Animals: Cannibal in a Clock

C. C. Thompson of Barberton, Ohio owns a blue alarm clock. One day last month his wife noticed that a spider, which she described as a “tiny black dot,” had somehow got between the face and the glass. From minute hand to hour hand the insect stretched and tethered its silky strands. The hands moved on, tore them asunder. Next hour the spider tried again; again the hands revolved, destroyed. The spider was still trying when the alarm sounded next morning. Friends & neighbors came to watch as day by day the hands grew fusty with gossamer. Each night C. C. Thompson wound the clock, slept, woke at its alarm. The spider spun .on day & night. Last week, when the spider had spun and the clock undone some 420 times, clock and spider were sent to the University of Akron’s Professor Walter Charles Kraatz. The insect had now become the size of an ordinary house spider. Director Harold Lester Madison of Cleveland’s Museum of Natural History scoffed the idea of its growing, said the original “black dot” must have been an offspring of the present spider. He thought the cannibalistic female was eating her children or perhaps her husband, lost somewhere in the clockworks. Dr. Kraatz said she was living on stored-up body tissue. On the 19th day death seemed about to end the struggle. But on the 20th Dr. Kraatz’s microscope detected on the clock’s face two circular clusters, apparently eggs. Hatched into spider-food, these would provide strength for indefinite spinning. Not, however, if Agent G. W. Dilley of Akron’s Humane Society could prevent it. He announced he would let Dr. Kraatz observe the spider one more week, then ask that it be freed. On the 21st day the spider curled up its legs, spun no more. Dr. Kraatz thought it had gone into hibernation, said it might last all winter if kept warm. Superintendent Dilley still protested.