FLY AND SPIDER—THE TABLES TURNED.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6113, 29 September 1880, Page 6

FLY AND SPIDER—THE TABLES TURNED.

An old subscriber in Australia sends to The Gentlemen's Magazine tho following:—"Australia is the land of contrariety in regard to animal and vegetable life—such as blaok swans, the duok-molo, fish which climb trees, cherries with the stone outside, and veritable wooden pears I—butene fact regarding spiders and flies it equally strange, for hero there is a fly which catches spiders. He is a wiry, energetic, hard-looking customer; body longish and narrow; colour, literally halfmourning, and about three-quarters of an inch long; he builds a clay nest for his larva), generally inside locks, under verandah eaves, or oven in cracks of woodwork, and sometimes in the folds of curtains or clothes. In one ease, while staying at a friend’s house about twenty miles from Sydney, I loft my waterproof coat hanging untouched for about four days, and on taking it down there was a nest nearly built in one of the folds, of about tho size or one's little finger and three or four inches in length. On rsplaoing the coat and leaving it for another few days, and then examining it, the nest was finished ; it had three compartments, with one little white grub in each and for its food several small green spiders, not then absolutely dead, but apparently in a state of ooma. Those spider* were evidently taken out of the orange orchard, as there were plenty of the same kind alive about tho trees; but last week, while up in the mountains, I watched one of tho flies carrying off a blaok house-spider quite as big as itself; and during tho course of the day saw him throe separate times, and on each occasion with a large spider. I could not find the nest; but the farmer tells me that he has occasionally done so, and found as many as twenty good sized spiders of various kinds, all apparently dead, but not decayed, and generally five or six larv® of tho fly. “ There is also a large spider which aotu-

ally catches small birds occasionally! and kills and devours them 1 He is like » w»ip in colour j body, shape and size of a small hazel nut t legs, long and wiry i and he also looks a hard-skinned customer. The web is always double, one about half as largo again as the other, and made of such a strong, ycl* lowish fibre, that, if accidentally walking into it, you feel a sensible stoppage of your way for the moment. One bird—the wreck of which I myself saw left in the web—was rather smaller than the English wren, and the web was strong enough to stand all its struggles, although a little broken hero and there. "As regards size of some spiders wo have a flat-bodied, gray-coloured one here, which builds no web, but lives under bark of dead trees, behind boards, Ac,, the body of which is about the size of a shilling and not much thicker, but the legs of which are quite as long os the fingers of an ordinary sized hand, and the whole spread of the brute is about a hand's breadth. This is for the fullest sized ones ; but the common run of them are five or sir inches across, and the stylo in which they pounce upon and double up the smaller cockroaches is what our Yankee cousins would call a * caution.' ”