THE DUNG-BEETLES OF THE PAMPAS
To travel the world, by land and sea, from pole to pole; to
cross-question life, under every clime, in the infinite variety of its
manifestations: that surely would be glorious luck for him that has
eyes to see; and it formed the radiant dream of my young years, at the
time when _Robinson Crusoe_ was my delight. These rosy illusions, rich
in voyages, were soon succeeded by dull, stay-at-home reality. The
jungles of India, the virgin forests of Brazil, the towering crests of
the Andes, beloved by the Condor, were reduced, as a field for
exploration, to a patch of pebbles enclosed within four walls.
Heaven forfend that I should complain! The gathering of ideas does not
necessarily imply distant expeditions. Jean-Jacques Rousseau[1]
herborized with the bunch of chick-weed whereon he fed his Canary;
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre[2] discovered a world on a strawberry-plant
that grew by accident in a corner of his window; Xavier de Maistre,[3]
using an arm-chair by way of post-chaise, made one of the most famous
of journeys around his room.
[Footnote 1: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), author of the
_Confessions_, _La Nouvelle Heloise_, etc.--_Translator's Note_.]
[Footnote 2: Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737-1814),
author of _Paul et Virginie_, _La Chaumiere idienne_ and _Etudes de la
nature_.--_Translator's Note_.]
[Footnote 3: Xavier de Maistre (1763-1852), best known for his _Voyage
autour de ma chambre_ (1795).--_Translator's Note_.]
This manner of seeing country is within my means, always excepting the
post-chaise, which is too difficult to drive through the bushes. I go
the circuit of my enclosure over and over again, a hundred times, by
short stages; I stop here and I stop there; patiently, I put questions
and, at long intervals, I receive some scrap of a reply.
The smallest insect village has become familiar to me: I know each
fruit-branch where the Praying Mantis[4] perches; each bush where the
pale Italian Cricket[5] strums amid the calmness of the summer nights;
each downy plant scraped by the Anthidium, that maker of cotton bags;
each cluster of lilac worked by the Megachile, the Leaf-cutter.
[Footnote 4: Cf. _The Life of the Grasshopper_: chaps. vi. to
ix.--_Translator's Note_.]
[Footnote 5: Cf. _idem_: chap. xvi.--_Translator's Note_.]
If cruising among the nooks and corners of the garden do not suffice,
a longer voyage shows ample profit. I double the cape of the
neighbouring hedges and, at a few hundred yards, enter into relations
with the Sacred Beetle,[6] the Capricorn, the Geotrupes,[7] the
Copris,[8] the Decticus,[9] the Cricket,[10] the Green
Grasshopper,[11] in short, with a host of tribes the telling of whose
story would exhaust a lifetime. Certainly, I have enough and even too
much to do with my near neighbours, without leaving home to rove in
distant lands.
[Footnote 6: Cf. _The Sacred Beetle and Others_, by J. Henri Fabre,
translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos: chaps i. to
vi.--_Translator's Note_.]
[Footnote 7: Cf. _idem_: chaps. xii. to xiv.--_Translator's Note_.]
[Footnote 8: Cf. _idem_: chaps. ix. and xvi.--_Translator's Note_.]
[Footnote 9: Cf. _The Life of the Grasshopper_: chaps. xi. to
xiii.--_Translator's Note_.]
[Footnote 10: Cf. _idem_: chaps. xv. and xvi.--_Translator's Note_.]
[Footnote 11: Cf. _idem_: chap. xiv.--_Translator's Note_.]
Besides, roaming the world, scattering one's attention over a host of
subjects, is not observing. The travelling entomologist can stick
numerous species, the joy of the collector and the nomenclator, into
his boxes; but to gather circumstantial evidence is a very different
matter. A Wandering Jew of science, he has no time to stop. Where a
prolonged stay would be necessary to study this or that fact, he is
hurried past the next stage. We must not expect the impossible of him
under these conditions. Let him pin his specimens to cork tablets, let
him steep them in jars of spirit, and leave to the sedentary the
patient observations that require time.
This explains the extreme penury of history outside the dry
descriptions of the nomenclator. Overwhelming us with its numbers, the
exotic insect nearly always preserves the secret of its manners.
Nevertheless, it were well to compare what happens under our eyes with
that which happens elsewhere; it were excellent to see how, in the
same guild of workers, the fundamental instinct varies with climatic
conditions.
Then my longing to travel returns, vainer to-day than ever, unless one
could find a seat on that carpet of which we read in the _Arabian
Nights_, the famous carpet whereon one had but to sit to be carried
whithersoever he pleased. O marvellous conveyance, far preferable to
Xavier de Maistre's post-chaise! If I could only find just a little
corner on it, with a return-ticket!
I do find it. I owe this unexpected good fortune to a Brother of the
Christian Schools, to Brother Judulien, of the La Salle College at
Buenos Aires. His modesty would be offended by the praises which his
debtor owes him. Let us simply say that, acting on my instructions,
his eyes take the place of mine. He seeks, finds, observes, sends me
his notes and his discoveries. I observe, seek and find with him, by
correspondence.
It is done; thanks to this first-rate collaborator, I have my seat on
the magic carpet. Behold me in the pampas of the Argentine Republic,
eager to draw a parallel between the industry of the Serignan[12]
Dung-beetles and that of their rivals in the western hemisphere.
[Footnote 12: Serignan, in Provence, where the author ended his
days.--_Translator's Note_.]
A glorious beginning! An accidental find procures me, to begin with,
the Splendid Phanaeus (_P. splendidulus_), who combines a coppery
effulgence with the sparkling green of the emerald. One is quite
astonished to see so rich a gem load its basket with ordure. It is the
jewel on the dung-hill. The corselet of the male is grooved with a
wide hollow and he sports a pair of sharp-edged pinions on his
shoulders; on his forehead he plants a horn which vies with that of
the Spanish Copris. While equally rich in metallic splendour, his mate
has no fantastic embellishments, which are an exclusive prerogative of
masculine dandyism among the Dung-beetles of La Plata as among our
own.
Now what can the gorgeous foreigner do? Precisely what the Lunary
Copris[13] does with us. Settling, like the other, under a flat cake
of Cow-dung, the South American Beetle kneads egg-shaped loaves
underground. Not a thing is forgotten: the round belly with the
largest volume and the smallest surface; the hard rind which acts as a
preservative against premature desiccation; the terminal nipple where
the egg is lodged in a hatching-chamber; and, at the end of the
nipple, the felt stopper which admits the air needed by the germ.
[Footnote: 13: Cf. _The Sacred Beetle and Others_: chap.
xvi.--_Translator's Note_.]
All these things I have seen here and I see over there, almost at the
other end of the world. Life, ruled by inflexible logic, repeats
itself in its works, for what is true in one latitude cannot be false
in another. We go very far afield in search of a new spectacle to
meditate upon; and we have an inexhaustible specimen before our eyes,
between the walls of our enclosure.
Settled under the sumptuous dish dropped by the Ox, the Phanaeus, one
would think, ought to make the very best use of it and to stock her
burrow with a number of ovoids, after the example of the Lunary
Copris. She does nothing of the sort, preferring to roam from one find
to the other and to take from each the wherewithal to model a single
pellet, which is left to itself for the soil to incubate. She is not
driven to practise economy even when she is working the produce of the
Sheep far from the pastures of the Argentine.
Can this be because the jewel of the pampas dispenses with the
father's collaboration? I dare not follow up the argument, for the
Spanish Copris would give me the lie, by showing me the mother
occupied alone in settling the family and nevertheless stocking her
one pit with a number of pellets. Each has her share of customs the
secret of which escapes us.
The two next, _Megathopa bicolor_ and _M. intermedia_, have certain
points of resemblance with the Sacred Beetle, for whose ebon hue they
substitute a blue black. The first besides brightens his corselet with
magnificent copper reflections. With their long legs, their forehead
with its radiating denticulations and their flattened wing-cases, they
are fairly successful smaller editions of the famous pill-roller.
They also share her talent. The work of both is once again a sort of
pear, but constructed in a more ingenious fashion, with an almost
conical neck and without any elegant curves. From the point of view of
beauty, it falls short of the Sacred Beetle's work. Considering the
tools, which have ample free play and are well adapted for clasping, I
expected something better from the two modellers. No matter: the work
of the Megathopae conforms with the fundamental art of the other
pill-rollers.
A fourth, _Bolbites onitoides_, compensates us for repetitions which,
it is true, widen the scope of the problem but teach us nothing new.
She is a handsome Beetle with a metallic costume, green or copper-red
according as the light happens to fall. Her four-cornered shape and
her long, toothed fore-legs make her resemble our Onites.[14]
[Footnote 14: Cf. _The Sacred Beetle and Others_: chap.
xvi.--_Translator's Note_.]
In her, the Dung-beetles' guild reveals itself under a very unexpected
aspect. We know insects that knead soft loaves; and here are some
which, to keep their bread fresh, discover ceramics and become
potters, working clay in which they pack the food of the larvae.
Before my housekeeper, before any of us, they knew how, with the aid
of a round jar, to keep the provisions from drying during the summer
heats. The work of the Bolbites is an ovoid, hardly differing in shape
from that of the Copres; but this is where the ingenuity of the
American insect shines forth. The inner mass, the usual dung-cake
furnished by the Cow or the Sheep, is covered with a perfectly
homogeneous and continuous coating of clay, which makes a piece of
solid pottery impervious to evaporation.
The earthen pot is exactly filled by its contents, without the
slightest interval along the line of junction. This detail tells us
the worker's method. The jar is moulded on the provisions. After the
food-pellet has been formed in the ordinary baker's fashion and the
egg laid in its hatching-chamber, the Bolbites takes some armfuls of
the clay near at hand, applies it to the foodstuff and presses it
down. When the work is finished and smoothed to perfection with
indefatigable patience, the tiny pot, built up piecemeal, looks as
though made with the wheel and rivals our own earthenware in
regularity.
The hatching-chamber, in which the egg lies, is, as usual, contrived
in the nipple at the end of the pear. How will the germ and the young
larva manage to breathe under that clay casing, which intercepts the
access of the air?
Have no fears: the pot-maker knows quite well how matters stand. She
takes good care not to close the top with the plastic earth which
supplied her with the walls. At some distance from the tip of the
nipple, the clay ceases to play its part and makes way for fibrous
particles, for tiny scraps of undigested fodder, which, arranged one
above the other with a certain order, form a sort of thatched roof
over the egg. The inward and outward passage of the air is assured
through this coarse screen.
One is set thinking in the presence of this layer of clay, which
protects the fresh provisions, and this vent-hole stopped with a truss
of straw, which admits the air freely, while defending the entrance.
There is the eternal question, if we do not rise above the
commonplace: how did the insect acquire so wise an art?
Not one fails in obeying those two laws, the safety of the egg and
ready ventilation; not one, not even the next on my list, whose talent
opens up a new horizon: I am now speaking of Lacordaire's Gromphas.
Let not this repellant name of Gromphas (the old sow) give us a wrong
notion of the insect. On the contrary, it is, like the last, an
elegant Dung-beetle, dark-bronze, thickset, square-shaped like our
Bison Onitis[15] and almost as large. It also practises the same
industry, at least as regards the general effect of the work.
[Footnote 15: Cf. _The Sacred Beetle and Others_: chap.
xvi.--_Translator's Note_.]
Its burrow branches into a small number of cylindrical cells, forming
the homes of as many larvae. For each of these the provisions consist
of a parcel of Cow-dung, about an inch deep. The material is carefully
packed and fills the bottom of the cavity, just as a soft paste would
do when pressed down in a mould. Until now the work is similar to that
of the Bison Onitis; but the resemblance goes no farther and is
replaced by profound and curious differences, having no connection
with what the Dung-beetles of our own parts show us.
As we know, our sausage-makers, Onites and Geotrupes alike, place the
egg at the lower end of their cylinder, in a cell contrived in the
very midst of the mass of foodstuffs. Their rival in the pampas adopts
a diametrically opposite method: she places the egg above the
victuals, at the upper end of the sausage. In order to feed, the grub
does not have to work upwards; on the contrary, it works downwards.
More remarkable still: the egg does not lie immediately on top of the
provisions; it is installed in a clay chamber with a wall about
one-twelfth of an inch in thickness. This wall forms an
hermetically-sealed lid, curves into a cup and then rises and bends
over to make a vaulted ceiling.
The germ is thus enclosed in a mineral box, having no connection with
the provision-store, which is kept strictly shut. The newborn grub
must employ the first efforts of its teeth to break the seals, to cut
through the clay floor and to make a trap-door which will take it to
the underlying cake.
A rough beginning for the feeble mandible, even though the material to
be bored through is a fine clay. Other grubs bite at once into a soft
bread which surrounds them on every side; this one, on leaving the
egg, has to make a breach in a wall before taking nourishment.
Of what use are these obstacles? I do not doubt that they have their
purpose. If the grub is born at the bottom of a closed pot, if it has
to chew through brick to reach the larder, I feel sure that certain
conditions of its well-being demand this. But what conditions? To
become acquainted with them would call for an examination on the spot;
and all the data that I possess are a few nests, lifeless things very
difficult to interrogate. However, it is possible to catch a glimpse
of one or two points.
The Gromphas' burrow is shallow; those little cylinders, her loaves,
are greatly exposed to drought. Over there, as here, the drying up of
the victuals constitutes a mortal danger. To avert this peril, by far
the most sensible course is to enclose the food in absolutely shut
vessels.
Well, the receptacle is dug in very fine, homogeneous, water-tight
earth, with not a bit of gravel, not an atom of sand in it. Together
with the lid that forms the bottom of its round chamber, in which the
egg is lodged, this cavity becomes an urn whose contents are safe from
drought for a long time, even under a scorching sun. However late the
hatching, the new-born grub, on finding the lid, will have under its
teeth provisions as fresh as though they dated from that very day.
The clay food-pit, with its closely-fitting lid, is an excellent
method, than which our agricultural experts have discovered no better
way of preserving fodder; but it possesses one drawback: to reach the
stack of food, the grub has first to open a passage through the floor
of its chamber. Instead of the pap called for by its weakly stomach,
it begins by finding a brick to chew.
The rude task would be avoided if the egg lay directly on top of the
victuals, inside the case itself. Here our logic is at fault: it
forgets an essential point, which the insect is careful not to
disregard. The germ breathes. Its development requires air; and the
perfectly-closed clay urn does not allow any air to enter. The grub
has to be born outside the pot.
Agreed. But, in the matter of breathing, the egg is no better off for
being shut up, on top of the provisions, in a clay casket quite as
air-tight as the jar itself. Examine the thing more closely, however,
and you will receive a satisfactory reply. The walls of the
hatching-chamber are carefully glazed inside. The mother has taken
meticulous pains to give them a stucco-like finish. The vaulted
ceiling alone is rugged, because the building-tool now works from the
outside and is unable to reach the inner surface of the lid and smooth
it. Moreover, in the centre of this curved and embossed ceiling, a
small opening has been made. This is the air-hole, which allows of
gaseous exchanges between the atmosphere inside the box and that
outside.
If it were entirely free, this opening would be dangerous: some
plunderer might take advantage of it to enter the casket. The mother
foresees the risk. She blocks the breathing-hole with a plug made of
the ravelled vegetable fibres of the Cow-dung, a stopper which is
eminently permeable. It is an exact repetition of that which the
various modellers have shown us at the top of their calabashes and
pears. All of them are acquainted with the nice secret of the felt
stopper as a means of ventilating the egg in a water-tight enclosure.
Your name is not an attractive one, my pretty Dung-beetle of the
pampas, but your industrial methods are most remarkable. I know some
among your fellow-countrymen, however, who surpass you in ingenuity.
One of these is _Phanaeus Milon_, a magnificent insect, blue-black all
over.
The male's corselet juts forward. On the head is a short, broad,
flattened horn, ending in a trident. The female replaces this ornament
by simple folds. Both carry on the forehead two spikes which form a
trusty digging-implement and also a scalpel for dissecting. The
insect's squat, sturdy, four-cornered build resembles that of _Onitis
Olivieri_, one of the rarities of the neighbourhood of Montpellier.
If similarity of shape implied purity of work, we ought unhesitatingly
to attribute to _Phanaeus Milon_ short, thick puddings like those made
by Olivier's Onitis.[16] Alas, structure is a bad guide where instinct
is concerned! The square-chined, short-legged Dung-beetle excels in
the art of manufacturing gourds. The Sacred Beetle herself supplies
none that are more correctly shaped nor, above all, more capacious.
[Footnote 16: I owe this detail on the work of Olivier's Onitis to a
note and a sketch communicated by Professor Valery-Mayer, of the
Montpellier School of Agriculture.--_Author's Note_.]
The thickset insect astonishes me with the elegance of its work, which
is irreproachable in its geometry: the neck is shorter, but
nevertheless combines grace with strength. The model seems derived
from some Indian calabash, the more so as it has an open mouth and the
belly is engraved with an elegant engine-turned pattern, produced by
the insect's tarsi. One seems to see a pitcher protected by a
wickerwork covering. The whole attains and even exceeds the size of a
Hen's egg.
It is a very curious piece of work and of a rare perfection,
especially when we consider the artist's clumsy and massive build. No,
once again, the tool does not make the workman, among Dung-beetles any
more than among ourselves. To guide the modeller there is something
better than a set of tools: there is what I have called the bump, the
genius of the animal.
_Phanaeus Milon_ scoffs at difficulties. He does much more than that:
he laughs at our classifications. The word Dung-beetle implies a lover
of dung. He sets no value on it, either for his own use or for that of
his offspring. What he wants is the sanies of corpses. He is to be
found under the carcasses of birds, Dogs or Cats, in the company of
the undertakers-in-ordinary. The gourd which I will presently describe
was lying in the earth under the remains of an Owl.
Let him who will explain this conjunction of the appetites of the
Necrophorus[17] with the talents of the Sacred Beetle. As for me,
baffled by tastes which no one would suspect from the mere appearance
of the insect, I give it up.
[Footnote 17: Or Burying-beetle. Cf. Chapters XI. and XII. of the
present volume.--_Translator's Note_.]
I know in my neighbourhood one Dung-beetle and one alone who also
works among carrion. This is _Onthophagus ovatus_, LIN., a constant
frequenter of dead Moles and Rabbits. But the dwarf undertaker does
not on that account scorn stercoraceous fare: he feasts upon it like
the other Onthophagi. Perhaps there is a twofold diet here: the bun
for the adult; the highly-spiced, far-gone meat for the grub.
Similar facts are encountered elsewhere, with differing tastes. The
Hunting Wasp takes her fill of honey drawn from the nectaries of the
flowers, but feeds her little ones on game. Game first and then sugar,
for the same stomach! How that digestive pouch must change during
development! And yet no more than our own, which scorns in later life
the food that delighted it when young.
Let us now examine the work of _Phanaeus Milon_ more thoroughly. The
calabashes reached me in a state of complete desiccation. They are
very nearly as hard as stone; their colour inclines to a pale
chocolate. Neither inside nor out does the lens discover the slightest
ligneous particle pointing to a vegetable residue. The strange
Dung-beetle does not, therefore, use cakes of Cow-dung or anything
like them; he handles products of another class, which at first are
rather difficult to specify.
Held to the ear and shaken, the object rattles slightly, as would the
shell of a dry fruit with a stone lying free inside it. Does it
contain the grub, shrivelled by desiccation? Does it contain the dead
insect? I thought so, but I was wrong. It contains something much more
instructive than that.
I carefully rip up the gourd with the point of a knife. Within a
homogenous wall, whose thickness is over three-quarters of an inch in
the largest of my three specimens, is encased a spherical kernel,
which fills the cavity exactly, but without sticking to the wall at
any part. The small amount of free play allowed to this kernel
accounts for the rattling which I heard when I shook the thing.
In the colour and general appearance of the whole, the kernel does not
differ from the wrapper. But break it open and minutely examine the
pieces. We now recognize tiny fragments of bone, flocks of down,
threads of wool, scraps of flesh, the whole mixed in an earthy paste
resembling chocolate.
This paste, when placed on hot charcoal, sifted under the lens and
deprived of its particles of dead bodies, becomes much darker, is
covered with shiny bubbles and sends forth puffs of that acrid smoke
by which we so readily recognize burnt animal matter. The whole mass
of the kernel, therefore, is strongly impregnated with sanies.
Treated in the same manner, the wrapper also turns black, but not to
the same extent; it hardly smokes; it does not become covered with
jet-black bubbles; lastly, it would not anywhere contain bits of
carcase similar to those in the central kernel. In both cases, the
residue after calcination is a fine, reddish clay.
This brief analysis tells us all about the table of _Phanaeus Milon_.
The fare served to the grub is a sort of meat-pie. The sausage-meat
consists of a mince of all that the two scalpels of the forehead and
the toothed knives of the fore-legs have been able to remove from the
corpse: hair and down, small crushed bones, strips of flesh and skin.
Now hard as brick, the thickening of this mincemeat was originally a
paste of fine clay steeped in the liquor of corruption. Lastly, the
light crust of our meat-pies is here represented by a covering of the
same clay, less rich in extract of meat than the other.
The pastry-cook gives his work an elegant shape; he decorates it with
rosettes, with twists, with scrolls. _Phanaeus Milon_ is no stranger
to these culinary aesthetics. She turns the crust of her meat-pie into
a splendid gourd, with a finger-print ornamentation.
The outer covering, an unprofitable crust, insufficiently steeped in
savoury juices, is not, we can easily guess, intended for consumption.
It is possible that, somewhat later, when the stomach becomes robust
and is not repelled by coarse fare, the grub scrapes a little from the
sides of its pasty walls; but, until the adult insect emerges, the
calabash as a whole remains intact, having acted at first as a
safeguard of the freshness of the force-meat and all the while as a
protecting casket for the recluse.
Above the cold pastry, right at the base of the neck of the gourd, is
contrived a round cell with a clay wall continuing the general wall. A
fairly thick floor, made of the same material, separates it from the
store-room. This is the hatching-chamber. Here is laid the egg, which
I find in its place but dried up; here is hatched the grub, which, to
reach the ball of food, must first open a trap-door through the
partition that separates the two stories.
We have here, in short, the edifice of the Gromphas, in a different
style of architecture. The grub is born in a casket surmounting the
stack of food but not communicating with it. The budding larva must
therefore, at the opportune moment, itself pierce the covering of the
pot of preserves. As a matter of fact, later, when the grub is on the
sausage-meat, we find the floor perforated with a hole just large
enough for it to pass through.
Wrapped all round in a thick casing of pottery, the meat keeps fresh
as long as is required by the duration of the hatching-process, a
detail which I have not ascertained; in its cell, which is also of
clay, the egg lies safe. Capital; so far, all is well. _Phanaeus
Milon_ is thoroughly acquainted with the secrets of fortification and
the danger of victuals evaporating too soon. There remain the germ's
respiratory requirements.
To satisfy these, the insect has been equally well-inspired. The neck
of the calabash is pierced, in the direction of its axis, with a tiny
channel which would admit at most the slenderest of straws. Inside,
this conduit opens at the top of the dome of the hatching-chamber;
outside, at the tip of the nipple, it spreads into a wide mouth. This
is the ventilating-shaft, protected against intruders by its extreme
narrowness and by grains of dust which obstruct it a little without
stopping it up. I said it was simply marvellous. Was I wrong? If a
construction of this sort is a fortuitous result, we must admit that
blind chance is gifted with extraordinary powers of foresight.
How does the clumsy insect manage to accomplish so delicate and
complex a piece of building? Exploring the pampas as I do through the
eyes of an intermediary, my only guide in this question is the
structure of the work, a structure whence we can deduct the workman's
method without going far astray. I therefore imagine the building to
proceed in this manner: a small carcase is found, the oozing of which
has softened the underlying loam. The insect collects more or less of
this loam, according to the richness of the vein. There are no precise
limits here. If the plastic material be plentiful, the collector is
lavish with it and the provision-box becomes all the more solid. Then
enormous calabashes are obtained, exceeding a Hen's egg in volume and
formed of an outer wall three-quarters of an inch thick. But a mass of
this description is beyond the strength of the modeller, is badly
handled and betrays, in its shape, the awkwardness attendant on an
over-difficult task. If the material be rare, the insect confines its
harvesting to what is strictly necessary; and then, freer in its
movements, it obtains a magnificently regular gourd.
The loam is probably first kneaded into a ball and then scooped out
into a large and very thick cup by the pressure of the fore-legs and
the work of the forehead. Even thus do the Copris and the Sacred
Beetle act when preparing, on the top of their round pill, the bowl in
which the egg will be laid before the final manipulation of the ovoid
or pear.
In this first business, the Phanaeus is simply a potter. So long as it
be plastic, any clay serves her turn, however meagrely saturated with
the juices running from the carcase.
She now becomes a pork-butcher. With her toothed knife, she carves,
she saws some tiny shreds from the rotten animal; she tears off, cuts
away what she deems best suited to the grub's entertainment. She
collects all these fragments and mixes them with choice loam in the
spots where the sanies abounds. The whole, cunningly kneaded and
softened, becomes a ball made on the spot, without any
rolling-process, in the same way as the sphere of the other
pill-manufacturers. Let us add that this ball, a ration calculated by
the needs of the grub, is very nearly constant in size, whatever the
dimensions of the final calabash.
The sausage-meat is now ready. It is set in place in the wide-open
clay bowl. Loosely packed, without compression, the food will remain
free, will not stick to its wrapper.
Next, the potter's work is renewed. The insect presses the thick lips
of the clay cup, rolls them out and applies them to the prepared
force-meat, which is eventually contained by a thin partition at the
top end and by a thick layer every elsewhere. A wide circular pad is
left on the top partition, which is thin in view of the weakness of
the grub that is to perforate it later, when making for the
provisions. Manipulated in its turn, this pad is converted into a
hemispherical hollow, in which the egg is forthwith laid.
The work is completed by rolling out and joining the edges of the
little crater, which closes and becomes the hatching-chamber. Here,
especially, a delicate dexterity becomes essential. At the same time
that the nipple of the calabash is being shaped, the insect, when
packing the material, must leave the little channel which is to form
the ventilating-shaft, following the line of the axis. This narrow
conduit, which an ill-calculated pressure might stop up beyond hope of
remedy, seems to me extremely difficult to obtain. The most skilful of
our potters could not manage it without the aid of a needle, which he
would afterwards withdraw. The insect, a sort of jointed automaton,
makes its channel through the massive nipple of the gourd without so
much as a thought. If it did give it a thought, it would not succeed.
The calabash is made: there remains the decoration. This is the work
of patient after-touches which perfect the curves and leave on the
soft loam a series of stippled impressions similar to those which the
potter of prehistoric days distributed over his big-bellied jars with
the ball of his thumb.
That finishes the work. The insect will begin all over again under a
fresh carcase; for each burrow has one calabash and no more, even as
with the Sacred Beetle and her pears.
Here is another of these artists of the pampas. All black and as big
as the largest of our Onthophagi,[18] whom she greatly resembles in
general build, _Canthon bispinus_ is likewise an exploiter of dead
bodies, if not always on her own behalf, at least on that of her
offspring.
[Footnote 18: Cf. _The Sacred Beetle and Others_: chaps. xi. xvii.,
and xviii.--_Translator's Note_.]
She introduces very original innovations into the pill-maker's art.
Her work, strewn like the aforementioned with finger-prints, is the
pilgrim's gourd, the double-bellied gourd. Of the two stories, which
are joined together by a fairly plainly-marked groove, the upper is
the smaller and contains the egg in an incubating-chamber; the lower
and bulkier is the food-stack.
Imagine the Sisyphus' little pear with its hatching-chamber swollen
into a globule a trifle smaller than the sphere at the other end;
suppose the two protuberances to be divided by a sort of wide open
groove like that of a pulley; and we shall have something very like
the Canthon's work in shape and size.
When placed on burning charcoal, this double-bellied gourd turns
black, becomes covered with shiny warts that look like jet beads,
emits a smell like that of grilled meat and leaves a residue of red
clay. It is therefore formed of clay and sanies. Moreover, the paste
is sprinkled with little scraps of dead flesh. At the smaller end is
the egg, in a chamber with a very porous roof, to allow the air to
enter.
The little undertaker has something better to show than her double
sausage. Like the Bison Onitis, the Sisyphus and the Lunary Copris,
she enjoys the collaboration of the father. Each burrow contains
several cradles, with the father and mother invariably present. What
are the two inseparables doing? They are watching their brood and, by
dint of assiduous repairs, keeping the little sausages, which are in
constant danger of cracking or drying up, in good condition.
The magic carpet which has allowed me to take this trip to the pampas
supplies me with nothing else worth noting. Besides, the New World is
poor in pill-rollers and cannot compare with Senegambia and the
regions of the Upper Nile, that paradise of Copres and Sacred Beetles.
Nevertheless we owe it one precious detail: the group which is
commonly known by the name of Dung-beetles is divided into two
corporations, one of which exploits dung, the other corpses.
With very few exceptions, the latter has no representatives in our
climes. I have mentioned the little Oval Onthophagus as a lover of
carrion corruption; and my memory does not recall any other example of
the kind. We have to go to the other world to find such tastes.
Can it be that there was a schism among the primitive scavengers and
that these, at first addicted to the same industry, afterwards divided
the hygienic task, some burying the ordure of the intestines, the
others the ordure of death? Can the comparative frequency of this or
the other provender have brought about the formation of two
trade-guilds?
That is not admissible. Life is inseparable from death; wherever a
corpse is, there also, scattered at random, are the digestive residues
of the live animal; and the pill-roller is not fastidious as to the
origin of this waste matter. Dearth therefore plays no part in the
schism, if the true dung-worker has actually turned himself into an
undertaker, or if the undertaker has turned himself into a true
dung-worker. At no time have materials for the work been lacking in
either case.
Nothing, not the scarcity of provisions, nor the climate, nor the
reversed seasons, would explain this strange divergence. We must
perforce regard it as a matter of original specialities, of tastes not
acquired but prescribed from the beginning. And what prescribed them
was anything but the structure.
I would defy the greatest expert to tell me, simply from the insect's
appearance and without learning the facts by experiment, the manner of
industry to which _Phanaeus Milon_, for instance, devotes himself.
Remembering the Onites, who are very similar in shape and who
manipulate stercoral matter, he would look upon the foreigner as
another manipulator of dung. He would be mistaken: the analysis of the
meat-pie has told us so.
The shape does not make the real Dung-beetle. I have in my collection
a magnificent insect from Cayenne, known to the nomenclators as
_Phanaeus festivus_, a brilliant Beetle in festive attire, charming,
beautiful, glorious to behold. How well he deserves his name! His
colouring is a metallic red, which flashes with the fire of rubies;
and he sets off this splendid jewellery by studding his corselet with
great spots of glowing black.
What trade do you follow under your torrid sun, O gleaming carbuncle?
Have you the bucolic tastes of your rival in finery, the Splendid
Phanaeus? Can you be a knacker, a worker in putrid sausage-meat, like
_Phanaeus Milon_? Vainly do I consider you and marvel at you: your
equipment tells me nothing. No one who has not seen you at work is
capable of naming your profession. I leave the matter to the
conscientious masters, to the experts who are able to say: I do not
know. They are scarce, in our days; but after all there are some, less
eager than others in the unscrupulous struggle which creates upstarts.
This excursion to the pampas leans to one conclusion of some
importance. We find in another hemisphere, with reversed seasons, a
different climate and dissimilar biological conditions, a series of
true dung-workers whose habits and industry repeat, in their essential
facts, the habits and industry of our own. Prolonged investigations,
made at first hand and not, like mine, at second hand, would add
greatly to the list of similar workers.
And it is not only in the grassy plains of La Plata that the modellers
of dung proceed according to the principles usual over here; we may
say, without fear of being mistaken, that the magnificent Copres of
Ethiopia and the big Sacred Beetles of Senegambia work exactly like
our own.
The same similarity of industry exists in other entomological series,
however distant their country. My books give details of a
Pelopaeus[19] in Sumatra, who is an ardent Spider-huntress like our
own, who builds mud cells inside houses and who, like her, is fond of
the loose hangings of the window-curtains for the shifting foundation
of her nests. They tell me of a Scolia[20] in Madagascar who serves
each of her grubs with a fat rasher, an Oryctes-larva,[21] even as our
own Scoliae feed their family on prey of similar organization, with a
highly concentrated nervous system, such as the larvae of Cetoniae,
Anoxiae and even Oryctes. They tell me that in Texas a Pepsis, a
huntress of big game akin to the Calicurgi, gives chase to a
formidable Tarantula and vies in daring with our Ringed
Calicurgus,[22] who stabs the Black-bellied Lycosa.[23] They tell me
that the Sphex-wasps of the Sahara, a rival of our own White-banded
Sphex,[24] operate on Locusts. But we must limit these quotations,
which could easily be multiplied.
[Footnote 19: Cf. _The Mason-wasps_, by J. Henri Fabre, translated by
Alexander Teixeira de Mattos: chaps. iii. to vi.--_Translator's
Note_.]
[Footnote 20: The chapters on the Scoliae will appear in _More Hunting
Wasps_. Meanwhile, cf. _The Life and Love of the Insect_, by J. Henri
Fabre, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos: chap.
xi.--_Translator's Note_.]
[Footnote 21: The larva of the Rhinoceros Beetle.--_Translator's
Note_.]
[Footnote 22: For the Pompilus, or Ringed Calicurgus, cf. _The Life
and Love of the Insect_: chap. xii.--_Translator's Note_.]
[Footnote 23: For the Narbonne Lycosa, or Black-bellied Tarantula, cf.
_The Life of the Spider_: chaps. i. and iii. to vii.--_Translator's
Note_.]
[Footnote 24: Cf. _The Life of the Fly_: chap. i.--_Translator's
Note_.]
For producing variations of animal species to suit our theorists there
is nothing so convenient as the influence of environment. It is a
vague, elastic phrase, which does not compromise us by compelling us
to be too precise and it supplies an apparent explanation of the
inexplicable. But is this influence so powerful as they say?
I grant you that to some small extent it modifies the shape, the fur
or feather, the colouring, the outward accessories. To go farther
would be to fly in the face of facts. If the surroundings become too
exacting, the animal protests against the violence endured and
succumbs rather than change. If they go to work gently, the creature
subjected to them adapts itself as best it can, but invincibly refuses
to cease to be what it is. It must live in the form of the mould
whence it issued, or it must die: there is no other alternative.
Instinct, one of the higher characteristics, is no less rebellious to
the injunctions of environment than are the organs, which serve its
activity. Innumerable guilds divide the work of the entomological
world; and each member of one of these corporations is subject to
rules which not climate, nor latitude, nor the most serious
disturbances of diet are able to alter.
Look at the Dung-beetles of the pampas. At the other end of the world,
in their vast flooded pastures, so different from our scanty
greenswards, they follow, without notable variations, the same methods
as their colleagues in Provence. A profound change of surroundings in
no way effects the fundamental industry of the group.
Nor do the provisions available affect it. The staple food to-day is
matter of bovine origin. But the Ox is a newcomer in the land, an
importation of the Spanish conquest. What did the Megathopae, the
Bolbites, the Splendid Phanaeus eat and knead, before the arrival of
the present purveyor? The Llama, that denizen of the uplands, was not
able to feed the Dung-beetles confined to the plains. In days of old,
the foster-father was perhaps the monstrous Megatherium, a
dung-factory of incomparable prodigality.
And from the produce of the colossal beast, whereof naught remains but
a few rare skeletons, the modellers passed to the produce of the Sheep
and the Ox, without altering their ovoids or their gourds, even as our
Sacred Beetle, without ceasing to be faithful to her pear, accepts the
Cow's flat cake in the absence of the favourite morsel, the Sheep's
bannock.
In the south as in the north, at the antipodes as here, every Copris
fashions ovoids with the egg at the smaller end; every Sacred Beetle
models pears or gourds with a hatching-chamber in the neck; but the
materials employed vary greatly according to the season and locality
and can be furnished by the Megatherium, the Ox, the Horse, the Sheep
or by man and several others.
We must not allow this diversity to lead us to believe in changes of
instinct: that would be to strain at a Gnat and swallow a Camel. The
industry of the Megachiles, for instance, consists of manufacturing
wallets with bits of leaves; that of the Cotton-bees of making bags of
wadding with the flock gathered from certain plants. Whether the
pieces be cut from the leaves of this shrub or that, or at need from
the petals of some flower; whether the cotton-wool be collected here
or there, as chance may direct the encounter, the industry undergoes
no essential changes.
In the same manner, nothing changes in the art of the Dung-beetle,
victualling himself with materials in this mine or that. Here in truth
we have immutable instinct, here we behold the rock which our
theorists are unable to shake.
And why should it change, this instinct, so logical in its workings?
Where could it find, even with chance assisting, a better plan? In
spite of an equipment which varies in the different genera, it
suggests to every modelling Dung-beetle the spherical shape, a
fundamental structure which is hardly affected when the egg is placed
in position.
From the outset, without the use of compasses, without any mechanical
rolling, without shifting the thing on its base, one and all obtain
the ball, the delicately executed compact body supremely favourable to
the grub's well-being. To the shapeless lump, demanding no pains, they
all prefer the sphere, lovingly fashioned and calling for much
manipulation, the globe which is the preeminent form and best-adapted
for the preservation of energy, in the case of a sun and of a
Dung-beetle's cradle alike.
When Macleay[25] gave the Sacred Beetle the name of Heliocantharus,
the Black-beetle of the Sun, what had he in mind? The radiating
denticulations of the forehead, the insect's gambols in the bright
sunlight? Was he not thinking rather of the symbol of Egypt, the
Scarab who, on the pediment of the temples, lifts towards the sky, by
way of a pill, a vermilion sphere, the image of the sun?
[Footnote 25: William Sharp Macleay (1792-1865), author of _Horae
Entomologicae_; or, _Essays on Annulose Animals_ (1819-1821), on which
I quote the _Dictionary of National Biography_:
"He propounded the circular or quinary system, a forcedly artificial
attempt at a natural system of classification, which soon became a
byword among naturalists."--_Translator's Note_.]
The comparison between the mighty bodies of the universe and the
insect's humble pellet was not distasteful to the thinkers on the
banks of the Nile. For them supreme splendour found its effigy in
extreme abjection. Were they very wrong?
No, for the pill-roller's work propounds a grave problem to whoso is
capable of reflection. It compels us to accept this alternative:
either to credit the Dung-beetle's flat head with the signal honour of
having of itself solved the geometrical problem of preserved food, or
else to fall back upon a harmony ruling all things under the eye of an
Intelligence Which, knowing everything, has provided for everything.