THE INSECT WORLD
STRAIGHT-WINGED INSECTS
(_Orthoptera_)
When children play with pebbles on the beach, they often put the red ones
in one group, the white ones in another. It is much the same with men,
they try to put the things that are alike together, and in the bewildering
multitude of shapes and forms and habits with which the insect specialists
have had to deal, they catch at any similarity, and put together in one
group a lot of creatures which are only alike in a few particulars.
In the straight-winged order of orthoptera they have put the creatures
which have four wings, the front pair being leather-like and smaller than
the other pair, which latter fold up like a fan. They are also all
equipped with strong biting jaws. Bugs often look like them, but bugs have
beaks and never jaws.
It is in this order that are found nearly all of the true song insects, at
least so far as human ears can tell. The grasshoppers, the katydids and
crickets are the great music makers of the insect world, although it is
true that there is one, perhaps the loudest, shrillest singer of them all
which is classified among the bugs, the lyreman, or cicada, one of the
species of which is known as the seventeen-year locust.
When we talk of the hum of insects we do not often stop to think that it
is quite a different thing in general from their song. Most insects in
their flight, providing that their wings move fast enough, make some kind
of a noise. The humming of the bee, the buzzing of the house fly and
mosquito and the whirring of the clumsy beetle's wings are quite a
different thing from the conscious song of the katydid to its mate, or the
singing of the cricket on the hearth.
Of course it is impossible for us to be quite sure that there is not a
host of insects who have means of making some kind of a noise which is so
high up in the scale of noises as to be too faint for us to hear.
[Illustration]
THE KING GRASSHOPPER
(_Hippiscus sp._)
As this young king grasshopper stands looking so inquiringly at one with
his varicolored eyes, each of which is composed of hundreds of facets, I
cannot help thinking that he represents a creature quite as fascinating
and actually more dangerous than the East African monsters of our school
geographies.
Perhaps it is perfectly natural, but it does not seem right, that so
little emphasis should be laid in our histories upon the terrible
struggles of man with his insect enemies. The time will come when we shall
recognize this warfare, when we shall realize how much of human happiness
lies buried on the battlefields of our struggle against the insect hordes.
The members of one species of this great family can sail for a thousand
miles before the wind, and they go in such numbers that they make a cloud
2,000 square miles in extent.
They multiply in such numbers as to baffle all calculation, and every
living green thing for thousands of square miles disappears down their
throats, leaving the country they infest desolate. The great famine of
Egypt, mentioned in the book of Exodus, the grasshopper years of Kansas,
which ruined thousands of families on our plains, and more recent
devastations in Argentina and South Africa are examples of the tremendous
effects which the migratory locusts have had upon the happiness of
mankind.
The famines which have followed in their wake have cost the lives of
hundreds of thousands of human beings and ruined the lives of millions of
others. We have become so accustomed to the idea that the farmer must
expect to lose his crop every few years from the devastations of these
beasts, that we have not yet realized that it would be profitable to spend
vast sums of money in learning how to fight them.
In the evolution of the race, this change will come about, and I feel that
no honor is too great to bestow upon the American entomologists who have
led the world in its fight with these enemies of the human race. Some day
these quiet, resourceful, far-sighted men of knowledge will take their
places beside the organizers of industry and the warriors of mankind in
the hero worship of our boys and girls.
[Illustration]
A BABY GRASSHOPPER
A baby creature, scarcely two weeks since it issued from a grasshopper
egg, and yet with two moults behind it--two bright green baby skins cast
off!
Imagine looking forward, as this baby creature does, to the day when its
internal air sacs shall be filled with air and the pads on its back have
grown so long and parchment-like that it can leave its hopping,
terrestrial existence and sail away across the fields. Until that time,
however, it must be content with its six spiny legs, pushing its way among
the blades of grass, tasting everything green and eating what it likes,
and hiding from its enemies when moulting time comes round.
A young chick finds itself shut inside the eggshell and must work its way
out alone, but the young grasshoppers when they hatch out find
themselves--the whole nestful--shut in a hardened case in the ground made
by their mother, and it takes half a dozen of them working together to
dislodge the lid which shuts them in.
Unlike the beetles and the butterflies, which spring full-fledged from the
metamorphosis of a caterpillar, the grasshopper comes to be a winged
creature by slow stages, each one a little more advanced than the former,
with wings a little better developed. The baby grasshopper is essentially
a small, wingless adult, and not a grub or larva in the ordinary sense.
[Illustration]
A YOUNG GRASSHOPPER'S SKELETON
When the young grasshopper emerges from the egg, it is very small
indeed--a wingless, helpless little creature, all legs and mouth.
It passes through successive ages, or stages, as they are called, each one
of which is separated from the other by a moult or casting of its outer
shell.
These moults take place at fixed periods, and as the insect finds itself
restrained by its firm, inelastic skeleton, a longitudinal rent occurs
along the back, and the insect, soft and dangerously helpless, struggles
out of the old skin, inclosed in a new but delicate cuticle, which takes
some time to harden and color up.
Some people go to great trouble and expense to keep the baby portraits and
even the baby shoes, and I cannot help wondering whether a full-grown
grasshopper, leading a life in the open air, is ever interested in
observing the baby skeletons which show its five stages of terrestrial
life.
What an interesting collection could be made of these insects' skeletons,
photographed large enough so that we could see and study them!
[Illustration]
THE GRASSHOPPER IS GOOD TO EAT
How much mere prejudice controls us! Whence came our aversion to the
spotless, winged grasshopper as food and our fondness for the flesh of the
wallowing swine? We thoughtlessly pass on to our children the idea that
certain things are not good to eat while others are, and so, although the
grasshopper has been eaten for centuries by millions of people, even by
the ancient Assyrians, and is today one of the candied delicacies of
Japan, our American boys, hungry as they always are, have not yet caught
them to cook over their campfires.
The spiny legs deter us, perhaps, and yet, when one thinks that we eat up
all of the soft-shelled crabs, sardines, reed birds and some other
delicacies, that seems to be no argument at all against the pasture fed
and fattened locust of our summer time.
In Barbary, according to Miss Margaret Morley, the recipe in common use is
to boil them for half an hour, remove the heads and wings and legs,
sprinkle with salt and then fry them and season with vinegar to taste.
The Maoris of New Zealand, it is said, prefer them to the pigeons which
they raise.
The Bedouins bake then in a heated pit in the ground, much as a woodsman
cooks his beans, and later dries them in the sun, then grinds them to
powder and makes a kind of gruel, or else he eats them without grinding,
simply removing the legs and wings with his fingers as one would the shell
of a shrimp.
Some people say they taste like the yolk of a hard-boiled egg, while
others compare them in flavor to prawns.
Now, whether all the different kinds are good or not, and which are best
to eat are questions which the American boys most find out for
themselves--the girls, it is assumed, will take no part in this new field
of cookery!
Should any boy desire to dip into this vast subject and become an
acridophagus it would take him back in his study to the hieroglyphics on
some of the oldest monuments of the human race and be a most fascinating
subject.
[Illustration]
A GRASSHOPPER'S EAR IS UNDER ITS WING
(_Dissosteira carolina_, Linn.)
If you raise the wing of a full-grown grasshopper and look behind its big
fat thigh, you will see a strange hole into its body. This is supposed to
be its ear, but what it hears and what it does not hear, who can tell?
When on a warm summer day you hear a male grasshopper chirping, for the
males alone can sing, you can think that somewhere nearby, perhaps with
wings lifted to hear the song better, sits some attentive female whose
ears are tuned to catch the plaintiveness of this courting song.
[Illustration]
THE GRASSHOPPER'S HEARING ORGAN
(_Dissosteira carolina_, Linn.)
As we grow older and certain sounds which we heard in childhood with the
greatest ease become harder for us to hear and are finally lost to as
altogether, we begin to appreciate the relative character of sound. Some
boys can hear the faintest twitter of the shyest song bird in the tree
tops, while others strain their ears in vain to catch its note.
Is it any wonder then that men should be puzzled to know just what the
true grasshopper hears? They know there are males of certain species which
sing so loud they make our ears ache, but there are others whose noises,
if they make any, have never yet been heard by human ears, and yet they
all have these ears. They believe, too, that there are certain sounds the
grasshopper can hear without the use of these special ears.
So whether this strange organ furnishes a special means by which the males
and females find each other or not, and what part it has played throughout
the centuries in the development of this marvelous form of living matter,
are things that man may be a long time yet in finding out.
In the photograph it lies to the left, a dark kidney-shaped opening with
the ear drum membrane at an angle just inside its rim. It has a
well-formed tympanum, and nerves and muscles of a complex nature.
[Illustration]
THE SHORT-WINGED GREEN LOCUST
(_Dicromorpha viridis_, Scudd.)
Whether this creature has a personality or not may be forever extremely
difficult for humans to decide. Its eyes that look like cows' eyes really
cast hundreds of images on a special kind of brain, so different from our
own that we cannot understand it, and then, besides these great big eyes,
it has three others scarcely visible in the picture. Its short-ringed
horns are not horns at all, but sense organs of so complicated a nature
that we do not yet know certainly whether they are organs of smell or not,
and it is supposed that they may be the seat of sense organs that we
humans do not have.
The jumping legs of the creature are filled with powerful muscles, which,
when they expand, can hurl it through the air and enable it to escape from
its enemies. On the inner side of the femur is a musical instrument, a row
of hard, bead-like projections, which are very highly developed in the
males, but not at all in the females. When one of the veins of the upper
wing, which is prominent and has a sharp knife edge, is scraped over these
projections, a musical sound is made by the vibration of the whole wing.
It would seem to be the case, as with so many of the birds, that only the
male can sing, the female being mute.
[Illustration]
THE KATYDID
(_Scudderia sp._)
How marvelously equipped such a creature as this is to live! The great
eyes, with many facets, enable it to see by night as well as by day. Its
long, slender antennæ catch the faintest odor, and probably are sensitive
to a host of perfumes that we do not know. In the front of each fore leg,
just below the knee, is a dark, sunken area, the ear, with which it can
probably hear sounds too faint for our ears, and by moving them can tell
from which direction the sounds come. Its long muscular legs enable it to
jump a hundred times its length whereas man can scarcely cover three times
his length at a leap. Its wings not only enable it to fly well, but in the
males are provided with an apparatus near their base for making a musical
sound.
This sound is made by half opening the long green wings and closing them
again rapidly.
The left wing bears a file on its inner surface near the base, while the
other, the right wing, has a sharp knife edge on the outside just below
the file on the left wing. In closing the wings together the knife edge
scrapes across the file and makes at least one of the wings vibrate. While
the wings are opening no sound is produced; as they close the
characteristic sounds so like the words "Katy did" are made.
[Illustration]
THE NARROW-WINGED KATYDID
(_Scudderia sp._)
If it is any comfort for sleepless ones to know it, the katydid is one of
the noisiest creatures of its size in the world. It is only the males
which call their "Katy-did, Katy-didn't, she did, she didn't," and they
are calling to their mates.
There are people who prefer the noises of the street-cars to the noises of
Nature, and who complain that the buzz of insect life on a summer evening
makes them feel lonesome and unhappy, but to me half the mystery and charm
of tropical life lies in the music of the night insects. Our southern
states, with their tropical summers, have a wealth of insect life quite
comparable to that of the tropics and vastly more varied than that of
northern Europe.
The katydid is the greatest songster of this night choir and is a truly
American species--as truly a thing to be proud of as the mocking-bird.
Lafcadio Hearn in his "Kusa Hibari" has put us in touch with the soul of a
Japanese katydid, and if ours did not have quite so shrill a voice we too
might domesticate him, but the idea of caging an American katydid as the
Japanese do their tiny-voiced creatures will not, I fear, appeal to the
average American citizen.
The male of this species sings sometimes by day as well as by night and
has different calls for day and night.
The female lays her eggs in the edges of leaves, thrusting them in between
the lower and upper cuticle, and from these hatch out the wingless,
long-legged green creatures which are hopping everywhere about the grass
in early summer.
They are borne for the summer season only, and with the frosts of winter
they all die off. Nature seems to make just as complicated a being whether
it is to last a score of minutes or a hundred years--one season or a
hundred is all the same to her.
Just why the katydid should want to hear its own song some city people may
wonder, but it is evident that he does, for just below each knee, on his
foremost legs, is to be found a well-developed ear with a tympanum which
probably vibrates much as ours do.
[Illustration]
A YOUNG KATYDID
(_Scudderia sp._)
It is doubtful if there are any animals so largely legs as the young
katydid. It cannot fly yet, for the wings upon its back are still too
small to carry it through the air, but it can escape from its enemies by
jumps which put those of a gazelle or a kangaroo to shame. The muscles in
its legs are like our own muscles so far as can be determined, except that
they are attached to projections on the inside of a skeleton which encases
them all, instead of being attached to the outside of a skeleton which
they themselves encase, so when a katydid jumps one cannot see the muscles
move as one can those of a horse.
[Illustration]
THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH
(_Gryllus pennsylvanicus_, Burm.)
Through the ages, who knows if not from the times of the cave-dwellers,
this friendly visitor of the fireside has rubbed his rough wings together
over his head and sung man to sleep. The European form seems quite as
domesticated as the cat or dog, leading nowhere a truly wild life, and it
may be questioned whether any living creature has become more a part of
human life than the cricket on the hearth.
The carrying power of their song is extraordinary; there are species whose
strident notes can be heard for a mile, although their little bodies are
scarcely more than an inch in length. The males alone are musical, and it
is reasonable to suppose, since the females have ears in their fore legs,
that they are singing to their mates and not to mankind.
As one listens to their friendly song it is hard to appreciate what
fighters they are among themselves, the larger ones even turning cannibals
when food is scarce, although a glance at the photograph shows how well
equipped they are for battle. Their great black eyes, only shinier black
than their coal-black armored necks, their jointed palpi with which they
feed themselves, their thick, leathery wings pressed against their sides
like a box cover, and their strong, muscular, spiny hind legs, with which
they jump a hundred times their own length, do none of them contribute to
beauty, though quite in keeping with their armored war-horse appearance.
Two long, flexible circi protrude like tails behind, but the task of
finding out what they are for has been too difficult for man. Perhaps the
strange nerve-ending hairs which they bristle with may be sensitive to
vibrations of the air, of which we yet know nothing.
[Illustration]
THE GROUND CRICKET
Unlike its jet black relative of the fireside, the striped ground cricket
forages by day on grassy slopes. It is a more omnivorous scavenger than
the hyena, for it eats decaying plants as well as animals.
Its big brown eyes, which cover half its head, see, doubtless, many ways
at once, and its long, whiplike antennæ, which it waves constantly as it
springs through the grass, are believed to scent odors which are
inconceivably faint, such as the odor of a blade of grass, a pebble, or a
decaying leaf.
[Illustration]
THE STONE OR CAMEL CRICKET
(_Ceuthophilus uhleri_, Scudd.)
It would not be a good idea to let the children think that creatures such
as this were prowling round the house at night--that is, unless you assure
them that it is only a harmless, tawny yellow stone-cricket from the shady
woods, where it generally hides under stones and damp, decaying logs.
It seems strangely equipped for its night life, for it has antennæ as long
as its body. I cannot help wondering if these help it to jump in the dark.
Fabre, the great French entomologist, has tried, as others have, to find
out just how the insects use their antennæ and what they are really for.
He says at last, "our senses do not represent all the ways by which the
animal puts himself in touch with that which is not himself; there are
other ways of doing it, perhaps many, not even remotely analogous to those
which we ourselves possess."
[Illustration]
A MONSTER OF THE UNDERWORLD: THE MOLE CRICKET
(_Gryllotalpa borealis_, Burm.)
The creatures of the air which hide away their eggs that their larvæ may
hatch out underneath the ground must reckon with this burrowing beast.
All his life long he tunnels beneath the ground from place to place. When
you think of how long it would take you, even with the best tools, to dig
a hole in the ground big enough to crawl into, you will get some idea of
the power which these two front legs, four-pointed like a spading fork,
must have, to enable such a creature to disappear into the ground in a few
seconds as he does. These paws, proportionately many times more powerful
than bears' paws, are snippers too, for moving back and forth behind them
is a sharp-edged instrument which, like the shuttle-bar on a mowing
machine, shears off the grass roots which interfere with the mole
cricket's progress through the ground. The poor defenseless angleworms
must fall an easy prey to such a foe as this!
Upon the first joint of each clumsy front leg, it has a narrow slit-like
ear which is but faintly visible in the photograph. Can you imagine a male
and female calling to each other through the long and winding passageways
beneath the ground? Possibly they call to each other only in the
night-time, on the rare occasions when they venture out above the ground.
He is a curious creature with eyes that are only rudimentary and a noxious
smell that he emits if he is touched.
The female excavates a chamber near the surface of the ground and lays her
eggs in it to be incubated by the sun's heat, as are most insects' eggs.
For some time it was supposed that both parents devoured their progeny, as
many as 90 per cent being eaten up, but a French observer, Monsieur
Decaux, has found that the male alone is the cannibal and the mother, far
from doing this, watches over them and when they hatch she feeds the
little ones with bits of plant roots, earthworms and the larvæ of various
insects.
The discovery of one of these mole crickets is really an event. Most
people see but one or two in all their lives. In Porto Rico, however,
there is a form with longer wings which eats the roots of sugar cane,
tobacco and other crops so that the "changa," as it is called, is
considered the most serious insect pest in the island.
[Illustration]
THE COCKROACH
(_Blatella germanica_, Linn.)
In carboniferous times this was a dominant creature, crawling over the
giant club mosses and tree ferns which composed the marshy vegetation of
the young world. Today it crawls over the cracker-box and makes its way
through every crevice in the kitchen and is, of all the creatures of our
houses, the most detested. This is the German cockroach, an importation
from Europe, which has spread around the world, and which New Yorkers know
as the croton bug.
Its long, spiny legs are built for the scurrying for which it is noted,
while its slippery body enables it to squeeze through crevices and holes.
It carries its head tucked under its body, as if looking for food, and its
whiplike antennæ, always in motion, detect at long range the presence of
anything edible which can be crammed into its capacious crop.
Housewives may be surprised to learn that a cockroach can live five years,
and that it takes a year to develop to maturity from the egg. The female
lays her eggs in a horny capsule, like a spectacle case, which she carries
about with her until she is ready to deposit it in some suitable place.
Later she returns to help her cockroach babies out of their shells.
Like the cricket, cockroaches love the night and shun the daylight. They
cannot tolerate cold weather, and though there are 5,000 species they
mostly inhabit the tropics, where they are the plague of domestic and ship
life. It is said that "ships come into San Francisco from their long
half-year voyages around the Horn with the sailors wearing gloves on their
hands when asleep in their bunks in a desperate effort to save their
fingernails from being gnawed off by the hordes of roaches which infest
the whole ship." (Kellogg.)
And now a rumor comes to us that the cockroach carries cancer.
[Illustration]
A DEMON FLY KILLER: THE PRAYING MANTIS
(_Paratenodera sinensis_, Sauss.)
Its spiny fore legs are built to hold the struggling flies, while, with
its sharp jaws, it tears them to pieces much as a hawk or eagle holds its
prey with its talons and tears it to shreds with its beak. It is wasteful,
too, of its food, as wasteful as the sea lion, or the seal, throwing away
the half-consumed carcass before it is finished and pursuing another
victim.
So voracious is its appetite and so successful is it as a hunter that
Doctor Slingerland of Cornell has introduced the eggs of a species of this
mantis from Europe and distributed them among his friends in the Northern
states as a beneficial insect.
To kill a praying mantis has been in Mohammedan countries almost as great
a crime as it is to kill an albatross at sea, but this was not because it
kills the swarms of flies so common in those lands, but rather because of
the prayerful attitude made necessary by its fiercely spined and powerful
front legs.
Its head is so loosely set on its long neck, or thorax, that it can move
it from side to side with the greatest ease. Fabre declares that "the
mantis is alone among all the insects in directing its attention to
inanimate things. It inspects, it examines, it has almost a physiognomy."
Perhaps one is warranted in having a feeling of repugnance toward the
mantis, for no other living creature has more horrible habits. There has
always been something horrible about the cannibalism of human beings who
ate their enemies killed in battle, but this has never seemed so revolting
as the practice of the Fijians who killed members of their own tribe in
cold blood for purposes of the cannibal feast. The female mantis goes a
step farther than this, for she begins eating her lover even before the
courtship is over.
There is nothing about the spiders, terrifying though they must appear to
their defenseless prey, to indicate that they try consciously to frighten
their victims, but the mantis, by spreading out its wings and curling up
its abdomen, and raising its talon-tipped, spiny legs, seems to
deliberately petrify with terror the cricket or grasshopper which comes
within its reach.
THE ORDER OF THE BUGS
(_Hemiptera_)
How blind mankind must seem to the insect world! To look at beetles with
their massive jaws and armor-plated bodies, or flies with their gauzy
wings, or grasshoppers with their long jumping legs and then class them
all as bugs, must seem to them incomprehensible, for to be a bug, an
insect must have a sharp pointed beak, whatever else it has. It may or may
not have wings, it may have a larval stage or it may not, but if it hasn't
a beak and can't suck then it can't be classed as a true bug.
These sucking insects of many shapes, although directly connected with the
welfare of the human race, have been, until recently, the least known of
the great orders of insects.
To this order belong the chinch bugs, the cause of an estimated loss to
the grain growers of twenty million dollars a year; the great Phylloxera,
which destroyed the vines on three million acres of French vineyards, and
the San José scale, which has spread during the past ten years through
every state and territory in the United States and become a menace to the
fruit-growing industry.
It is of this order of the insect world that David Sharp remarks "... if
any thing were to exterminate the enemies of Hemiptera we ourselves would
probably be starved in a few months." It does seem strange in face of all
these statements of authority that our best friends, the insectivorous
birds, are being killed out for lack of forest refuge. We spend millions
to fight the pests when once they get the upper hand, but pay little or no
attention to the comforts of those tireless workers, the birds, which
would keep them down.
I am ashamed of such a fragmentary picture showing of this most important
order, and hope someone will follow on with a bug book which will do the
subject justice.
[Illustration]
THE SQUASH BUG
(_Anasa tristis_, De G.)
The smell of the squash bug is known to every country boy. The odor is
emitted through openings in the abdomen from special stink glands, which
vary with each species.
The tough external skeleton explains, perhaps, why no spray is strong
enough to kill the fully grown insects without also injuring the young
squash and pumpkin vines, and why the best method of prevention consists
in screening the young plants with a wire screen until they have grown
large enough to be immune from attack. If you can find the young insects
which are not yet encased in such a hardened shell, spraying with a 10 per
cent kerosene emulsion will stop up their breathing pores and asphyxiate
them.
The one in the picture is an old specimen, preparing to go into winter
quarters under the leaves and wait for the tender squash and pumpkin vines
to appear above the ground next spring.
It is surprising how quickly they find these juicy shoots, which they
pierce with their sucking beaks and upon which they lay the eggs which in
a few days hatch out into a brood of small but voracious squash bugs.
[Illustration]
A STRANGE-SHAPED BUG
(_Euschistus tristigmus_, Say)
A strange-shaped bug walked into the laboratory to have his picture taken,
not willing, evidently, that he should be left out of the collection. The
handbooks on entomology which I possess seem not to have heard of him. He
is just a common, ordinary bug, but he, doubtless, has an interesting life
for all our scorning of his acquaintance.
[Illustration]
A QUEER, UNWORLDLY MONSTER
(_Corynocoris distinctus_, Dallas)
Could anything be more antediluvian and unworldly than this old,
broken-down creature, with six crooked legs, a pair of popping-out eyes,
two shining ocelli which look straight up into the air, and a long, stout
beak that is partly hidden behind one of the fore legs?
A discussion of how such a fright of a thing came into existence leads one
into the realms of evolutionary science, and there we should perhaps find
it suggested that it is so ugly and looks so much like the bark of the
trees on which it roosts that birds have passed its ancient forefather by,
and through the weird workings of that little-understood law of heredity
this thorny, spotted creature has waddled along year after year, keeping
up in the race for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of centuries. I cannot
help exhibiting a little of the showman's pride in it; for, as Barnum
would say, this is positively the first real appearance of this
century-hidden, hoary monster before the everyday public.
According to the books, this species belongs to a strange family, in which
are even more remarkable-looking creatures. They are all, however,
characterized by having the femora of their back legs covered with knobs
or spines. One of the species is so spiny all over its back that the male
makes use of it to carry around the freshly laid eggs of the female.
[Illustration]
THE THREAD-LEGGED BUG
(_Emesa longipes_, De G.)
When you consider how slight a jar of a spider's web will bring its maker
running swiftly across the web, it is interesting to be told that this
thread-legged bug has the temerity to pick off insects from a spider's
web. It is plain that he stands on stilts, and with his powerful tong-like
front legs, which end in spiny gripping hands, he must, I imagine, reach
out across the web and pick the smaller insects from it, for he is much
too small and weak and incredibly fragile to fight a spider on its own
web.
Even to someone fairly familiar with the insect world he might easily be
mistaken for a mantis, but his short, sharp beak, bent backwards under his
chin, puts him among the bugs, where he takes his place beside the
assassin bugs.
In one form of thread-legged bug in South America, it is said that the
young larva is so long and slender that it curls itself around the
mother's body and is carried about with her, papoose-like, on her back.
[Illustration]
THE ASSASSIN BUG
(_Pselliopus cinctus_, Fab.)
The human species puts its assassins into striped clothing and it is a
rather curious coincidence to find in the insect world an assassin bug in
convict's stripes.
I think no visitor to our portrait gallery has seen a more fantastic being
than this little bow-legged beast. Until I found out what he was, I could
not understand his rank impertinence, for he stalked leisurely about as
though afraid of nothing.
I wonder if he has a nasty flavor and advertises the fact by his curious
coat.
[Illustration]
AN ASSASSINATION
(_Pselliopus cinctus_, Fab.)
I once took a photograph, without realizing it, of some Arab women at the
gates of Bagdad, trying to assassinate an old man; and I cannot pass the
picture in my album without shuddering.
This photograph affects me in the same way, for it, too, is of a real
tragedy and portrays the death of a ladybird, one of the few friends man
has in the whole order of beetles, and that, too, at the hands of a member
of the order of bugs, the most destructive order of our insect pests.
It must be admitted that, as things go in Nature, the ladybird has met her
just fate, for she has spent her life devouring bugs, the sucking aphids
and scale insects of our rose bushes and cherry trees. Somehow the old
nursery rhyme of
"Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home,
Your house is on fire, your children will burn,"
seems to have endeared to us all this beneficent little beetle which
wanders everywhere, cutting short the lives of the sap-sucking insects
that deform and injure our plants, and it does not seem to matter that
this particular assassin bug preys upon our enemies as well as on our
friends. To find this convict striped, spiny bug, with its beak buried to
the base in the vitals of the ladybird, and realize that it had first
poisoned its victim with poison saliva and was now sucking its blood,
rouses a peculiar feeling of hatred towards this hideously ugly creature.
Perhaps this is heightened by the contrast between the pretty, trim form
of the ladybird and the ugliness of the assassin bug.
I was puzzled to know how a creature so nearly armor-clad could be
successfully attacked by a soft-bodied bug of such deliberate habits of
movement. How the start is made I do not know, but it is evident that
between the base of the wing covers of the ladybird and her neck or thorax
is a weak spot in her armor and the assassin thrusts his beak into this
crack.
There are members of this assassin bug class which do not hesitate to
attack little children in the South, and produce nasty wounds with their
poisoned beaks.
[Illustration]
THE CICADA
(_Cicada sayi_, Grossb.)
The coming of the swallow is scarcely more significant to Americans of the
Southern states than the arrival of the cicada. Its song is the noisiest
song in the insect world, and is made in a curious way, by the stretching
and relaxing of a corrugated drum-like membrane in the side of the abdomen
by means of specially strong muscles. The sound is controlled in rhythmic
cadences by means of semicircular discs or covers to the drums, which can
be closed and opened at the will of the insect.
This noisy song, which the male alone can sing, he doubtless sings for his
mate and not for us, although entomologists are not agreed as to how his
partner hears his song, as she seems to have no ears. Although this is the
photograph of a two-year cicada the story can be told here of that
weirdest of all the insects,--the Rip Van Winkle of the insect world, as
David Sharp has called it,--the seventeen-year cicada.
From a tiny egg laid by its mother in a twig of your back-yard shrubbery
there issues a creature which is as unlike this monster as it can be, with
soft, white body and mole-like front legs. It hurries to the ground and
disappears beneath its surface sometimes to a depth of a hundred times its
length--twenty feet it is said. For seventeen years it digs its way around
in the absolute darkness of this underworld, and then, as though by some
prearranged agreement, it comes to the surface to join in a marriage
revelry of a few brief weeks in summer with its kinsmen of the same
generation who disappeared as it did into the darkness seventeen years
before.
Most insects live for a few months only, and one, indeed, the male at
least, for only fifteen or twenty minutes; but the seventeen-year cicada,
the oldest of the insect world, lives as long as a cat or dog. But what a
life! Seventeen years of it in the dark and a few weeks in the sunlight.
And yet, compared to the life of an angleworm, condemned to the darkness
forever, what an interesting career!
When the cicada's shrill song disturbs you, then remember how brief is the
pleasure of its existence.
[Illustration]
THE AMBUSH BUG
(_Phymata pennsylvanica_, Handl.)
We are personally so afraid of a bee's sting that it is hard for us to
believe that any mere bug exists which is strong enough to overcome and
kill a wasp or honey bee. A look at the thick armor of this creature and
its powerful, black pointed beak will go a long way towards convincing one
that this may be such a bug; it has a close relative, anyway, which does
so. Its front legs have been developed into enormously strong claws with
which to catch and hold its prey.
It lurks in flowers and preys on honey-sucking insects, and one can easily
imagine the unequal struggle between it and a butterfly, or realize that
it might come off victor in a fight with bees or wasps.
There are such romantic scenes and bloodcurdling spectacles to be observed
in this world of insects that I cannot understand why there are so few
who, having ample time, have not the patience to sit and watch them as
Fabre and others less well known have done.
No schoolroom training in observation can compare in value with the
outdoor observations of living insects. To look and wait and think and try
to understand; what habits of observation, perseverance and reflection
these actions cultivate!
[Illustration]
A BUG THAT IS ALWAYS WALKING AROUND
(_Brochymena arborea_, Say)
No photograph in the collection illustrates better the marvelous variety
of form which abounds in the jungle of our back yards. To the naked eye
all the interesting details are invisible and one's hand instinctively
brushes the intruder from the table where it has crawled in to take a look
at a human being.
The spotted, crablike legs, covered with bristles, the beadlike facet
eyes, the oyster shell shaped body, the moving antennæ all covered with
white scales, the curious trunk or sucking pipe descending from the chin,
give to the creature a personality which combines something of the wistful
with the curious. And yet this is, as my friend Dr. Schwartz says, "just
one of those bugs that is always walking around on our plants and nobody
seems to know just what it is doing."
[Illustration]
THE TARNISHED PLANT BUG
(_Lygus pratensis_, Linn.)
If you have ever carefully tended young vegetable plants, set them out by
hand and watched over them, you will certainly have made the acquaintance
of this vicious little creature a quarter of an inch long. At least you
will have found where he drove his proboscis and sucked the juices from
your tender plant, leaving his irritating fluids behind to distort the
tissues of the leaf or bud. He lives in the rubbish which was left
littering up the garden and is waiting now for spring to come when he will
make his appearance and do whatever damage is necessary for his existence.
You cannot spray him with kerosene for he is too agile, skipping away from
you in the sunlight, but when his mate lays her eggs, and the young nymphs
with wingless bodies crawl about, you can kill them with a dose of
kerosene oil emulsion which will close their breathing pores and suffocate
them.
[Illustration]
THE LANTERN FLY BUG
(_Helicoptera variegata_, Van D.)
This creature belongs to the family of lantern flies and is also related
to the little leaf hoppers which one startles from the grass by the
hundred in walking across a lawn or meadow.
It is a small, grey bug, not a quarter of an inch long, and quite
insignificant when looked at with the naked eye, yet it is quite as
strange in form as any of the prehistoric monsters.
Its powerful beak is made up, as are the beaks of all the great order of
sucking insects, of four hairlike bodies, four fine, flexible, closely
connected rods enclosed in a narrow groove and sharp enough to puncture
the skin of a succulent young plant. Not only are these hairlike rods as
sharp as needles, but the outer pair are usually barbed so that, once
introduced, a hold is easily maintained.
Under the throat is an organ of the nature of a force pump which injects
an irritating fluid into the plant. It is supposed that this gives rise to
an irritation or congestion of the plant tissue, and thus keeps up a
supply of liquid food for the bug at the point operated upon, which,
rising by capillary attraction along the grooved rods, finds its way into
the stomach of the insect.
That these leaf-sucking insects inject a poison is shown by the way in
which the punctured leaves curl up, turn brown and die.
THE BEETLES
(_Coleoptera_)
Beetles are distinguished from the other orders of flying creatures by
having the first pair of wings changed into shells under which the other
pair can be safely folded and laid away. You can usually recognize them
when they spread their wings to fly, for they have to raise their wing
covers in order to do so. Also they generally have prominent jaws, as they
are biting creatures and do not suck the juices of plants and animals as
the bugs do.
Beetles are almost everywhere. You cannot turn over a stone or break down
a stump or roll over a log without disturbing some of them, and yet
perhaps less is known about the lives of beetles than about those of any
other of the great orders of insects.
They lead two lives, distinct as two lives can be: one in the form of a
grub, the other as a full-grown beetle. To make the transformation, they
burrow into the ground or into the wood of trees and but rarely make for
themselves silken cocoons such as the butterfly larvæ spin.
They do not lead so aerial an existence as some other orders, but,
nevertheless, they are today, perhaps because of their closely fitting
outer shells, the predominant order of insects of the present epoch and
already there are known the bewildering number of 150,000 species. In
North America alone (Mexico excepted) 12,000 species have been described
and these have been grouped into eighty families and 2,000 genera. The
general public is beginning to realize that not everyone can be an
entomologist, and that the quality of brains and training required before
one can travel safely among this maze of forms and distinguish between the
friends and foes of our agriculture is a quality of the greatest value to
mankind.
So far as man is concerned, this gigantic class of creatures is among the
most destructive with which we divide life on this planet, and though
there are beetle friends which help us by preying on other beetles and by
making humus out of leaves and twigs, and by feeding millions of our song
birds, yet, as a whole, they represent a restless, armored multitude which
perhaps we should be just as well without.
[Illustration]
THE JUNE BEETLE
(_Allorhina nitida_, Linn.)
In looking at these two strange beings (this picture and the next), we
cannot feel confident that science has gone very far in giving us the
reasons for the things we see. They seem no more alike than fish and
tortoise or bird and quadruped and yet, before our very eyes, in one brief
year, the one turns into the other.
This beetle dies, and leaves behind a hundred little cells, parts of its
own body and the body of its mate. These paired cells, the fertilized
eggs, grow rapidly into the form of the clumsy, helpless grub which feeds
upon the leaves, only to break up and form themselves again into this
armor-plated creature of the beetle world.
There must be something as radically wrong with our individualistic ideas
of today as there was with the conception of a flat world which prevailed
before the time of Columbus. Perhaps if we stop trying to think of these
manifestations of beetle life as individuals and think of them as parts of
one great organism scattered over the surface of the earth, these striking
differences will seem no stranger to us than do the differences in the
various stages of a flower's life. The beetle forms inside the grub and
the tulip flower bud forms inside the bulb. If tulip flowers could fly, we
should then have the strange spectacle of the opening of the scale-covered
tulip bulb and the coming forth of the gorgeous colored flower which
sailed away to shed its seeds in someone else's garden. I think that this
is the way we must look at it if we would get a clear idea of this
strangest of phenomena,--metamorphosis.
[Illustration]
THE JUNE BEETLE LARVA
(_Allorhina nitida_, Linn.)
How is it possible that this fat creature, with eye-like breathing pores
along its body, whose legs are worthless, and which is so helpless that it
has to turn over on its back to wriggle over the ground, can change into
the emerald-green June beetle which wings its way like an aerodrome across
the meadow? This is the apparent miracle of metamorphosis which it has
well-nigh baffled the intellect of man to explain.
Though the reasons for it are still unknown, modern research has shown us
how this incredible change has taken place.
When this creature, which has grown a hundred times its size since it was
born, has reached the age for this great change, it doubtless feels the
impending transformation coming, and instinct tells it to crawl away into
some protected nook or corner and pupate underneath the protection of a
silken coverlid of its own spinning.
The change begins; each organ goes to pieces, disintegrates, becomes a
mass of disconnected cells, so that the body filled with these, becomes,
as it were, a bag of mush. This mushy fluid has been likened by
entomologists to the disintegrated tissues which inflammation causes in
our own bodies. If, then, you should slit it open at this stage, you would
find no alimentary canal, no salivary glands, no muscles, simply a thick
fluid, with here and there a thicker lump, that is attached at certain
places to the inside of the sac wall. These lumps are formed of groups of
active cells which were not disintegrated in the general breakdown of the
muscle tissue, and these form the nuclei around which the new creature is
to be built. These groups of cells grow rapidly, feeding on the fluid mass
of broken-down tissue much as a young chick inside the egg feeds on the
yolk, and builds up the whole complicated structure of the winged beetle,
which seems to have no possible relations to the white grub out of whose
body it was made.
It is as though the insect hatched twice, first from the almost
microscopic egg its mother laid and from which it emerged as a tiny little
creature in the image of this grub, growing and manufacturing from the
leaves it eats enough nitrogenous matter so that when it emerges again
from the yolk-like substance of its cocoon it will be a full-grown beetle,
for it must be remembered that once made the beetle never grows.
This wonderful process is the same which is gone through by every flying
insect that has a grub or caterpillar stage.
[Illustration]
ONE OF THE JUNE BUGS OR MAY BEETLES
(_Lachnosterna quercus_, Knoch)
Of the wild creatures of our back yards, none is better known than this
hard-shelled buzzing creature, which whirs into the circle of light around
your lamp and commits suicide, if you will let it, by flying into the
flame.
It is one of the so-called June bugs, or May beetles, which every boy and
girl knows, and is not the June _beetle_ of which the larva was shown
previously.
Its hard, pitted skeleton covers it completely, and it is most interesting
to watch it open its wing covers with great deliberation, unfold the wings
which are carefully stowed away beneath them, and holding its wing covers
elevated so they will not interfere, start the transparent wings into
motion and fly away with the whir of a miniature aerodrome. Indeed, it was
this resemblance which caused the members of the Aerial Experiment
Association to name one of their first aerodromes after it, and the first
trophy ever given for an aerodrome flight was won by Curtis's "June Bug."
This creature's first life is spent beneath the sod of your lawn, where it
curls up around the roots of the grasses and clover and other plants which
you do not want it to eat, and the first year of its subterranean
existence it is the white grub, with the brown head, which everybody
knows. At the end of the second summer of its life it changes to a soft
brown beetle, which throughout the winter is hardening its shell
preparatory to coming out in late spring as a winged creature to feed upon
the leaves of trees. The beetle which is walking toward you lives upon the
oak.
[Illustration]
ONE OF THE TWIG-PRUNERS
(_Elaphidion atomaricum_, Dru.)
The long-horned beetles, as they are called, are remarkable for the length
of their antennæ and for their eyes of many facets, which almost encircle
the antennæ at their base. They have, like other beetles, two lives, so to
speak, and their grub-life is spent inside some twig or branch, burrowing
and living on the juices which their stomachs extract from the sawdust
made by their jaws. They kill the twig they burrow in, so that the wind
blows it to the ground, and they go through their transformation on the
ground. The story is told of a long-horned beetle, belonging to a
different species, that lived for years in its larval stage, burrowing
patiently into the dry wood of a boot-last or shoe-stretcher, trying
vainly to get enough nourishment out of it to make a beetle of itself.
[Illustration]
THE PREDACEOUS GROUND BEETLE
(_Chlænius æstivus_, Say)
This creature almost anyone will recognize as a beetle. It is built for
running, and its jaws are made for fighting. You have only to catch one
and watch it open and shut its jaws to realize that it would bite you if
it could. But for all that it is a great friend, for it is what the
entomologists call predaceous, and at night or at twilight it hunts
everywhere for the larvæ of insects which attack the plants we live on. In
its larval state, in which it looks for all the world like a centiped
without the "ped," it burrows in the ground in search of the plant
destroyers, which think to escape notice by getting under the cover of the
soil. It is by nature, then, opposed to the vegetarians, the herbivores,
and hunts them wherever they are likely to occur.
When you see a black or dark-brown beetle running swiftly from under some
stone or log whirls you have just turned over and which makes faces with
its jaws as though it would chew your fingers when you pick it up, you can
be quite sure in eight times out of ten that it is one of these carabidæ
or predaceous ground beetles, and if you let it drop from your fingers you
may be saving the life of a friend, because some day it may eat the worm
which, lying close to some pet flower of yours, had planned to cut it off
beneath the ground.
It is one of the hardest things in all the world to understand how
balanced is this scale of foe and friend. One year there is a wiping out
of our insect friends through frost or floods or microscopic disease, and,
freed thus from the check which kept their numbers down, the foes to our
plants can multiply to such an extent that nothing we can do will save our
crops from total failure. Next year, perhaps, the parasitic beetle,
finding such a wealth of food to live upon, increases and holds well in
check the pest which last year ate up all our plants. Each wave of insect
pests could be explained, no doubt, if all the facts were known, and
nowadays no one who knows what modern agriculture means will fail to
reckon on the risks from losses caused by these pests.
[Illustration]
THE CLOVER LEAF WEEVIL
(_Phytonomus punctatus_, Fab.)
Could anyone suspect this modest antediluvian creature coming toward you
out of the gloom, hanging his head, as it were, of any designs against
anyone? He has them, however, and if you will examine your clover leaves
in June you will find them scalloped with irregular patches eaten out of
them. It would be easy for him to prove an alibi, since it is his other
self, his larval existence, which does it and does it at night, too,
coming up out of the base of the clover plant where it hides during the
daytime. Occasionally in August he can himself be seen feeding on the
clover leaves. In his two existences he manages to do a good deal of
damage to the clover fields of the farmer, necessitating the plowing up of
old fields when he becomes too numerous.
But let us look at the company he keeps. He is in the same class with the
alfalfa weevil which came over from central Asia recently and spread
through the alfalfa fields of Utah, threatened the alfalfa growers with
ruin and set the Entomological Bureau of the Government out on the trail
of some parasite, some enemy of his which they were sure must have held
him in check in his native land. If you could have heard the conferences
which were held and the drastic measures relating to traffic which were
proposed you would realize that it is no child's play to fight the Asiatic
relative of this modest-looking creature.
But it has in this country worse relatives even than the alfalfa weevil.
It is related to the cotton boll weevil, which has brought thousands of
families in the South to the point of starvation and drawn millions of
dollars from the federal treasury of the country in an effort to fight it
and lessen its ravages throughout the cotton belt of the Southern states.
Thousands of lectures are being given to tell the farmers what its habits
are and how it can be prevented.
It has other more distant relatives which live in the forest trees and
make wonderful burrows which look like hieroglyphics. As that remarkable
entomologist, Hubbard, discovered, they are cultivators of microscopic
mushrooms as wonderful as those of the mushroom nests of the atta ants or
the termites of the tropics. Incidentally, and this is the important
point, they kill the trees, fires start in the dead trees, and it is
estimated roughly by Dr. Hopkins, the Forest Entomologist, that they
destroy over a hundred million dollars' worth of timber annually or, at
least, are one of the principal causes of this gigantic loss.
[Illustration]
THE SPOTTED VINE CHAFER IN FLIGHT
(_Pelidnota punctata_, Linn.)
How often one sees lame butterflies limping along in their flight, because
their wings have been injured by the rose bushes or by striking against
the pine needles or have been nipped by some hungry bird. The beetles,
when they alight, carefully fold up each delicate wing, close down over
them polished covers as hard almost as steel and fitting as closely as the
engine covers of an automobile. Whether these wing covers act as
aeroplanes or as rudders for the beetles when in flight is as yet unknown.
There are strange, almost microscopic, markings over the surface of these
wing covers and in some species there are glands inside them which secrete
a fluid which reaches the surface through minute pores, but the use of
this fluid we are still unable to discover.
It seems likely that the discovery, if we may so term it, of these
wing-protecting shells, has been of tremendous advantage to the class of
organisms where it first appeared. At any rate, among the insects the
order of beetles (Coleoptera) is the predominating one of this epoch.
When one thinks that man has just begun to fly, whereas the beetles flew
perhaps a hundred million years or more ago, these wings and their most
perfect chitinized wing covers are deserving of our wonder and of our
admiration, too.
This light, yellowish brown and black spotted beetle prefers the leaves of
the grape vine to those of any other plant, and in its grub life it
burrows in rotten wood, especially in decaying roots of apple, pear and
hickory trees.
[Illustration]
ONE OF THE BLISTER OR CANTHARIDES BEETLES
(_Epicanta marginata_, Fab.)
I can never look at this beetle without a feeling of emotion, for in a
desperate struggle to escape from the fate predestined by a bald-headed
ancestry, I once submitted to the treatment of a noted hair specialist and
allowed him to apply to my scalp the acrid oil of the blister beetle. And
the melancholy part is that it did no good.
Fabre has described how the female European blister beetle lays a thousand
or two eggs in the ground in close proximity to the nest of the solitary
bee whose eggs form the only food of the blister beetle larva. From the
beetles' eggs hatch out strong-jawed, six-legged spiny larvæ called
triangulins. Although born close to the nests of the bees, which in this
case are in the ground, these triangulins do not enter the nests, but
attempt to attach themselves to any hairy object which may come near, much
as burrs attach themselves to the wool of sheep.
A certain number of them by merest chance, apparently, succeed in getting
onto the bodies of the bees and are carried by them to their nests. As the
male bees, in this particular species, appear a month before the female,
it seems probable, Fabre thinks, that the vast majority of triangulins
attach themselves at first to the males and later, when a chance occurs,
discovering their mistake, transfer themselves onto the females and so get
carried to the underground cells, and are present when the mother bee
fills the cell with honey and then lays an egg which floats around on top.
There is something ghastly in the picture of the mother bee laying her
single egg, with the blister beetle larva on her back waiting till the
last moment in order to slip unexpectedly from her body to the egg, on
which it floats in the honey as on a raft. When the unsuspecting bee has
closed in her unborn child, the hideous monster which is perched on top of
it eats it up. This takes eight days, and when it has eaten up its raft,
the triangulin moults and becomes, as it were, an aquatic creature with
breathing pores so placed that it can float on the honey, and with a
stomach so changed that it can be nourished by it. In about eight more
days the honey is consumed and the final moult takes place.
[Illustration]
A HIPPOPOTAMUS AMONG THE INSECTS
(_Prionus sp._)
Why beetles as large as elephants never came into existence on this
planet, or have they developed on some other of the countless worlds of
space, are questions too hard for us to answer.
This wonderfully protected creature with long horn-like antennæ and
hippopotamus-like jaws is a relative of the largest of the beetles, those
which live in the great forests along the Amazon or in the tropical
jungles of the Fijian Islands, and whose grubs are good to eat. Some years
ago, in a clearing in a New Zealand forest, a Maori dug out several
handfuls of the white wriggling creatures for me and a settler's wife
fried them with butter over the fire in her kitchen stove, and I can
testify that they were as crisp and delicate as fried oysters.
Like the other giant creatures of the forest, these Prionids, as they are
called, are growing rarer with the destruction of the forest trees on
which they live, and some day their skeletons in museum cases may be all
that remain of them.
These long-horned wood borers do not themselves bore into the wood; how
could they with their long antennæ? It is their other selves, their grubs,
that live deep in the solid heart wood of some oak or hickory tree. There
is something strange in their solitary hermit-cell life. Think of living
for two years or more in a narrow hole which shuts you in on all sides and
having for a steady diet the walls of your cell to feed upon. Prisoners
have burrowed under prison stockades to escape, but these larvæ
deliberately leave the outer, softer sapwood in which they hatch, and
start for the interior of the trunk, packing behind them with sawdust and
excrement the tunnel which they eat out.
The fact that the grubs of some species of these Prionids choose to live
in the roots and trunks of trees which we choose to cultivate makes them
our enemies, and every good orchardist knows that the only way to stop
them is to dig them out or stab them with a wire run through them in their
burrows.
This fellow bit savagely at a pencil, and when he finally caught hold, I
lifted him up as one does a bull dog, and he hung there almost as long.
[Illustration]
ONE OF THE LONGICORN BEETLES
(_Orthosoma brunneum_, Forst.)
At first glance this longhorn might pass for a Prionus, but its antennæ
are very different and the shape of its broad collar or prothorax is not
the same. To a trained eye they could never be confused, which cannot be
said of all beetles! In fact there is perhaps no group of living organisms
which scientific men have more difficulty in classifying than the beetles,
unless it be the lichens on the stones and trees. Their differences are so
minute and their grub lives so obscure that they have sometimes to be bred
in order to determine their relationships.
[Illustration]
AN AMERICAN SCARAB
(_Copris carolina_, Linn.)
I cannot help wondering what one of the priests of ancient Egypt would
think of this picture of a New World relative of his sacred scarab. To me
there has always been something strangely beautiful in the veneration
which the great Egyptian race has shown for thousands of years towards the
humble, industrious beetle which spends its life in the droppings from
Egyptian cattle.
Go to Gizeh, and look at the images of the scarab beetle carved from the
rarest stories the lapidary could find, mounted in the loveliest gold
settings he could fashion, and reflect that the ladies of the court wore
these dung beetles around their necks and were buried with them on.
Was this veneration of the scarab as old, almost, as the race, and did it
come with the race into its civilization, or did it arise as the whim of
some great Pharaoh?
It is said that somewhere with this veneration there was included a
symbolism. The living scarab is a tumble bug, the female makes a ball of
dung much larger than herself and either with her shovel pointed nose, or
else standing on her head with her hind legs on the ball, she either
pushes or pulls the ball along until she finds some suitable place in
which to dig a hole and bury this ball so that later she may consume it at
her ease. It has been suggested that some Egyptian astronomer, watching
the rolling ball, may have suggested an analogy with the movement of the
heavenly bodies--with the traveling of the moon around the earth. For we
must not forget that in those days the wonder of the heavens was fresh and
new and the idea of world-balls of matter was a subject of intense
intellectual excitement.
But there was yet another reason for the veneration of the Egyptians. The
fact that these beetles suddenly disappeared into the ground and that
later they appeared again was taken as proof of a future life.
It seems to me that we can take a lesson from the ancient Egyptians and
see in things as insignificant as the beetles of manure the greatness of
the world of change and really feel the wonder of it all.
It is a pity, but I have to admit that this American species is not a
"tumble bug," but contents herself with digging holes, filling them with
manure and laying her eggs on it, instead of rolling a well-made ball to
some special place as her Egyptian cousin does.
The mother scarab, unlike every other beetle, lives to see her children
grow up, indeed she produces two families of little scarabs.
[Illustration]
THE TWELVE-SPOTTED CUCUMBER BEETLE
(_Diabrotica duodecim punctata_, Oliv.)
There are few of our insect enemies which do their destructive work more
rapidly than do the cucumber beetles. Every child in the South who has
left his cucumber hills unscreened knows this, for he has found them some
morning literally eaten up over night by the spotted or striped
yellow-green cucumber beetles.
The puzzle is, where do they come from so suddenly? It is as though they
were waiting for cucumbers to come up, and this is pretty nearly true, for
the adults have wintered in the leaves and rubbish of the garden and are
all ready to concentrate on the plantlets in the spring.
Unlike so many pests, which are content to trouble us only during a part
of their existence, this twelve-spotted cucumber beetle is our enemy all
its life long, for it spends its larval life eating the roots of corn and
other field crops.
It is a wide-spread pest, with many relatives quite as bad as it is, and
not only does it eat up the young and defenseless cucumbers and the roots
of the corn, but it is the carrier of a germ infection of a serious nature
to the cucumber. My friend, Dr. Erwin F. Smith, informs me that its kind
has infested large areas in the South with this disease and dashed the
hopes of thousands of boys who, instead of feasting on the melons they
have planted with such care, must stand helplessly by and watch the leaves
and flowers wilt and the vines decay. It must be remembered that this is a
winged carrier of disease and anyone who still fails to understand the
speed of travel of an epidemic had better watch the cucumber beetles busy
spreading this destructive germ disease. A single beetle feeding on a
diseased leaf can carry on its jaws enough germs to infect every melon or
cucumber plant in a neighboring field, and that, too, in a single day.
[Illustration]
ONE OF THE SAWYERS
(_Monohammus titilator_, Fab.)
While standing on a street corner waiting for a street-car one day last
summer my attention was attracted to this beautiful squirrel-gray creature
at my feet. It was so evidently ill that, as I picked it up, I began to
examine it to find out what was the matter. Clustered on its neck, out of
reach of its feet or jaws were whitish bodies which evidently did not
belong to its external skeleton but were probably the eggs of what I took
to be some parasite whose growth within the body of the beast had brought
about its pitiable condition. These are just visible between the
creature's "horns" in the photograph. It was, in other words, a sick
insect.
It is because biologists see these parasites so plainly all down through
the scale of living things that they are so sceptical of accepting any
other cause of human disease until all possibility has been excluded of
its being caused by some parasite or other, too small to be seen even by
using the best microscopes.
My sympathy for this long-horned beetle would be keener did I not read
that its larval self is spent inside the wood of the pines and firs of our
forests, doing great damage to them.
When one is puzzled to know why any living thing should be burdened by
such antler-like antennæ, let him remember the peacock's tail and the bird
of paradise's plumage and be content to know that the laws of evolution
are not yet fully known, and that, given time and growth, almost any form
can be evolved.
TWO-WINGED INSECTS
(_Diptera_)
Years ago in Berlin, my German landlady called me in as an expert to
decide a controversy between her children and herself as to whether a frog
had four legs or six. It seemed strange to me then that a grown-up woman
should not know the number of a frog's legs. Yet there will be many who
read these pages who do not know how many wings a fly has. And flies are
much more important than frogs.
In fact the mosquito and the house fly, both included in the order of the
flies, probably cause more deaths and are more dangerous to human life
than any other creatures in the world.
These portraits are of a few only of the vast myriads of forms of
two-winged insects which haunt the world. Were I to photograph just one
individual of each different species which inhabit the globe, I would have
to spend a lifetime doing it, and when it was finished it would make five
hundred volumes about the size of this one.
There should never be the slightest difficulty in telling a fly from other
insects for there are no other two-winged forms.
Although the flies are sucking insects, their beaks lap up liquid food and
are not at all like the beaks of the bugs. In the great majority of flies,
the beaks resemble a trunk with curious fleshy folds or lips. It is true
some species, like the mosquito, have long, sharp-pointed stylets which,
working up and down, puncture the skin of plants and animals.
The larval forms of many flies are maggots, those squirming, often almost
headless creatures that abound in rotting carcasses or decaying matter of
all kinds, and this is one of the reasons why less is known about the
flies than about some others of the insect world which have selected less
revolting birthplaces.
Of course, in such a gigantic family no general rules apply, and still, a
maggot, whether in an orange or a dead horse, is most likely to be the
larva of a diptera or two-winged insect.
[Illustration]
THE CRANE FLY
(_Limnobia sp._)
Every lover of the autumn woods must have noticed on some still October
day, in the little clearings in the woods, these awkward, long-legged
flies which, frightened by the approach of a human being, gather their
ungainly hind legs together behind and their forelegs in front of them and
slowly and laboriously flutter upward into the sunlight. They are
well-named, these creatures, "the crane flies," for their legs are as long
and apparently much more useless than those of the crane. In fact some
entomologists have expressed themselves as wondering why they have such
legs at all for they are so fragile that they break at the slightest
touch.
They belong to a family with a thousand species in it and perhaps the most
peculiar thing about them is that some forms of the family live and fly
about when there is snow on the ground. This is a very rare exception in
the insect world.
[Illustration]
AN INSECT HAWK: ONE OF THE ROBBER FLIES
(_Erax æstuans_, Linn.)
Her strong, spiny legs, her powerful body filled with strong wing muscles,
and her sharp beak, make this robber fly one of the most dreaded enemies
of the other winged insects for, like the hawk among the birds, she
pounces on them in their flight and tears them to pieces with her beak,
sucking the blood from them as she carries them in the air. A single one
of these insect hawks, or robber flies, as they are called, has been known
to catch and devour as many as eight moths in twenty minutes.
These robber flies are fearless creatures, for they attack and kill bumble
bees and wasps and even, it is said, that monster demon, the dragon-fly.
Tiger beetles, too, are said to fall a prey to this insect hawk.
Its other or larval self is also predaceous, boring into beetle larvæ in
the ground.
[Illustration]
A ROBBER FLY
(_Dasyllis grossa_, Fab.)
When I learned that this powerfully winged, hairy fly tears beetles' wings
from off their backs with that wedge-shaped beak of hers, and sucks the
blood of bees and wasps, it gave me a different idea of the great fly
family, which hitherto I had thought was made up of defenseless creatures
like the house fly.
Of all the insects we have photographed, few have seemed to be more
thoroughly fearless or more ugly than the robber flies. I have never seen
one capture and devour a creature larger than itself, but it must be as
thrilling an adventure as to see a dragon-fly devour a gnat, or a spider
pounce upon the prey entangled in its net.
[Illustration]
ANOTHER VIEW OF THE ROBBER FLY
(_Dasyllis grossa_, Fab.)
At first it looked as though this creature had two heads, one at each end
of its body, but the great facet eyes, of which only one can be seen in
the photograph, make it clear which is the head and which the egg-laying
end of this strange, fearless robber of the air.
Just why it is called a robber fly when it really doesn't rob at all, but
kills, is a mystery to me.
[Illustration]
ONE OF THE LARGE ROBBER FLIES
(_Mallophora sp._)
This robber fly is not so quick nor so savage as many of its family. It
waits for some slow moving insect to come along then pounces upon it.
It probably breeds in decaying wood, although this is not certainly known,
and it is very difficult to breed them artificially.
To the economic entomologist the ability to breed these monsters in
captivity is one of the most important factors in studying out their life
histories, as they are called, their various stages, the plants they feed
on, their habits of moulting, of breeding and of feeding their young.
[Illustration]