THE SPANISH COPRIS: THE HABITS OF THE MOTHER
There are two special points to be remembered in the life-history of
the Spanish Copris: the rearing of her family; and her pill-rolling
talents.
First, the output of her ovaries is extremely limited; and nevertheless
her race thrives just as much as that of many others whose seed is
numerous. Maternal care makes up for the small number of her eggs.
Prolific layers, after making a few rough and ready arrangements,
abandon their progeny to luck, which often sacrifices a thousand in
order to preserve one; they are factories turning out organic matter
for life’s comprehensive maw. Almost as soon as hatched, or even before
hatching, their offspring for the most part perish devoured.
Extermination makes short work of superfluity in the interests of the
community at large. That which was destined to live lives, but under
another form. These excessive breeders know and can know nothing of
maternal affection.
The Copres have other and fundamentally different habits. Three or four
eggs represent their entire posterity. How are they to be preserved, to
a great extent, from the accidents that await them? For them, so few in
numbers, as for the others, whose name is legion, existence is an
inexorable struggle. The mother knows it and, in order to save her
nearest and dearest, sacrifices herself, giving up outdoor pleasures,
nocturnal flights and that supreme delight of her race, the
investigation of a fresh heap of dung. Hidden underground, by the side
of her brood, she never leaves her nursery. She keeps watch; she
brushes off the parasitic growths; she closes up the cracks; she drives
off any ravagers that may appear: Acari, [34] tiny Staphylini, [35]
grubs of small Flies, Aphodii, [36] Onthophagi. [37] In September she
climbs to the surface with her family, which, having no further use for
her, emancipates itself and henceforth lives as it pleases. No bird
could be a more devoted mother.
Secondly, the Copris’ abrupt transformation at laying-time into an
expert pill-maker provides us, in so far as we are able to get at the
truth, with a proof of the theorem which I was almost afraid to
formulate just now. Here is a Beetle not equipped for the pill-roller’s
art, an art moreover which is not required for her individual
prosperity. She has no aptitude, no propensity for kneading the food
which she buries and consumes as she finds it; she is totally ignorant
of the sphere and its properties in connection with food-preservation;
and, all of a sudden, in obedience to an inspiration for which nothing,
in the ordinary course of her life, has prepared the way, she moulds
into a sphere or ovoid the legacy which she bequeaths to her grub. With
her short, clumsy fore-leg she shapes the viaticum of her offspring
into a skilful solid mass. The difficulty is great. It is overcome by
dint of application and patience. In two days, or three at most, the
round cradle is perfected. How does the dumpy creature go to work to
achieve mathematical exactness in her ball? The Sacred Beetle has her
long legs, which serve as compasses; the Gymnopleurus has similar
tools. But the Copris, unprovided with the spread of limb which would
enable her to encircle the object, finds nothing in her equipment that
favours the formation of a sphere. Perched upon her ovoid, she labours
at it bit by bit with an intensity that makes up for her defective
implements; she estimates the correctness of its curve by assiduous
tactile examinations from one end to the other. Perseverance triumphs
over clumsiness and achieves what at first seemed impossible.
Here all my readers will assail me with the same questions: why this
abrupt change in the insect’s habits? Why this indefatigable patience
in a form of work that bears no relation to the tools at hand? And what
is the use of this ovoid shape whose perfection demands so great an
outlay of time?
To these queries I see only one possible reply: the preservation of the
foodstuffs in a fresh condition demands the globular form. Remember
this: the Copris builds her nest in June; her larva develops during the
dog-days; it lies a few inches below the surface of the ground. In the
cavern, which is now a furnace, the provisions would soon become
uneatable, if the mother did not give them the shape least susceptible
to evaporation. Very different from the Sacred Beetle in habits and
structure but exposed to the same dangers in her larval state, the
Copris, in order to ward off the peril, adopts the principles of the
great pill-roller, principles whose surpassing wisdom we have already
made manifest.
I would ask the philosophers to ponder upon these five manufacturers of
preserved meats and the numerous rivals which they doubtless possess in
other climes. I submit to them these inventors of the largest possible
box with the smallest possible surface for provisions liable to dry;
and I ask them how such logical inspirations and so much rational
foresight can take birth in the obscure brain of the lower orders of
creation.
Let us come down to plain facts. The Copris’ pill is a more or less
pronounced ovoid, sometimes differing but slightly from a sphere in
shape. It is not quite so pretty as the work of the Gymnopleurus, which
is very nearly pear-shaped, or at least reminds one of a bird’s egg,
notably a Sparrow’s, because of the similarity in size. The Copris’
work is more like the egg of a nocturnal bird of prey, of any member of
the Owl family, as its projecting end does not stand out conspicuously.
From this pole to the other the ovoid measures, on an average, forty
millimetres, by thirty-four across. [38] Its whole surface is tightly
packed, hardened by pressure, converted into a crust with a little
earth grained into it. At the projecting end, an attentive eye will
discover a ring bristling with short straggling threads. Once the egg
is laid in the cup into which the original sphere is hollowed, the
mother, as I have already said, gradually brings the edges of the
cavity together. This produces the projecting end. To complete the
closing, she delicately rakes the ovoid and scrapes a little of the
material upwards. This forms the ceiling of the hatching-chamber. At
the top of this ceiling, which, if it fell in, would destroy the egg,
the pressure is very slight indeed, leaving an area devoid of rind and
covered with bits of thread. Immediately under this circle, which is a
sort of porous felt, lies the hatching-chamber, the egg’s little cell,
which easily admits air and warmth.
Like the Sacred Beetle’s egg and those of other Dung-beetles, the
Copris’ egg at once attracts attention by its size, but it grows much
larger before hatching, increasing two- or threefold in bulk. Its moist
chamber, saturated with the emanations from the provisions, supplies it
with nourishment. Through the chalky porous shell of the bird’s egg, an
exchange of gases takes place, a respiratory process which quickens
matter while consuming it. This is a cause of destruction as well as of
life: the sum total of the contents does not increase under the
inflexible wrapper; on the contrary, it diminishes.
Things happen otherwise in the Copris’ egg, as in the other
Dung-beetles’. We still, no doubt, find the vivifying assistance of the
air; but there is also an accession of new materials which come to add
to the reserves furnished by the ovary. Endosmosis causes the
exhalations of the chamber to penetrate through a very delicate
membrane, so much so that the egg is fed, swells and enlarges to thrice
its original volume. If we have failed to follow this progressive
growth attentively, we are quite surprised at the extraordinary final
size, which is out of all proportion to that of the mother.
This nourishment lasts a fairly long time, for the hatching takes from
fifteen to twenty days. Thanks to the added substance with which the
egg has been enriched, the larva is already pretty big when born. We
have not here the weakly grub, the animated speck which many insects
show us, but a pretty little creature, at once sturdy and tender,
which, happy at being alive, arches its back and frisks and rolls about
in its nest.
It is satin-white, with a touch of straw-colour on its skull-cap. I
find the terminal trowel plainly marked: I mean that slanting plane
with the scalloped edge whereof the Sacred Beetle has already shown us
the use when some breach in the cell needs repairing. The implement
tells us the future trade. You also, my attractive little grub, will
become a knapsacked excreter, a fervent plasterer manipulating the
stucco supplied by the intestines. But first I will subject you to an
experiment.
Now what are your first mouthfuls? As a rule I see the walls of your
nest shining with a greenish, semifluid wash, a sort of thinly-spread
jam. Is this a special dish intended for your delicate baby stomach? Is
it a childish dainty disgorged by the mother? I used to think so when I
first began to study the Sacred Beetle. To-day, after seeing a similar
wash in the cells of the various Dung-beetles, including the uncouth
Geotrupes, [39] I wonder whether it is not rather the result of a mere
exudation accumulating on the walls in a sort of dew, the fluid
quintessence filtering through the porous matter.
The Copris mother lent herself to observation better than any of the
others. I have many times surprised her at the moment when, hoisted on
her round pill, she excavates the top in the form of a cup; and I have
never seen anything that at all suggests a disgorgement. The cavity of
the bowl, which I lose no time in examining, is just like the rest.
Perhaps I have missed the favourable moment. In any case, I can take
only a brief glance at the mother’s occupations: all work ceases as
soon as I raise the cardboard sheath to give light. Under these
conditions the secret might escape me indefinitely. Let us look at the
difficulty from another angle and enquire whether some special
milk-food, elaborated in the mother’s stomach, is necessary for the
infant larva.
In one of my cages I rob a Sacred Beetle of her round pill, lately
fashioned and briskly rolled. I strip it at one point of its earthy
layer and into this clean point I drive the blunt end of a pencil,
making a hole a third of an inch deep. I install a newly-hatched
Copris-grub in it. The youngster has not yet taken the least
refreshment. It is lodged in a cell which in no respect differs from
the rest of the mass. There is no creamy coating, whether disgorged by
the mother or merely oozing through. What will result from this change
of quarters?
Nothing untoward. The larva develops and thrives quite as well as in
its native cell. Therefore, when I first started, I was the victim of
an illusion. The delicate wash which nearly always covers the
egg-chamber in the Dung-beetles’ work is simply an exudation. The grub
may be all the better for it, when taking its first mouthfuls; but it
is not indispensable. To-day’s experiment confirms the fact.
The grub subjected to this test was put into an open pit. Things cannot
remain in this condition. The absence of ceiling is irksome to the
young larva, which loves darkness and tranquillity. How will it set to
work to build its roof? The mortar-trowel cannot be used as yet, for
materials are lacking in the knapsack which so far has done no
digesting.
Novice though it be, the little grub has its resources. Since it cannot
be a plasterer, it becomes a bricklayer. With its legs and mandibles it
removes particles from the walls of its cell and comes and places them
one by one on the rim of the well. The defensive work makes rapid
progress and the assembled atoms form a vault. It has no strength about
it, I admit; the dome falls in if I merely breathe on it. But soon the
first mouthfuls will be swallowed; the intestines will fill; and, well
supplied, the grub will come and consolidate the work by injecting
mortar into the interstices. Properly cemented, the frail awning
becomes a solid ceiling.
Let us leave the tiny grub in peace and consult other larvæ which have
attained half their full growth. With the point of my penknife I pierce
the pill at the upper end; I open a window a few millimetres square.
The grub at once appears at the casement, anxiously enquiring into the
disaster. It rolls itself over in the cell and returns to the opening,
this time, however, presenting its wide, padded trowel. A jet of mortar
is discharged over the breach. The product is a little too much diluted
and of inferior quality. It runs, it flows in all directions, it does
not set quickly. A fresh ejaculation follows and another and yet
another, in swift succession. Useless pains! In vain the plasterer
tries again, in vain it struggles, gathering the trickling material
with its legs and mandibles: the hole refuses to close. The mortar is
still too fluid.
Poor, desperate thing, why don’t you copy your young sister? Do what
the little larva did just now: build an awning with particles taken
from the wall of your house; and your liquid putty will do well on that
spongy scaffolding! The large grub, trusting to its trowel, does not
think of that method. It exhausts itself, without any appreciable
result, in trying to effect repairs which the little grub managed most
ingeniously. What the baby knew how to do the big larva no longer
knows.
Insect industry has instances like this of professional methods
employed at certain periods and then abandoned and utterly forgotten. A
few days more or less make changes in the creature’s talents. The tiny
grub, devoid of cement, has bricks to fall back upon: the big larva,
rich in putty, scorns to build, or rather no longer knows how, though
it is even better-endowed than the youngster with the necessary tools.
The strong one no longer remembers what as a weakling he so well knew
how to do, only a few days before. A poor power of recollection, if
indeed there be such a power under that flat skull! However, in the
long run and thanks to the evaporation of the ejected materials, the
short-memoried plumber ends by stopping up the window. Nearly half a
day has been spent in trowel-work.
The idea occurs to me to try whether the mother will come to the
distressed one’s aid in like circumstances. We have seen her diligently
restoring the ceiling which I smashed above the egg. Will she do for
the big grub what she did for the sake of the germ? Will she repair the
torn pill in which the plasterer is helplessly floundering?
To make the experiment more conclusive, I select pills that do not
belong to the mother entrusted with the work of restoration. I picked
them up in the fields. They are far from regular, are all dented
because of the stony soil on which they lay, a soil not easily
convertible into a roomy workshop and consequently unsuited to exact
geometry. They are moreover encrusted with a reddish rind, due to the
ferruginous sand in which I packed them in order to avoid dangerous
jolting on the road. In short, they differ a good deal from those
elaborated in a jar, with plenty of space around them and on a clean
support, pills which are perfect ovoids, free from earthy stains. In
the top of two of them I make an opening which the grub, faithful to
its methods, at once strives to stop up, but without success. One,
stored away under a bell-glass, will serve me as a witness. The other I
place in a jar where the mother is watching her cradles, two splendid
ovoids.
I have not long to wait. An hour later I raise the cardboard screen.
The Copris is on the strange pill and so busily engaged that she pays
no attention to the daylight admitted. In other, less urgent
circumstances, she would at once have slipped down and taken shelter
from the troublesome light; this time, she does not move and
imperturbably continues her work. Before my eyes she rakes away the red
crust and uses the scrapings from the cleansed surface to spread over
and solder the breach. It is hermetically sealed in a very short space
of time. I stand amazed at the insect’s skill.
Well, while the Copris is restoring a pill that does not belong to her,
what is the grub that owns the other doing in the bell-glass? It
continues to kick about hopelessly, vainly lavishing cement that is
incapable of setting. Put to the test in the morning, it does not
succeed until the afternoon in closing the aperture; and then the job
is anything but well done. The borrowed mother, on the other hand, has
not taken twenty minutes to remedy the accident most excellently.
She does even more. After the most important part is finished and the
afflicted grub succoured, she stands all day, all night and the next
day on the newly-closed pill. She brushes it daintily with her tarsi to
get rid of the layer of earth; she obliterates the dents, smooths the
rough places and adjusts the curve, until from a shapeless and soiled
pill it becomes an ovoid vying in precision with those which she had
already manufactured in her glass jar.
Such care bestowed upon a strange grub deserves attention. I must go
on. I slip into the jar a second pill, similar to the foregoing,
ruptured at the top, with an opening larger than on the first occasion,
one about a sixteenth of an inch square. The greater the difficulty,
the more praiseworthy will the restoration be.
It is, indeed, difficult to close. The grub, a fat baby, is wildly
gesticulating and excreting through the window. Leaning over the hole,
its new mother seems to console it. She is like a nurse bending over
the cradle. Meanwhile her helpful legs are working with a will,
scratching around the yawning aperture to obtain the wherewithal to
stop it. But the materials, half-dried this time, are hard and
unyielding. They are slow in coming; and the quantity is too small for
so big a hole. No matter: what with the grub continuing to shoot forth
its putty and the other mixing it with her own scrapings, to give it
consistency, and afterwards spreading it, the opening closes up.
The thankless task has taken a whole afternoon. It is a good lesson for
me. I shall be more careful in future. I shall choose softer pills and,
instead of opening them by removing the materials, I shall simply lift
the wall by shreds until the grub is laid bare. The mother will only
have to flatten down those shreds and solder them together.
I act accordingly with a third pill, which is very neatly repaired in a
short time. Not a trace remains of the ravages caused by my penknife. I
continue in the same way with a fourth, a fifth and so on, at intervals
long enough to give the mother a rest. I stop when the receptacle is
full, looking like a pot of plums. The contents amount to twelve
pieces, of which ten have come from the outside, all ten violated by my
penknife and all restored to good condition by the foster-mother.
There are some interesting sidelights to this curious experiment, which
I could have continued if the capacity of the jar had permitted. The
Copris’ zeal, which was not lessened after the restoring of so many
ruins, and her diligence, which was the same at the end as in the
beginning, tell me that I had not exhausted the maternal solicitude.
Let us leave it at that; it is amply sufficient.
Observe first the arrangement of the pills. Three are enough to occupy
the floor-space of the enclosure. The others are therefore gradually
superposed in layers, making in the end a four-story structure. The
whole forms an irregular pile, an absolute labyrinth with very narrow,
winding lanes, through which the insect glides with some difficulty.
When her household is in order, the mother stays below, under the pile,
touching the sand. It is at this moment that a new broken cell is
introduced, right at the top of the pile, on the third or fourth floor.
Let us put back the screen, wait a few minutes and then go back to the
jar.
The mother is there, hoisted on the torn pill and doing her utmost to
close it. How was she informed on the ground-floor of what was
happening in the attic? How did she know that a larva up there was
calling for her assistance? The babe in distress screams and the nurse
comes running up. The grub says nothing; it makes no sound. Its
desperate gesticulations are not accompanied by any noise. And the
watcher hears this mute appeal. She notices the silence, she sees the
invisible. I am bewildered, every one would be bewildered by the
mystery of these perceptions which are so foreign to our nature and
which ‘topsy turvy the understanding,’ as Montaigne would say. Let us
pass on.
I have described elsewhere [40] the brutality with which the Bee, that
most gifted of insects, treats the eggs of her fellows. Osmiæ,
Chalicodomæ and others perpetrate atrocities at times. In a moment of
vengeance or of that inexplicable aberration which occurs after the
laying is finished, a sister’s egg, savagely torn from the cell with
the pincers of the mandibles, is flung into the dust-bin. The thing is
pitilessly crushed, is ripped open, is even eaten. How different from
the good-natured Copris!
Shall we attribute altruism among families to the Dung-beetle? Shall we
do her the signal honour of allowing that she administers relief to
foundlings? That would be madness. The mother who so diligently assists
the children of others thinks, beyond a doubt, that she is working for
her own. The victim of my experiment had two pills that belonged to
her; my intervention gave her ten more. And, in the jar filled with
prunes to the top, her assiduous care draws no distinction between the
real household and the casual family. Her intellect therefore is
incapable of the most elementary conception of quantity; she cannot
even distinguish between the singular and the plural, the few and the
many.
Can it be because of the darkness? No, for my frequent visits give the
Copris an opportunity, when the opaque screen is lifted, of looking
around her and discovering the strange accumulation, that is if light
be really the guide which she lacks. Besides, has she not another means
of information? In the natural burrow, the pills, three or at most four
in number, all lie on the ground, forming one row only. With my
additions they pile up into four stories.
In order to clamber to the top, in order to hoist herself up through
such a maze as never Copris mansion knew before, the Beetle must rub
against and touch the units of the heap. But she counts none the better
for that. To the insect all this is just the home, is just the family,
worthy of the same care at the summit as at the base. The twelve
produced by my trickery and the two of her own laying are the same
thing in her arithmetic.
I present this strange mathematician to any one who comes and talks to
me of a glimmer of reason in the insect, as Darwin claimed. It is one
of two things: either this glimmer does not exist, or else the Copris
reasons divinely and becomes a St. Vincent de Paul of insects, moved to
pity by the sad lot of the homeless. Make your choice.
It is possible that, rather than abandon the principle, men will not
shrink from sheer folly and that the compassionate Copris will one day
figure in the evolutionists’ Book of Moral Deeds. Why not? Does it not
already, with an eye to the same argument, contain a certain
tender-hearted Boa Constrictor who, on losing his master, lay down and
died of grief? Oh, the fond reptile! These edifying stories, compiled
with the object of tracing man back to the Gorilla, procure me a few
moments of mild amusement when I come across them. But we will not
labour the point.
Better that you and I, friend Copris, should speak of things that do
not raise storms. Would you mind telling me the reason of the
reputation which you enjoyed in the days of antiquity? Ancient Egypt
extolled you in pink granite and porphyry; she venerated you, O my fair
horned one, and awarded you honours similar to the Scarab’s! You ranked
second in the entomological hierarchy.
Horapollo tells us of two Sacred Beetles with horns. One sported a
single specimen on her head, the other had two. The first is you, the
inmate of my glass jars, or at least some one very like you. If Egypt
had known what you have just taught me, she would certainly have placed
you above the Scarab, that roving pill-roller who deserts her home and
leaves her family, after it has received its inheritance, to shift for
itself as best it can. Knowing nothing of your wonderful habits, which
history is noting for the first time, she deserves all the greater
praise for having divined your merits.
The second, the one with two horns, would, according to the experts,
appear to be the insect which the naturalists call the Isis Copris. I
know her only in effigy, but her image is so striking that I sometimes
catch myself dreaming late in life, just as I did in my youth, of going
down to Nubia and exploring the banks of the Nile, in order to
cross-examine, under some lump of Camel-dung, the insect that is
emblematic of Isis the divine brooder, nature made fruitful by Osiris,
the sun.
Oh, simpleton! Attend to your cabbages, sow your turnips: that won’t do
you any harm; water your lettuces; and understand, once and for all,
how vain are all our questionings when it is simply a matter of
enquiring into a muck-raker’s sagacity! Be less ambitious; confine
yourself to setting down facts.
So be it. There is nothing striking to be said of the larva, which is a
replica of the Sacred Beetle’s, save for some minute details which do
not interest us here. It has the same hump in the middle of its back,
the same slanting truncature of the last segment, expanding into a
trowel on the upper surface. A ready excreter, it understands, though
less thoroughly than the other, the art of stopping up breaches to
protect itself from draughts. The larval state covers a period of four
to six weeks.
At the end of July the nymph appears, first amber-yellow all over, next
currant-red on the head, horn, corselet, breast and legs, while the
wing-cases have the pale hue of gum arabic. A month later, by the end
of August, the perfect insect releases itself from its mummy wrappers.
Its costume, now wrought upon by delicate chemical changes, is quite as
strange as that of the new-born Sacred Beetle. Head, corselet, breast
and legs are chestnut-red. The horn, the epistoma and the
denticulations of the fore-legs are shaded with brown. The wing-cases
are a rather yellowish white. The abdomen is white, excepting only the
anal segment, which is an even brighter red than the thorax. I perceive
this early colouring of the anal segment, while the rest of the abdomen
is still quite pale, in the Sacred Beetles, the Gymnopleuri, the
Onthophagi, the Geotrupes, the Cetoniæ [41] and many others. Whence
this precocity? One more note of interrogation which will long stand
awaiting a reply.
A fortnight passes. The costume becomes ebon-black, the cuirass
hardens. The insect is ready for the emergence. We are at the end of
September; the earth has drunk in a few showers which soften the
stubborn shell and allow of an easy deliverance. This is the moment,
prisoners mine. If I have teased you a little, at least I have kept you
in plenty. Your shells have hardened in your cages and have become
caskets which your own efforts will never succeed in forcing open. I
will come to your aid. Let us describe in detail how things happen.
Once the burrow is supplied with the voluminous loaf out of which three
or four pilular rations are to be carved, the mother does not appear
outside again. Besides, there is no provision made for her. The heap
stored away below is the family cake, the exclusive patrimony of the
grubs, who will receive equal shares. For four months, therefore, the
recluse is without food of any kind.
It is a voluntary privation. Victuals are there, within reach, copious
and of superior quality; but they are intended for the larvæ and the
mother will take good care not to touch them: anything abstracted for
her own use would mean so much less for the grubs. Gluttonous at the
outset, when there was no family to consider, she now becomes very
abstemious, even to the point of prolonged fasting. The Hen sitting on
her eggs forgets to eat for some weeks; the watchful Copris mother
forgets it during a third part of the year. The Dung-beetle outdoes the
bird in maternal self-abnegation.
Now what does this self-sacrificing mother do underground? To what
household cares can she devote the period of so long a fast? My
appliances provide a satisfactory answer. I possess, as I have said,
two kinds. One consists of glass jars with a thin layer of sand and a
cardboard case to create darkness; the other of large pots filled with
earth and closed with a pane of glass.
At any moment when I raise the opaque sheath of the first, I find the
mother now perched upon the top of her ovoids, now on the ground,
half-erect, smoothing the bulging curve with her fore-leg. On rarer
occasions, she is dozing in the midst of the heap.
The manner in which she employs her time is obvious. She watches her
treasure of pills; her inquisitive antennæ sound them to discover what
is happening inside; she listens to the nurselings growing; she touches
up faulty spots; she polishes and repolishes the surfaces in order to
delay the desiccation within until the development of the inmates is
complete.
These scrupulous cares, cares occupying every moment, have results
which would strike the attention of the least-experienced observer. The
egg-shaped vessels, or better the cradles of the nursery, are wonderful
in their regular curves and in their neatness. We see none of those
chinks with a blob of putty showing through, none of those cracks, of
those peeling scales, in short none of those defects which, towards the
end, nearly always disfigure the Sacred Beetle’s pears, handsome though
they be at the start.
The horned Dung-beetle’s caskets could not be better shaped, even after
they are thoroughly dried up, if they had been worked in plaster by a
modeller. What pretty, dark-bronze eggs they are, rivalling the Owl’s
in size and form! This irreproachable perfection, maintained until the
shell is burst by the emerging larva, is obtained only by incessant
touching up, interspersed at long intervals with periods of rest during
which the mother composes herself for a nap at the foot of the heap.
The glass jars leave room for doubt. It is possible to say that the
insect, imprisoned in an impassable enclosure, stays in the midst of
its pills because it is unable to go elsewhere. I agree; but there
remains that work of polishing and of continual inspection about which
the mother need not trouble at all if these cares did not form part of
her habits. Were she solely anxious to recover her liberty, she ought
to be roaming restlessly all round the enclosure, whereas I always see
her very quiet and absorbed. The only evidence of her excitement, when
the raising of the cardboard cylinder suddenly produces daylight, is
that she lets herself slide from the top of a pill and hides in the
heap. If I moderate the light, composure is soon restored and she
resumes her position on the summit, there to continue the work which my
visit interrupted.
For the rest, the evidence of the apparatus that is always in darkness
is conclusive. The mother buried herself in June in the sand of my pots
with copious provisions, which are soon converted into a certain number
of pills. She is at liberty to return to the surface when she pleases.
She will there find broad daylight under the big sheet of glass which
ensures me against her escape; she will find food, which I renew from
time to time in order to entice her.
Well, neither the daylight nor the food, desirable though this must
seem to be after a fast so long extended, is able to tempt her. Nothing
stirs in my pots, nothing rises to the surface until the rains come.
It is exceedingly probable that exactly the same thing happens
underground as in the jars. To make certain, I inspect some of my
appliances at different periods. I always find the mother beside her
pills, in a spacious cave which gives free play to the watcher’s
evolutions. She could go lower down in the sand and hide anywhere she
pleased, if rest is what she wants; she could climb outside and sit
down to fresh victuals, if refreshment became necessary. Neither the
prospects of rest in a deeper crypt nor the thought of the sun and of
nice soft rolls make her leave her family. Until the last of her
offspring has burst his shell, she sticks to her post in the
birth-chamber.
It is now October. The rains so greatly desired by man and beast have
come at last, soaking the ground to some depth. After the torrid and
dusty days of summer, when life is in suspense, we have the coolness
that revives it, we have the last festival of the year. In the midst of
the heath putting out its first pink bells, the oronge [42] splits its
white purse and comes into view, looking like the yolk of an egg half
deprived of its albumen; the massive purple boletus turns blue under
the heel of the passer-by who crushes it; the autumnal squill lifts its
little spike of lilac flowers; the strawberry-tree’s coral balls begin
to soften.
This tardy springtime has its echoes underground. The vernal
generations, Sacred Beetles and Gymnopleuri, Onthophagi and Copres,
hasten to burst their shells softened by the damp and come to the
surface to take part in the gaieties of the last fine weather.
My captives are denied the friendly shower. The cement of their
caskets, baked by the summer heat, is too hard to yield. The file of
the shield and legs would make no impression on it. I come to the poor
things’ assistance. A carefully graduated watering replaces the natural
rain in my glass and earthenware pots. To ascertain once more the
effects of water on the Dung-beetles’ deliverance, I leave a few of the
receptacles in the state of dryness for which they have to thank the
dog-days.
The result of my sprinkling soon becomes apparent. In a few days’ time,
now in one jar, now in another, the pills, properly softened, open and
fall to pieces under the prisoner’s efforts. The new-born Copris
appears and sits down, with his mother, to the food which I have placed
at his disposal.
When the hermit, stiffening his legs and humping his back, tries to
split the ceiling that presses down on him, does the mother come to his
assistance by delivering an assault from the outside? It is quite
possible. The watcher, hitherto so careful of her brood, so attentive
to what is happening within the pills, can hardly fail to hear the
sounds made by the captive in his struggles to emerge.
We have seen her indefatigably stopping the holes caused by my
indiscretion; we have seen her, often enough, restoring for the grub’s
greater safety the pill which I had opened with my penknife. Fitted by
instinct for repairing and building, why should she not be fitted for
demolishing? However, I will make no assertions, for I have been unable
to see. The favourable conditions always escaped me: I came either too
late or too early. And then let us not forget that the admission of
light usually interrupts the work.
In the darkness of the sand-filled pots, the liberation must take place
in the same way. All that I am able to witness is the insect’s
emergence above ground. Attracted by the smell of fresh provisions
which I have served on the threshold of the burrow, the newly-released
family emerge gradually, accompanied by the mother, wander round for a
time under the pane of glass and then attack the pile.
There are three or four of them, five at most. The sons are easily
recognized by the greater length of their horns; but there is nothing
to distinguish the daughters from the mother. For that matter, the same
confusion prevails among themselves. An abrupt change of attitude has
taken place; and the erstwhile devoted mother is now utterly
indifferent to the welfare of her emancipated family. Henceforward each
looks after his own home and his own interests. They no longer know one
another.
In the receptacles which are not moistened by artificial showers,
things come to a miserable end. The dry shell, almost as hard as an
apricot- or peach-stone, offers indomitable resistance. The insect’s
legs manage to grate off barely so much as a pinch of dust. I hear the
tools rasping against the unyielding wall; then silence follows and not
a prisoner survives to tell the tale. The mother too perishes in that
home which has remained dry when the season for dryness has passed. The
Copris, like the Sacred Beetle, needs the rain to soften the granite
shell.
To return to the liberated ones. When the emergence is effected, the
mother, we were saying, ceases to trouble about them. Her present
indifference, however, must not make us forget the wonderful care which
she has lavished for four months on end. Outside the Social
Hymenoptera—Bees, Wasps, Ants and so on—who spoon-feed their young and
bring them up according to scrupulously hygienic methods, where in the
insect world shall we find another example of such maternal
self-abnegation, of such wise and tender care for the offspring? I know
of none.
How did the Copris acquire this lofty quality, which I would readily
call a moral quality, if morality and nescience had any point of
contact? How did she learn to surpass in tenderness the Bee and the
Ant, both so greatly renowned? I say surpass. The mother Bee, indeed,
is simply a germ-factory, a prodigiously fertile factory, I admit. She
lays eggs; and that is all. The family is brought up by others, real
sisters of charity these, vowed to celibacy.
The Copris mother does more in her humble household. Alone and entirely
unaided, she provides each of her children with a cake whose crust,
hardening and constantly renovated with the maternal trowel, becomes an
inviolable cradle. So intense is her affection that she neglects
herself to the extent of losing all need for food. Down in a burrow,
for four consecutive months, she watches over her brood, attending to
the wants of the germ, the grub, the nymph and the perfect insect. She
does not return to the glad outer life until all her family are
emancipated. Thus do we behold one of the most brilliant manifestations
of maternal instinct in a humble dung-eater. The Spirit breatheth where
he will.