THE LUNARY COPRIS; THE BISON ONITIS
Smaller than the Spanish Copris and less particular about a mild
climate, the Lunary Copris (C. lunaris, Lin.) will confirm what the
Sisyphus has told us of the part played by the father’s collaboration
in the prosperity of the family. Our country districts cannot show his
match for oddity of male attire. Like the other, he wears a horn on his
forehead; in addition, he has an embattled promontory in the middle of
his corselet and a halberd-point and a deep, crescent-shaped groove on
his shoulders. The climate of Provence and the niggardly supply of food
in a wilderness of thyme do not suit him. He wants a country that is
less dry, with meadows where the patches of cattle-dung will supply him
with plenty of provender.
Unable to reckon on the rare specimens which we meet here from time to
time, I have stocked my insect-house with strangers sent from Tournon
by my daughter Aglaé. When April comes, she conducts an indefatigable
search at my request. Seldom have so many Cow-claps been lifted with
the point of the sunshade; seldom have delicate fingers with so much
affection broken the cakes on the pastures. I thank the heroine in the
name of science!
Her zeal meets with due reward. I become the proud possessor of six
couples, which are immediately installed in the insect-house where the
Spanish Copris used to work last year. I serve up the national dish,
the superlative loaf furnished by my neighbour’s Cow. There is not a
sign of home-sickness among the exiles, who bravely begin their labours
under the mysterious shelter of the cake.
I make my first excavation in the middle of June and am delighted with
what my knife gradually lays bare as it cuts up the soil in thin
slices. Each couple has dug itself a splendid vaulted room in the sand,
more spacious than any that the Sacred Beetle or the Spanish Copris
ever showed me and with a bolder arch. The greatest breadth is fully
six inches; but the ceiling is very low, rising to hardly two inches.
The contents correspond with the extravagant dimensions of the hall.
They form a dish worthy of the wedding of Camacho the Rich, a cake as
broad as one’s hand, of no great thickness and varying in outline. I
have found them oval-shaped, kidney-shaped, shaped like a Starfish,
with short, thick rays, and long and pointed, like a Cat’s tongue.
These minor details represent the pastry-cook’s fancies. The essential
and constant fact is this: in the six bakeries of my insect-house, the
sexes are always both present beside the lump of paste, which, after
being kneaded according to rule, is now fermenting and maturing.
What does this long cohabitation prove? It proves that the father has
taken part in digging the cellar, in storing the victuals gathered by
separate armfuls on the threshold of the door, and in kneading all the
scraps into a single lump, which is more likely to improve by keeping.
Were he a useless, idle incubus, he would not stay there, he would go
back to the surface. The father therefore is a diligent fellow-worker.
His assistance even looks as if it ought to extend farther still. We
shall see.
Dear insects, my curiosity has disturbed your housekeeping. But you
were only starting, you were having your house-warming, so to speak.
Perhaps you may be able to make good the damage which I have wrought.
Let us try. I will restore the condition of the establishment by
supplying fresh provisions. It is for you now to dig new burrows, to
carry down the wherewithal to replace the cake of which I have robbed
you, and afterwards to divide the lump, improved by time, into rations
suited to the needs of your larvæ. Will you do all this? I hope so.
My faith in the perseverance of the sorely-tried couples is not
disappointed. A month later, in the middle of July, I venture on a
second inspection. The cellars have been rebuilt, as spacious as at
first. Moreover, by this time they are padded with a soft lining of
dung on the floor and on a part of the side-walls. The two sexes are
still there; they will not separate until the rearing is completed. The
father, who has less family-affection, or perhaps is more timid, tries
to steal off by the back-way as the light enters the shattered
dwelling; the mother, squatting on her precious pellets, does not
budge. These pellets are oval-shaped plums, very like those of the
Spanish Copris, but not quite so large.
Knowing how few compose the latter’s collection, I am greatly surprised
at the sight that now meets my eyes. In a single cell I count seven or
eight ovoids, standing one against the other and lifting up their
nippled tops, each with its hatching-chamber. Notwithstanding its size,
the hall is cram-full; there is hardly room left for the two guardians
to move about. It may be compared with a bird’s nest containing its
eggs and no empty spaces.
The comparison is inevitable. What indeed are the Copris’ pills but
eggs of another sort, in which the nutritive mass of the white and the
yolk is replaced by a pot of preserved foodstuffs? Here the
Dung-beetles rival the birds and even surpass them. Instead of
producing from within themselves, merely by the mysterious processes of
nature, that which will provide for the latter growth of their young,
they are actively and openly industrious, and by dint of their own
skill provide food for their grubs which will achieve the adult form
without other assistance. They know nothing of the long and tortuous
process of incubation; the sun is their incubator. They have not the
continual worry of providing food, for they prepare this in advance and
make only one distribution. But they never leave the nest. Their watch
is incessant. Father and mother, those vigilant guardians, do not quit
the house until the family is fit to sally forth.
The father’s usefulness is manifest so long as there is a house to dig
and wealth to amass; it is less evident when the mother is cutting up
her loaf into rations, shaping her ovoids, polishing them and watching
over them. Can it be that the cavalier also takes part in this delicate
task, which would rather seem to be a feminine monopoly? Is he able,
with his sharp leg, to slice up the cake, to remove from it the
requisite quantity for a larva’s sustenance and to round the piece into
a sphere, thus shortening the work, which could be revised and
perfected by the mother? Does he know the art of stopping up chinks, of
repairing breaches, of soldering slits, of scraping pellets and
clearing them of any dangerous vegetable matter? Does he show the brood
the same attentions which the mother lavishes by herself in the burrows
of the Spanish Copris? Here the two sexes are together. Do they both
take part in bringing up the family?
I tried to obtain an answer by installing a couple of Lunary Copres in
a glass jar screened by a cardboard sheath, which enabled me readily
and quickly to produce light or darkness. When suddenly surprised, the
male was perched upon the pellets almost as often as the female; but,
whereas the mother would frequently go on with her ticklish
nursery-work, polishing the pellets with the flat of her leg and
feeling and sounding them, the father, more cowardly and less engrossed
in his duties, would drop down as soon as the daylight was admitted and
run away to hide in some corner of the heap. There is no way of seeing
him at work, so quick is he to shun the unwelcome light.
Still, though he refused to display his talents on my behalf, his very
presence on the top of the ovoids betrays them. Not for nothing was he
in that uncomfortable attitude, so ill-adapted to an idler’s slumbers.
He was then watching like his companion, touching up the damaged parts,
listening through the walls of the shells to find out how the
youngsters were progressing. The little that I saw assures me that the
father almost rivals the mother in domestic solicitude until the family
is finally emancipated.
The offspring gain in numbers by this paternal devotion. In the Spanish
Copris’ mansion, where the mother alone resides, we find four
nurselings at most, often two or three, sometimes only one. In that of
the Lunary Copris, where the two sexes cohabit and help each other, we
count as many as eight, twice the largest population of the other. The
hard-working father enjoys a magnificent proof of his influence upon
the fate of the household.
Apart from labour in common, this prosperity demands another condition
without which the zeal of the couple would be ineffectual. Before
everything, if you want a big family you must have enough to feed it
on. Remember the victualling methods of the Copris-tribe generally.
They do not, like the pill-rollers, go gathering here and there a booty
which is rounded into a ball and subsequently rolled to the burrow;
they settle immediately underneath the heap which they find, and there,
without leaving the threshold of the house, carve themselves slices
which they carry down singly to their store until they have collected
enough.
The Spanish Copris, at least in my neighbourhood, handles the product
of the Sheep. It is of high quality, but not plentiful, even when the
purveyor’s intestines are in their most generous mood. The whole of it,
therefore, is packed into the cavern and the insect does not come out
again, being kept underground by family-cares, even though there be but
one youngster to attend to. The niggardly morsel as a rule supplies
material only for two or three larvæ. Consequently the family is a
small one, through the difficulty in procuring provisions.
The Lunary Copris works under different conditions. His part of the
country provides the Cow-clap, that rich patch of dung in which the
insect finds inexhaustible supplies of the food needed by a flourishing
offspring. This prosperity is assisted by the size of the abode, whose
ceiling, with its exceptional breadth, is able to shelter a number of
pills that would never fit into the Spanish Copris’ much less roomy
burrow.
For lack of space at home and of a well-furnished flour-bin, the latter
restricts the number of her children, which is sometimes reduced to
one. Can this be due to impotence of the ovaries? No. I have shown in
an earlier chapter that, given free scope and a well-spread table, the
mother is capable of producing twice her usual family and more. I
described how for the three or four ovoids I substituted a loaf kneaded
with my paper-knife. By means of this artifice, which increased the
space in the narrow enclosure of the jar and provided fresh materials
for modelling, I obtained from the mother a family of seven in all. It
was a magnificent result, but far inferior to that derived from the
following experiment, which was better managed.
This time I take away the pellets as they are formed, all but one, so
as not to discourage the mother by my kidnapping. If she found nothing
at all left of her previous products, she might perhaps weary of her
fruitless labour. When the main loaf, of her constructing, has all been
used, I replace it with another, made by myself. I go on doing this,
removing the ovoid that has just been completed and renewing the
finished lump of food until the insect refuses to accept any more. For
five or six weeks the sorely tried mother never loses her patience and
each time begins all over again and perseveringly restocks her empty
nursery. At last the dog-days arrive, the brutal season which arrests
all life by its excessive heat and dryness. My loaves, however
carefully made, are scorned. The mother, overcome with torpor, refuses
to work. She buries herself in the sand, at the foot of the last
pellet, and there, motionless, awaits the liberating September rain.
The indefatigable creature has bequeathed me thirteen ovoids, each
modelled to perfection, each supplied with an egg; thirteen, a number
unparalleled in the Copris’ annals; thirteen, ten more than the normal
laying.
The proof is established: if the horned Dung-beetle strictly limits her
family, it is not through penury of the ovaries, but through fear of
famine.
Is it not thus that things happen in our country, which, the
statisticians tell us, is threatened with depopulation? The clerk, the
artisan, the civil servant, the workman, the small shopkeeper are a
daily increasing multitude with us; and all of them, having hardly
enough to live upon, refrain as far as possible from adding to the
numbers gathered around their ill-furnished table. When bread is short,
the Copris is not wrong in becoming almost a celibate. Why should we
cast a stone at his imitators? The motive is one of prudence on either
side. It is better to live alone than surrounded by hungry mouths. The
man who feels strong enough to struggle with poverty for himself
shrinks in dismay from the poverty of a crowded home.
In the good old days, the tiller of the soil, the peasant, the backbone
of the nation, found that a numerous family added to his wealth. All
used to work and bring their bit of bread to the frugal repast. While
the eldest drove the team afield, the youngest, clad in his first pair
of breeches, took the brood of Ducklings to the pond. [55]
These patriarchal ways are becoming rare. Progress sees to that. Of
course, it is an enviable thing to scorch along on a bicycle, working
your legs up and down like a distracted Spider; but there is a reverse
to the medal: progress brings luxury, but creates expensive tastes. In
my village, the commonest factory-girl, earning her ten-pence a day,
sports on a Sunday sleeves puffed at the shoulders and feathers in her
hat like the fine ladies’; she has a sunshade with an ivory handle, a
padded chignon, patent-leather shoes, with open-work stockings and lace
flounces. O Goose-girl, I in my short linen jacket dare not look at you
as you pass my door on your Sunday parade along the high-road! You make
me feel too small with your smart raiment.
The young men, on the other hand, are assiduous frequenters of the
café, which is much more luxurious than the old-fashioned pot-house.
Here they find vermouth, bitters, absinthe, amer Picon, in short the
whole collection of stupefying drugs. Such tastes as these make the
fields seem too humble and the soil too stubborn. Since the receipts no
longer come up to the expenses, they leave the land for the town, which
is better-suited, so they imagine, for money-making. Alas, saving is no
more practicable there than here! The workshop, where opportunities of
spending money lie in wait by the score, makes a man no richer than the
plough. But it is too late: you have made your bed; and you remain a
poverty-stricken townsman, in terror of paternity.
And yet this country, with its glorious climate, fertility, and
geographical position, is invaded by a host of cosmopolitans, sharks
and sharpers of every sort. Long ago, it used to attract the sea-roving
Phœnicians; the peace-loving Greeks, who brought us the alphabet, the
vine and the olive-tree; the Romans, those harsh rulers, who handed
down to us barbarities very difficult to eradicate. Swooping on this
rich prey came the Cymri, the Teutons, the Vandals, the Goths, the
Huns, the Burgundians, the Suevi, the Alani, the Franks, the Saracens,
hordes driven hither by every wind that blows. And all this
heterogeneous mixture was melted down and absorbed by the Gallic
nation.
To-day the foreigner is stealthily making his way into our midst. We
are threatened with a second barbarian invasion, peaceful, it is true,
but yet disturbing. Will our language, so clear and so harmonious,
become an obscure jargon, harsh with exotic gutturals? Will our
generous character be dishonoured by rapacious hucksters? Will the land
of our fathers cease to be a country and become a caravanserai? There
is a fear of it, unless the old Gallic blood runs swift and strong once
more and engulfs the stream of invaders.
Let us hope that it may be so and let us listen to what the horned
Dung-beetle has to teach us. A large family demands food. But progress
brings new needs, which cost much to satisfy; and our revenues are far
from increasing at the same rate. When men have not enough for six or
five or four, they are content to live as a family of three or two, or
even to remain single. Guided by such principles as these, a nation, in
its successive stages of progress, is on the road to suicide.
Let us go back then to where we were, suppress our artificial needs,
those unwholesome fruits of a hot-house civilization, honour rustic
frugality once again and remain on the land, where we shall find the
soil bountiful enough to satisfy us if we moderate our desires. Then
and not till then will the family flourish once more; then will the
peasant, delivered from the town and its temptations, be our salvation.
The third Dung-beetle that has shown me the gift of paternal instinct
is likewise a stranger. He comes to me from near Montpellier. He is the
Bison Onitis, or, according to others, the Bison Bubas. Taking no
interest in nomenclature subtleties, I shall not choose between the two
generic names, but will retain the specific denomination of Bison,
which has the sound which Linnæus wanted. I made his acquaintance many
years ago in the country around Ajaccio, [56] among the saffrons and
cyclamens that bloom so sweetly under the shade of the myrtles. Come
hither and let me admire you yet once again, O beauteous insect! You
recall my youthful enthusiasm on the shores of the glorious gulf, so
rich in shell-fish. Far was I from suspecting at the time that it would
one day fall to my share to sing your praises! I have not seen you
since. Welcome to my vivarium! And now tell us something about
yourself.
You are a sturdy little chap, short-legged and packed into a solid
rectangle, a sign of strength. On your head you wear two abbreviated
horns, curved like a Steer’s; and you prolong your corselet into a
blunt forehead adorned with two pretty dimples, one on the right and
one on the left. Your general appearance and your male finery make you
a near neighbour of the coprinary group. The entomologists, in fact,
class you immediately after the Copres and a long way from the
Geotrupes. Does your trade tally with the place which the systematists
allot to you? What can you do?
In common with others, I admire the classifier who, studying the mouth,
the legs and the antennæ in the dead insect, is sometimes happy in his
grouping and able, for instance, to include in the same family the
Scarab and the Sisyphus, who differ so greatly in appearance and so
little in habits. Yet this method, which ignores the higher
manifestations of life in order to pore over the smallest details of
the corpse, too often misleads us as to the insect’s real talent, which
is a much more important characteristic than a joint more or less in
the antennæ. The Bison, like many others, warns us to be careful where
we are going. Though akin to the Copris in structure, he is much nearer
the Geotrupes in his industry. Like them, he packs sausages in a
cylindrical mould; like them again, he has the paternal instinct.
I inspect my one couple in the middle of June. Under a plentiful pile
provided by the Sheep is a perpendicular shaft a finger’s-breadth in
diameter, open freely throughout its length and running some nine
inches down. The bottom of this well branches out into five different
galleries, each occupied by a roly-poly pudding similar to the
Geotrupes’, but less bulky and not so long. The mass of fodder has a
warty surface, is rounded off clumsily and has a hatching-chamber
scooped out of it at the lower end. This chamber is a little round
cell, coated with a semifluid wash. The egg is oval, white and
comparatively large, as is the rule among Dung-beetles. In short, the
Bison’s rustic work is a very close reproduction of the Geotrupes’.
I am disappointed: I expected better things. The insect’s elegance
seemed to promise something more artistic, a finer craftsmanship,
skilled in the modelling of pears, gourds, balls and ovoids. Once
again, be careful how you judge animals, any more than men, by
appearances. The structure gives us no idea of the insect’s all-round
ability.
I surprise the couple at the cross-roads where the five blind-alleys,
the sausages, start. The intrusion of the light has frightened them
into immobility. Before the disturbance caused by my excavations, what
were the two faithful partners doing at this spot? They were watching
over the five cells, ramming down the last column of provisions,
completing it with new contributions of material, brought down from
above and taken from the heap that forms a cover to the shaft. They
were perhaps preparing to dig a sixth chamber, if not more, and to
stock it like the others. I realize at any rate that there must be many
ascents from the bottom of the pit to the rich warehouse on the
surface, whence the bundles of material are carried down in the legs of
the one to be methodically pressed on top of the egg by the other.
The shaft indeed is open throughout its length. Moreover, to prevent
the crumbling of the walls which would result from frequent journeys,
the sides are plastered with stucco from end to end. This coat is made
of the same material as the puddings and is more than a twenty-fifth of
an inch thick. It is continuous and fairly even, without having too
elaborate a finish. It keeps the surrounding earth in place, so much so
that big fragments of the tunnel can be removed without losing their
shape.
In the hamlets on the Alps, the south fronts of the buildings are
coated with Cow-dung, which, after drying in the summer sun, becomes
the winter fuel. The Bison knows this pastoral method, but practises it
with another object: he hangs his house with manure to keep it from
crumbling. The father might well be entrusted with this work in the
intervals of rest which the mother leaves him while she is busy in the
ticklish work of making her pudding layer by layer. The Geotrupes, by
way of yet another industrial resemblance, has already shown us a
similar consolidating plaster. Hers, it is true, is less regular and
less complete.
After being ousted by my curiosity, the Bison couple set to work again
and, by the middle of July, supplied me with three more puddings,
making a total of eight. This time I find my two captives dead, one on
the surface, the other in the ground. Can it be an accident? Or is it
not more likely that the Bison constitutes an exception to the
longevity of the Scarabs, Copres and others, who behold their offspring
and even fly away to their second wedding in the following spring?
I incline to the belief that we come back here to the general insect
law of a short life deprived of the chief joy of parenthood, the sight
of one’s children, for no regrettable incident happened, so far as I
know, in the vivarium. If I am right in my conjectures, why does the
Bison, though a near kinsman of the Copris, who attains a green old
age, die so quickly, like the common herd, once the future of his
family is assured? Here again we have an unsolved mystery.
A rapid sketch of the larva is preferable to long descriptions of its
jaws and palpi, which make dull reading. I shall have said enough, I
think, on the subject if I mention that it is bent into a crook, that
it carries a knapsack on its back, that it is a quick evacuator and
that it is clever at stopping up any cracks in the dwelling:
characteristics and talents which are a general rule among the
Dung-beetles. In August, when the pudding has been consumed in the
middle and has become something of a ruin, the grub retires to the
lower end and here isolates itself from the remainder of the cavity by
means of a spherical enclosure, of which the mortar-bag supplies the
materials.
The work, a graceful sphere about the size of a large cherry, is a
masterpiece of stercoral architecture and may be compared with that
which the Bull Onthophagus has already shown us. Little nodes, arranged
in concentric lines and alternating like the tiles of a roof, adorn the
object from pole to pole. Each of them must correspond with a stroke of
the trowel putting its load of mortar in place. If you did not know
what it was, you would take the thing for the chiselled kernel of some
tropical fruit. A sort of rough pericarp completes the illusion. It is
the rind of the pudding which surrounds the central jewel but is easily
removed, just as the husk separates from the nut. When we have done the
shelling, we are quite surprised to find this splendid kernel under its
rustic wrapper.
Such is the chamber built with a view to the metamorphosis. The larva
spends the winter there in a state of torpor. I hoped to obtain the
adult insect in the spring. To my great surprise, the larval stage
continued until the end of July. It takes about a year, therefore, for
the nymph to make its appearance.
This slowness in maturing surprises me. Can it be the rule in the open
fields? I think so, for in the confinement of my insect-house nothing
happened, to my knowledge, that would occasion this delay. I therefore
enter the result of my manœuvres without any fear of making a mistake:
lying lifeless in its elegant and solid casket, the larva of the Bison
Onitis takes twelve months to develop into a nymph, whereas those of
the other Dung-beetles effect their transformation in a few weeks. As
to stating or even suspecting the cause of this strange larval
longevity, these are points which must be left in the limbo of the
unexplained.
Softened by the September rains, the stercoral shell, until now as hard
as a plum-stone, yields to the hermit’s thrust; and the adult Beetle
comes up into the light of day to lead a life of revelry so long as the
mild atmosphere of the last days of summer permits. When the first cold
weather sets in, he retires to his winter quarters underground and
reappears in the spring to begin the cycle of life all over again.