Art. LIV.—Notes on the Breeding Habits of the Katipo (Latrodectus katipo).

Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Volume 11, 1878, Page 391

Art. LIV.—Notes on the Breeding Habits of the Katipo (Latrodectus katipo). By C. H. Robson. [Read before the Wellington Philosophical Society, 3rd August, 1878.] The Katipo is found in great abundance all along the coast of the South Island, from the mouth of the Wairau river to the Kaikoura peninsula. They are all of the variety so well described by Dr. Buller and Dr. Powell, in Vol. III. Trans. N.Z. Inst., pages 34 and 56, and all have the bright scarlet band with yellow border on the abdomen; the other markings are distinct on some individuals and faint on others. The black variety without a red dorsal stripe, and which is mentioned by the Rev. M. Taylor and Mr. Wright does not seem to inhabit this part of the coast, nor have I ever seen it. The above writers having made no mention of the number of young which these spiders produce from a single cocoon, or the time occupied in doing so, I determined to try and settle these points by actual experiment, with the following results:—On November 4, 1877, I put a

female katipo in an empty, clear glass bottle; she at once began to make a fine irregular web, and, on the morning of the 8th, I found that during the night she had constructed and suspended near the neck of the bottle, a spherical cocoon, composed of a pale yellow silky web, through which one could see the purplish eggs; for the next two months the spider remained on or close to the cocoon; I put several flies and other insects into the bottle, all of which she at once killed and threw down to the bottom without eating. Early in January she shifted the cocoon close to one side of the bottle at the shoulder, and took up a position for herself three-quarters of the distance from it to the bottom of the bottle. By this time she was reduced to half the original size and was very inert, and, on the 7th February, 1878, sixty young katipos issued from the cocoon. Next morning the mother lay dead at the bottom of the bottle; it must not be supposed that the old spider always dies in this way, for I had one which ate the greater part of her family before doing so. The young ones are of a semi-transparent white, with two lines of black dots on the abdomen, and black joints to the legs, the underside of the abdomen being brown, with an irregular whitish centre.