The Red Hourglass Read online

  The cold was coming on. You could see it in the masses of black flies congregating on the wound I’d made by pruning an elm: the sap still ran with the heat, but the flies were slow enough to pick up with your fingers, slow with the premonition of a freezing still two days distant. Moths flocked at the marigolds in shivers of gray and brown; green bees crawled the flowers, their legs thickening with pollen; green and black grasshoppers the size of human fingers knocked against the fences; pale red ants swarmed the fading grass around their sandy hills, their motion frantic but much slower than during the summer mating flights. Everything was in the state it maintains for perhaps three days in the autumn, that state of reckless swarm and copulation and feeding slowed by the death already unfolding in the insects’ ephemeral bodies.

  One day I came to see a black widow I’d been watching for a month or so. Her home was in a wooden gate. The web stretched across the front of it and into its interstices and crevices. Most of the silk was hidden between boards. I hadn’t seen the widow for a few days. She had probably mated and crawled into some tight space near the ground to winter; she would lay her eggs in the spring. I began to tear down the web, using a stick in case I was wrong about her departure, and the sound was like a staticky radio. As I dragged the stick through cracks in the gate, desiccated prey fell out on the sidewalk. I examined the webbed carcasses of beetles, gnats, lacewings, ants, and a male black widow. Then I knocked loose something unusual.

  It was a paper nest. The brown-and-yellow wasps that build such nests are social. The queen wasp builds the first two or three cells—each a hexagonal cylinder hanging with the open end down—of chewed wood pulp and saliva, deposits eggs in them, and feeds the larvae that hatch with chewed-up insects and spiders. I once stole a nest of larvae. Their wormlike bodies were white, almost iridescent, and their heads were hard brown orbs with two dark nubs of undeveloped eyes and four fingerlike mouthparts waving hungrily. I fed them drops of milk-and-sugar from the tip of a sewing needle. They sucked it down hungrily and then waved their heads around, mouthing for more. Sometimes the drop would fall off prematurely and mantle their white “shoulders.” They would wrench their heads in big arcs, futilely attempting to get at the milk. They looked disturbingly like kittens do before their eyes open.

  I kept them alive this way for almost two weeks. They should have been ready to pupate, but I had no way to stimulate the hormonal changes that would have brought them to that state. In the wild, the queen or older sibs would have fed them the secretions of their own bodies that would not only transform them into adults but determine their gender—male, female, or the sterile, pseudofemale form of the worker wasp.

  As a first generation of workers enters the pupal stage, the queen seals the cells with a papery cap. The adult wasp’s shape emerges slowly during pupation. (Imagine a figure carved in wax slowly melting into a shapeless mass—but imagine it happening backwards.) The process can be observed by tearing open older nests in which several generations of wasps are at different stages of pupation. The ones nearly ready to wake are hard and their colors vague; they look like mummified adults folded into fetal position.

  The first generation of workers emerges from pupation to take on the duties of guarding the nest, gathering food, and caring for younger sibs. The queen becomes a specialist in egg-laying and does little else.

  A worker stings by shoving its specialized ovipositor into the enemy’s flesh. It injects an acidic toxin that kills most insect-sized enemies quickly. To a human, the sting feels like a burn from an inextinguishable match imbedded in the skin.

  The wasps that live through the winter are a new generation of queens, reared through the larval stage before the cold hits and left to pupate. The workers and the old queen die off gradually, lingering in the gathering cold, moving in slow motion as parts of their bodies freeze, blacken, and wither. In the spring the new queens chew out of their cells to disperse and found new nests, or sometimes to stay in the same nest. There, one conniver gains dominance by secretly eating her sisters’ eggs. It’s like a Bette Davis movie in miniature.

  The nest that fell out of the black widow’s web had died at the moment of awakening. That much was clear because a dozen adult queen wasps lay dead in sealed cells, while one was dead in mid-emergence. This one had chewed her way out of her cell. Her next step should have been to crawl into sunlight, spreading her wings to gather the energizing heat. But while the wasps lay dormant in the early spring, the black widow chose the gate for a web site. She had built her web across the wasp nest, anchoring many strands on its surface. In fact, she had covered the nest so tightly that most of the wasps couldn’t emerge. Several of them had chewed away the paper caps of their cells only to be held in by the strands of web. The widow must have detected the one wasp on the edge of the paper nest emerging. The wasp was webbed up, half out of the cell, but with her wings and stinger still trapped inside. The tough silk looped around her antennae like a lariat around a longhorn steer’s rack. The widow had probably killed her with a bite on the joint where the antenna bends—this is the widow’s favorite way to attack wasps, suggesting that she knows about the danger of the stinger. This wasp was structurally undamaged, but pale and hollow: when I held her to the light, the light passed through.

  The rest of the wasps had died in their cells, either starved or eaten alive. It wasn’t the widow that had eaten them; it was some band of scavengers. Unlike their emergent compeer, these wasps had mostly been gnawed from the stinger down toward the head. Something had started from the base of the nest and eaten the paper, moving down into the cells. The unknown scavengers apparently made no distinction between paper and wasps, for some of the wasp bodies had been eaten—some of them only halfway. In a few cells the scavengers had reached the wasps’ heads, devoured them, and gnawed through the paper caps below. The tiny, round openings the scavengers made were easy to distinguish from the sheared holes made by a wasp’s mandibles.

  Some of the scavengers had crawled out onto the lower surface of the wasp nest—a bad move, as it turned out. The widow had killed a good number of them. Unlike the wasp’s, these creatures’ exoskeletons did not remain intact once their moisture had been siphoned out. Their remains were scattered fragments of chitin I couldn’t readily identify.

  I called an entomologist for help. He mentioned parasitic wasps that devour larger wasps as they hibernate. These clearly were not the culprits here, because my vandals had been just as interested in paper as in protein. The entomologist also suggested a few scavenging varieties of beetles and caterpillars. Some tiny beetles, for example, make a habit of ruining insect collections.

  The beetle hypothesis matched the remains I had found. As I looked at the mysterious fragments of chitin again, I saw that their shapes could easily be the hollowed-out abdomens and thoraxes and wing cases of beetles. The question seemed settled. Up to this point I had tried not to damage the wasp nest too much, since I might thereby miss some detail that would help me solve the mystery, but now I went about dismantling it. As I extracted the wasp carcasses, I noticed a whitish gleam at the tops of their cells. I cut away a few cell walls with scissors. I poked into the whitish mass. Was it caterpillar silk? If so, I would have to change my beetle hypothesis.

  Suddenly a white spider with brown spots emerged and went waddling across my hand. Its tiny body was almost all abdomen, a soft abdomen with textured bands that resembled rolls of fat. It wasn’t a black widow. It was a member of a common species I had seen many times before, in the corners behind furniture or under pieces of siding, a creature so unobtrusive it has no common name.

  After capturing the little spider, I reinspected the silk on the wasp nest. The silk on the surface was, as I had assumed, the tough fiber of the black widow, and the widow had definitely scored the emergent wasp and some of the scavenging beetles. But inside many of the cells were tiny snares made of softer silk, the delicate work of the little white spider. Thanks to the tunneling of those paper-eating scavengers,
a cavity joined most of the cells at the top, and in this cavity the white spider had been living. His web held the remains of dozens of the beetles. It was an ideal arrangement for the two spiders, the smaller protected from the larger by the remains of the wasp nest, both feeding on what must have been a great wealth of prey—a symbiosis between two predators, each presumably unaware of the other.

  The widow had, by its choice of web site, exterminated a half-dozen queen wasps who might have produced nests of their own and who should at this season be dying off, having seen larval daughters into pupation.

  I found a similar case of miniature genocide in a widow’s web built over the egg case of a mantid. The egg case was about the length of a large paper clip—an oval mound of beige lying unobtrusively on the piece of wood to which it was attached. A single case can hold two hundred eggs. The young mantids had emerged from the egg case, and dozens of small, thready knots in the widow web showed what had happened to them.

  Widows have been known to snare and eat mice, frogs, snails, tarantulas, lizards, snakes—almost anything that wanders into that remarkable web. I have never witnessed a widow performing a gustatory act of that magnitude, but I have seen them eat scarab beetles heavy as pecans, cockroaches more than an inch long, bumblebees, camel crickets, and hundreds of other arthropods of various sizes. I have seen widows eat butterflies and ants that most spiders reject on the grounds of bad flavor. I have seen them conquer spider-eating insects such as adult mantids and mud dauber wasps. The combination of web and venom enables widows to overcome predators whose size and strength would otherwise overwhelm them.

  Among the widow’s more interesting habitual enemies is a certain carabid, or ground, beetle. There are thousands of species of carabids, but the one I’m talking about runs about the size of a domino, with mandibles over a quarter of an inch. A pair of these serrated mandibles resembles the claw of a crab. They pinch shut with unbelievable force.

  I became interested in these beetles one particularly wet May when an abundance of earthworms writhed all over the sidewalks and the grass. The worms congregated by the dozens under rocks and lawn furniture, a few of them hobbled in their conjugations, the rest slithering away into the wet earth at any intrusion. Looking at earthworms in the loose upper layer of soil, stirring among their castings, I disturbed many carabid beetles. They would storm off when I uncovered them, somehow thrusting the substantial bulk of their black bodies, gleaming with the dampness of the earth, into the ground within a second or two of being exposed. When I tried to dig them out, they had already vanished, as if they’d converted themselves into bits of the fertile earth they lived in.

  Their mandibles marked them as predators. I looked for them and found them abundant: here a carabid dismantling the grub of a June beetle, its mandibles cutting the grub as easily as scissors would; there another snipping an earthworm in half. I captured one carabid by harassing him with a stick. He seized the stick between his mandibles and did not let go until after I had lifted him into a jar.

  His predatory habits were spectacular. He would attack any moving thing immediately. I offered adult June beetles. The carabid would rush one, seize it, and work his mandibles over the June beetle’s body until he had a grip on the juncture of abdomen and thorax. Then he would squeeze until the June beetle broke in half with a loud crack. He would lap the juice out of the abdomen as the head and thorax of the dismembered prey crawled away in a panic.

  The carabid’s next victim was a tomato hornworm, which is actually the caterpillar of a gigantic sphinx moth. The caterpillar was about the size of my middle finger. I removed it from a tomato plant in our garden and placed it on the lip of a two-gallon can. It rippled around, gripping the brim of the can, making a complete circle in a few seconds. It did not stop.

  I left it and returned two hours later to find the creature still circling, its pace and path unaltered. The huge green caterpillar might have crept endlessly in its circle. Picking it up gently, I set it back on the lip pointing in the opposite direction. It circled, and circled again….

  I decided the caterpillar was too stupid to live. I put it into the carabid beetle’s container. The caterpillar was much larger, but it had no means of defense. The carabid sliced into it and lapped at its leaking blood. Because the caterpillar was so big, the carabid had to repeat his attack eight or ten times. The caterpillar crawled away frantically for the first few wounds, but it was so slow that its movements hardly inconvenienced the beetle drinking from its bleeding flank. After ten minutes or so the caterpillar lay still. Its jade flesh turned black as the beetle chewed and drained it. After half an hour the entire body was a black heap about a quarter of its original size. It lay in the dirt like an empty burlap sack. The beetle stood with his head raised and his mandibles flexing. He looked something like a bellowing bull and might have been humorous if he hadn’t just committed an awesome display of predation.

  The carabid was insatiable, and I eventually offered him a great variety of prey. He tried to eat a small toad but couldn’t get a good enough grip to kill it. Once I put the carabid in a jar with a large gray wolf spider. The spider was missing a leg because I had injured it in the capture. The next morning the carabid was circling the jar looking for his next meal; all that remained of the big spider were seven gray legs.

  In late autumn, as the supply of prey was running out, I realized I would have to sacrifice either the carabid or one of the widows I was also keeping. The choice was not mine; I could only put the carabid in with a widow and see which fed and which died.

  The fight, if it can be called that, was over in about three minutes. The heavy carabid was half a foot above ground, arching his body against the gummy strands that had hoisted him. His mandibles slashed and scissored at the web, doing no damage at all. The widow circled just out of range of his mandibles and his kicking legs, picking her chances to hurl silk strategically. Soon she had his mandibles roped shut. Reaching delicately past that awesome and now useless set of hardware, she bit him on an antenna. He thrashed a minute longer, and then was food enough to last her through the winter.

  Since then I have noticed the remains of carabid beetles in or beneath widow webs many times. The hard black exoskeletons seem immune to erosion and decay; they lie in piles of rot for months, maybe years, without losing their striking luster. Once I removed the head of a carabid, now hollow and dry, from a widow web and found two narrow strips of what looked like transparent tape projecting from the rear of the head. When I tugged on these, I realized they were the tendons that controlled the mandibles. I used them like puppet strings to make the disembodied head bite. It would pick up pencils, twigs, and bits of gravel this way. I even put my little finger between the mandibles and caused the beetle head to bite me, but it wasn’t painful. I couldn’t generate nearly as much force as a live carabid can, with the tendons anchored far back in the thorax.

  The widow routinely knocks off larger predators, but, like every other animal in the world, it sometimes serves as an entrée for something else.

  The mantid is a unique danger because of its unusual weaponry, but even this superpredator doesn’t always survive the widow. Widows are sometimes paralyzed by mud daubers and other wasps, who use them as live food for their larval young. The innocuous-looking daddy longlegs spider and some of its kin are said to eat widows, as are certain lizards.

  A century or so ago, when black widows and various other small and mysterious predators had been insufficiently studied and most people had only the exaggerations of folklore to go on, people would stage fights between such predators, creating a Colosseum spectacle in miniature. The participants included Gila monsters, widows, tarantulas, scorpions, small rattlesnakes, and mantids. One can find similar activities mentioned in histories and travelogues from various cultures. Tarantula fighting is supposedly still common in the Philippines, and the Chinese had an elaborate system for the sport of mantid fighting.

  The battles between the mini-superpredators in
the United States were generally staged for gambling purposes or as advertising gimmicks (one such fight went on in the window of a general store). We know about them mostly from newspaper stories, which covered them as curiosities or sporting events; I’ve even seen a paper from an Old West town in which a bug fight was the lead story on page one. The fights could last days— or, if mutually uninterested combatants were chosen, past the tolerance of the observers. Outcomes varied according to the method of staging, but the widow, smallest in the field of competitors, fared respectably. Even rattlesnakes proved vulnerable to the widow’s venom.

  While such spectacles no longer meet the average editor’s requirements for serious journalism, people still stage them for gambling or just for their private amusement. I came across a reference to this practice in a 1993 article in Harper’s Magazine. The article is about a man who stole thousands of rare books from libraries, but it mentions in passing that he and a traveling companion, while stopping in Amarillo, Texas, tried unsuccessfully to make a widow and a tarantula fight in a coffee can. The book thief’s mistake was in not giving either spider an environment suited to its hunting methods. Since this diversion is pretty much irrelevant to the article’s main subject, I suppose it was included to show just how strange the book thief was, or perhaps to show how people behave in Amarillo.

  Another participant in these contests was the wind-scorpion. This creature is known, where it is known at all, by many names: solpugid (“sundagger”), sunspider, and matavenado (Spanish for “deer-killer,” though it does no such thing). It is actually neither a scorpion nor a spider. It constitutes a separate family within the arachnid class that contains both. Superficially, it resembles a spider, and its hunting habits are similar to those of wolf spiders—though the windscorpion can grow up to five or six inches long. But a closer look (which is hard to get: the animal is nocturnal and the fastest runner of all the arthropods) shows an upswept, segmented abdomen like a scorpion’s. The pedipalps, the leglike feelers at the front end, are clubbed and sticky, for nabbing prey. Two prominent eyes sit above enormous jaws, proportionately the largest found in any known animal; in one specimen I collected, the jaws constituted one-third the total body length. The windscorpion kills by the mechanical injury it inflicts with these instruments. It has no venom.