THE MECHANISM OF LOVE
_VI. Cannibalism in sex.--Females who devour the
male, those who devour the spermatophore.--Probable
use of these practices.--Fecundation by the whole
male.--Loves of the white foreheaded dectic.--The
green grasshopper.--The Alpine analote.--The
ephippigere.--Further reflections of the cannibalism
of sex.--Loves of the praying mantis._
The spider eats her male; the mantis eats her male; in locustians,
the female is fecundated by a spermatophore, an enormous genital
bunch-of-grapes. She gnaws through this envelope of spermatozoides
to the last shred. These two facts should be brought together.
Whether the female swallow the male entire, or only the product of
his genital glands, it is probably in both cases a complementary act
of fecundation. There are possibly in the male, assimilable elements
necessary for the development of the eggs, almost as the albumen of
seeds, little aborted plants, is necessary for nourishing the vegetable
embryo, surviving plantlet. Plants, according to recent study, are born
twins: in order to live one must devour the other. Shifted to animal
life, and slightly modified, this mechanism explains what one terms,
from sentimentalism, the sexual ferocity of the she-mantis and the
she-spider. Life is made out of life. Nothing lives save at the expense
of life. The male insect nearly always dies immediately after the
mating; in locustians he is literally emptied by the genital effort:
whether the female respect, or devour him, his life would hardly be
longer, or shorter thereby. He is sacrificed; why, if this is for the
good of the species should he not be eaten? Anyhow, he is eaten. It is
his destiny, and he feels it coming, at least the male spider does, and
the male mantis allows himself to be gnawed with a perfect stoicism.
The spider jibs, the other submits. It is really a matter of ritual,
not of accident or of crime. One might try experiments. One might
prevent the female dectic from pecking the mistletoe berry which the
male has discharged on her; one might watch the coupling of mantes and
isolate them immediately: and then follow all the phases from laying to
hatching. If the spermatophagy of the dectic is useless, if the murder
of the male mantis is useless, it will annul the foregoing reflections,
and others will rise.
The white-fronted dectic is, like all the locustians (grass-hoppers),
a very ancient insect; it existed in the coal era, and it is perhaps
this antiquity which explains its peculiar fecundative method. As the
cephalopodes, his contemporaries, he has recourse to the spermatophore;
yet there is mating, there is embracing; there are even play and
caresses. Here are the couple face to face, they caress each other
with long antennæ "fine as hair," as Fabre says; after a moment they
separate. The next day, new encounter, new blandishments. Another day,
and Fabre finds the male knocked down by the female, who overwhelms him
with her embrace; he gnaws her belly. The male disentangles himself and
escapes, but a new assault masters him, he lies flat on his back. This
time the female, lifted on her high legs, holds him belly to belly;
she bends back the extremity of her abdomen; the victim does likewise;
there is junction, and soon one sees something enormous issue from the
convulsive flanks of the male, as if the animal were pushing out its
entrails. "It is," continues the best observer (Fabre, Souvenirs VI),
"an opaline leather bottle about the size and colour of a mistletoe
berry," a bottle with four pockets at least, held together by feeble
sutures. The female receives this leather bottle, or spermatophore, and
carries it off glued to her belly. Having got over the thunder-clap,
the male gets up, makes his toilet; the female browses as she walks.
"From time to time she rises on her stilts, bends into a ring, seizes
her opaline bundle in her mandibles, and chews it gently." She breaks
off little pieces, chews them carefully, and swallows them. Thus while
the fecundative particles are extravasated toward the eggs which they
are to animate, the female devours the spermatic pouch. After having
tasted it piece by piece she suddenly pulls it off, kneads it, swallows
it whole. Not a scrap is lost; the place is clear, and the oviscapte
is cleaned, washed, polished. The male has begun to sing again, during
this meal, but it is not a love-song, he is about to die; he dies:
passing near him at this moment, the female looks at him, smells him,
takes a bite of his thigh.
Fabre was unable to see the mating of the green grass-hopper, which
takes place at night, but he observed the long preludes; he has seen
the slow play of soft antennæ. The result of the coupling is the same
as with all locustians; the female chews and swallows the genital
ampulla. She is a terrible beast of prey who eats alive a huge cicada,
who fearlessly sucks the entrails of a wriggling cockchafer. One can't
say whether she eats her male, dead or alive; it is very probable for
he is quite timid. Another dectic, the Alpine analote, has given Fabre
the alarming spectacle: a male on his back, a female on his belly, the
genital organs joining end to end in this single contact, and while
she was receiving the fecundative caress, the enigmatic female, with
the fore part of her body raised, was gnawing with little mouthfuls,
another male held in her claws, impassive, his belly chewed open. The
male analote is much smaller and weaker than the female; like his
confrère the spider, he flees with greatest possible speed after the
end of coition; he is very often nipped. In the case observed by Fabre,
the meal was doubtless the end of a preceding amour: these locustians
have the habit, rare among insects, of receiving several suitors. Truly
this cannibal Marguerite de Bourgogne is a fine type of beast, and
gives a fine spectacle, not of immorality, an empty term, but of the
serenity of nature, which permits all things, wills all things, and for
whom there are neither vices nor virtues, but only movements and chemic
reactions.
The spermatophore of the ephippiger is enormous, nearly half the size
of the animal. The nuptial feast is finished according to the same
rite, and the female, having finished the leather-bottle spermatophore,
adds thereto the poor emptied male. She does not even wait until he is
dead; she chops him up, as he is dying, limb by limb: having fecundated
her with all his blood, he must feed her with all his flesh.
This male flesh is doubtless powerful comforting to the mother to
be. Female mammifers, after delivery, devour the placenta. One has
given different interpretations to this habitual act. Some see a
precaution against enemies: it is necessary to obliterate traces of
a condition which clearly shows that one is feeble, defenceless,
surrounded by young, a tasty prey at the mercy of any tooth; others
say it is a recuperation of energy. This latter opinion seems more
likely, especially if one consider the habits of locustians. The
spermatophore is indeed the preceding analogy to the placenta. On the
other hand, fecundation, before being a specific act, belongs to the
general phenomena of nutrition: it is the integration of one force in
another force, and nothing more. The devouring of the male, partial or
complete, represents, then, only the most primitive form of the union
of cellules, this junction of two unities in one, which precedes the
segmentation, feeds it, makes it possible during a limited time, after
which a new conjunction is necessary. If the actual acts are only a
survival, if they have lasted after their utility has disappeared, it
is another question, and one which I leave again to experimenters.
It will be enough for me if I have gained acceptance of the general
principle that animals' acts, whatever they may be, can not be
understood unless one strip them of the sentimental qualifications
beneath which ignorant humanity has covered them, corrupting them with
providential finalism.
While fully recognizing the immense social value of prejudices,
analysis should be permitted to excoriate them and to grind them.
Nothing appears more dear than maternal love, and nothing is more
widespread throughout all nature: yet nothing gives a falser
interpretation of the acts which these two words pretend to explain.
One makes a virtue of it, that is to say, in the Christian sense, a
voluntary act; one seems to think that it depends on the mother to
love or not to love her children, and one considers culpable those who
relax or forget their motherly cares. Like generation, motherly love is
a commandment; it is the second condition of the perpetuity of life.
Mothers sometimes are without it; some mothers also are sterile: the
will intervenes neither in one case nor in the other. As the rest of
nature, as ourselves, animals live submitted to necessity, they do what
they ought to do, so far as their organs permit them. The mantis who
eats her husband is an excellent egg-layer who prepares, passionately,
the future of her progeny.
After Fabre's observations of couples of these insects caged, the
female much stronger than the male mantes, are the predatory ones, who
do combat for love. The combats are deadly, the vanquished female is
eaten at once. The male is bashful. At the moment of desire he limits
himself to posing, to making sheep's eyes, which the female seems to
consider with indifference or disdain. Tired of parade, he finally
decides, and with spread wings, leaps trembling upon the back of the
ogress. The mating lasts five or six hours; when the knot is loosed,
the suitor is, regularly, eaten. The terrible female is polyandrous.
Other insects refuse the male when their ovaries have been fecundated,
the mantis accepts two, three, four, up to seven; and Bluebeard, eats
them regularly after the act is accomplished. Fabre has seen better.
The mantis is almost the only insect with a neck; the head does not
join the thorax immediately, the neck is long and flexible, bending
in all directions. Thus, while the male is enlacing and fecundating
her, the female will turn her head back and calmly eat her companion
in pleasure. Here is one headless, another is gone up to the corsage,
and his remains still clutch the female who is thus devouring him
at both ends, getting from her spouse simultaneously the pleasures
_ac mensa ac thoro_, both bed and board from her husband. The double
pleasure only ends when the cannibal reaches the belly: the male then
falls in shreds and the female finishes him on the ground. Poiret has
witnessed a scene perhaps even more extraordinary. A male leaps on a
female and is going to couple. The female turns her head, stares at the
intruder, and decapitates him with a blow of her jaw-foot, a marvellous
toothed-scythe. Without disconcertion the male, wedges up, spreads
himself, makes love as if nothing abnormal had happened. The mating
took place, and the female had the patience to wait for the end of the
operation before finishing her wedding breakfast.
The headless nuptials are explained by the fact that the insects' brain
does not seem to have unique control of its movements; these animals
can live without the cervical ganglion. A headless grasshopper will
still lift his bruised foot to his mouth, after three hours, with the
movement familiar to him in his complete condition.
The small mantis, or colourless mantis, is almost as fierce as her
great sister, the religious mantis; but the _empuse_, a kindred specie,
seems peaceful.