A DUNG-BEETLE OF THE PAMPAS
To travel over 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 with; 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 pebble-stones enclosed within four walls.
Heaven forfend that I should complain! The gathering of ideas does not
necessarily imply distant expeditions. Jean-Jacques Rousseau herborized
with the bunch of chickweed whereon he fed his canary; Bernardin de
Saint-Pierre discovered a world on a strawberry-plant that grew by
accident in a corner of his window; Xavier de Maistre, using an
arm-chair by way of post-chaise, made one of the most famous of
journeys around his room. [19]
This manner of seeing country is within my means, always excepting the
post-chaise, which is too difficult to drive through the brambles. 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 perches; each bush where the pale
Italian Cricket strums amid the calmness of the summer nights; each
wad-clad blade of grass scraped by the Anthidium, that maker of cotton
bags; each cluster of lilac worked by the Megachile, the leaf-cutter.
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, the Capricorn, the Geotrupe, the Copris, the Dectus, the
Cricket, the Green Grasshopper, in short, with a host of tribes the
unfolding of whose story would exhaust a human life. Certainly, I have
plenty, I have too much to do with my near neighbours, without going
and wandering in distant regions.
And then, 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 documents 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 by the next stage. We must not expect the impossible of
him in these conditions. Let him pin his specimens to cork tablets, let
him steep them in tafia jars 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
corporation of workers, the fundamental instinct varies with climatic
conditions.
Then my travelling regrets return, vainer to-day than ever, unless one
could find a seat on the 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 only I could find a little corner
on it, with a return-ticket!
I do find it. I owe this unexpected good fortune to a Christian
Brother, to Brother Judulian, of the Lasalle College at Buenos Ayres.
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 Dung-beetles of
Sérignan [20] and that of their rivals in the western hemisphere.
A glorious beginning! An accidental find procures me, to start with,
Phanæus Milo, a magnificent insect, blue-black all over. The corselet
of the male juts forward, over the head, in a short, broad, flattened
horn, ending in a trident. The female replaces this ornament with
simple folds. Both carry, in front of their shield, 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 parity of work, we ought unhesitatingly
to attribute to Phanæus Milo short, thick puddings like those made by
Olivier’s Onitis. Alas, structure is a bad guide where the instinct is
concerned! The square-chined, short-legged Dung-worker excels in the
art of manufacturing gourds. The Sacred Beetle himself supplies none
that are more perfect nor, above all, more capacious.
The thick-set insect astonishes me with the elegance of its work, which
is irreproachable in its geometry: the neck is less slender, but
nevertheless combines grace with strength. The model seems derived from
some Indian calabash, the more so as the neck opens wide and the belly
is engraved with an elegant guilloche, produced by the insect’s tarsi.
One seems to see a pitcher protected by a wicker-work covering. The
whole is able to attain and even exceed 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. 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 would call the bump, the genius of the
animal.
Phanæus Milo laughs at difficulties. He does more: 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 of which I give a drawing overleaf
was lying in the earth under the remains of an owl.
Let him who will explain this conjunction of the appetites of the
Necrophore with the talents of the Scarab. As for me, baffled by tastes
which no one would suspect from the mere appearance of the insect, I
give it up.
I know in my neighbourhood one Dung-beetle and one alone who also works
among the remains of dead bodies. 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 two-fold diet here: the
bun for the adult; the highly-spiced, far-gone meat for the grub.
Similar facts are encountered elsewhere with different tastes. The
predatory Hymenopteron takes her fill of honey drawn from the nectaries
of the flowers, but feeds her little ones on game. Game first, then
sugar, for the same stomach. How that digestive pouch must change on
the road! And yet no more than our own, which scorns in later life that
which delighted it when young.
Let us now examine the work of Phanæus Milo more thoroughly. The
calabashes came into my hands in a state of complete desiccation. They
are very nearly as hard as stone; their colour favours a pale
chocolate. Neither inside nor out does the lens discover the small
fibrous particle pointing to a residuum of grasses. The strange
Dung-beetle does not, therefore, employ the bovine cakes, nor anything
similar; he handles products of another class, which are pretty
difficult to specify at first.
Held to the ear and shaken, the object sounds a little 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 better than
that for our instruction.
I carefully rip up the gourd with the point of the knife. Under a
homogeneous outer wall, the thickness of which reaches as much as two
centimetres [21] 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 trifle of free scope allowed to this
kernel accounts for the rattling which I heard when shaking the piece.
The kernel does not differ from the wrapper in the colour and general
appearance of its bulk. But let us break it and examine the shreds. I
recognize tiny fragments of gold, flocks of down, threads of wool,
scraps of meat, the whole drowned in an earthy paste resembling
chocolate.
Placed on a glowing coal, this paste, shredded 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 in
which we easily 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 dark, but not to the
same extent; it hardly smokes; it is not covered with jet-black
bubbles; lastly, it does not anywhere contain shreds of carcasses
similar to those in the central nut. In both cases, the residuum of the
calcination is a fine, reddish clay.
This brief analysis tells us all about Phanæus Milo’s table. The fare
served to the grub is a sort of vol-au-vent. The sausage-meat consists
of a mince of all that the two scalpels of the shield and the toothed
knives of the fore-legs have been able to cut away from the carcass:
hair and down, crushed ossicles, strips of flesh and skin. Now hard as
brick, the thickening of that mince was originally a jelly of fine clay
soaked in the juice of corruption. Lastly, the puff-paste crust of our
vol-au-vent is here represented by a covering of the same clay, less
rich in extract of meat than the other.
The pastry-cook gives his pie an elegant shape; he decorates it with
rosettes, with twists, with scrolls. Phanæus Milo is no stranger to
these culinary æsthetics. He turns the crust of his vol-au-vent into a
handsome gourd, ornamented with a finger-print guilloche.
The outer covering, a disagreeable 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
wall of its pie; but, taken as a whole, until the adult insect emerges,
the calabash remains intact, having acted as a safeguard of the
freshness of the mince-meat at first and as a protecting box for the
recluse from start to finish.
Above the cold pasty, 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. It is the hatching-chamber. Here is laid the egg, which I
find in its place, but dried up; here is hatched the worm, which, to
reach the nourishing ball, must previously open a trap-door through the
partition separating the two storeys.
The worm is born in a little box surmounting the nourishing pile, but
not communicating with it. The budding grub must, therefore, at the
opportune moment, itself pierce the covering of the pot of preserves.
As a matter of fact, later, when the worm 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. Phanæus Milo is thoroughly
acquainted with the mysteries of fortification and the danger of
victuals evaporating too soon. There remain the breathing requirements
of the germ.
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 thinnest 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-piece. 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. It is simply marvellous, I said. Was I wrong? If a
construction of this sort is a fortuitous result, we must admit that
blind chance is gifted with extraordinary foresight.
How does the awkward insect manage to carry so delicate and complex a
piece of building through? 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
methods without going far wrong. I therefore imagine the labour to
proceed like this: a small carcass 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 abound, 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 a couple of centimetres thick. [22] But a mass of this
description is beyond the strength of the modeller, is badly handled
and betrays, in its outline, the clumsiness of 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 means of the pressure of the
fore-legs and the work of the shield. Even thus do the Copris and the
Sacred Beetle act when preparing, on the top of their round ball, the
bowl in which the egg will be laid before the final manipulation of the
ovoid or pear.
In this first business, Phanæus is simply a potter. So long as it be
plastic, any clay serves his turn, however meagrely it be saturated
with the juices emanating from the carcass.
He now becomes a pork-butcher. With his toothed knife, he carves, he
saws some tiny shreds from the rotten animal; he tears off, cuts away
what he deems best suited to the grub’s entertainment. He 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 obtained on the spot, without any rolling process, in the same way
as the globe 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 thickness 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 clayey cup, rolls them out and applies them to the forcemeat
preparation, which is eventually contained by a thin partition at the
top and by a thick layer every elsewhere. A large circular pad is left
on the top partition, which is slender 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 finished 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 time that
the nipple of the calabash is being shaped, the insect, while 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, obtains
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 with the end of his thumb over his
big-bellied jars.
That ends the work. The insect will begin all over again under a fresh
carcass; for each burrow has one calabash and no more, even as with the
Sacred Beetle and her pears.
THE GEOTRUPES