MINOTAURUS TYPHŒUS
To describe the insect that forms the subject of this chapter,
scientific nomenclature joins two formidable names: that of the
Minotaur, Minos’ bull fed on human flesh in the crypts of the Cretan
labyrinth; and that of Typhœus, one of the giants, sons of Terra, who
tried to scale the heavens. Thanks to the clue of thread which he
received from Minos’ daughter Ariadne, Theseus the Athenian found the
Minotaur, slew him and made his escape, safe and sound, after
delivering his country for ever from the dreadful tribute destined for
the monster’s food.
Typhœus, struck by a thunderbolt on his heaped-up mountains, was hurled
under Mount Etna. He is there still. His breath is the smoke of the
volcano. When he coughs, he spits out streams of lava; when he shifts
his position from one shoulder to the other, he puts Sicily aflutter;
he shakes her with an earthquake.
It is not unpleasant to find an echo of these old fables in the history
of animals. Mythological denominations, so resonant and pleasing to the
ear, entail no inconsistencies with reality, a fault that is not always
avoided by the terms compiled wholly of data gathered from the lexicon.
When vague analogies, in addition, connect the fabled with the
historical, then surnames and forenames both become very happy. Such is
the case with Minotaurus Typhœus (Lin.).
It is the name given to a fair-sized black coleopteron, closely related
to the Earth-borers, the Geotrupes. He is a peaceable, inoffensive
creature, but even better-horned than Minos’ bull. None among our
harness-loving insects wears so threatening an armour. The male carries
on his corselet a sheaf consisting of three steeled spears, parallel to
one another and jutting forward. Imagine him the size of a bull; and
Theseus himself, if he met him in the fields, would hardly dare to face
his terrible trident.
The Typhœus of the legend had the ambition to sack the home of the gods
by stacking one upon the other a pile of mountains torn from their
base; the Typhœus of the naturalists does not climb: he descends; he
bores the ground to enormous depths. The first, with a movement of the
shoulder, sets a province heaving; the second, with a thrust of its
chine, makes his mole-hill tremble as Etna trembles when he stirs who
lies buried within her depths.
Such is the insect wherewith we are concerned.
But what is the use of this history, what the use of all this minute
research? I well know that it will not produce a fall in the price of
pepper, a rise in that of crates of rotten cabbages, or other serious
events of this kind, which cause fleets to be manned and set people
face to face intent upon one another’s extermination. The insect does
not aim at so much glory. It confines itself to showing us life in the
inexhaustible variety of its manifestations; it helps us to decipher in
some small measure the obscurest book of all, the book of ourselves.
The insect is easy to obtain, cheap to feed and not repulsive to
examine organically; and it lends itself far better than the higher
animals to the investigations of our curiosity. Besides, the others are
our near neighbours and do but repeat a somewhat monotonous theme,
whereas the insect, with its unparalleled wealth of instincts, habits
and structure, reveals a new world to us, much as though we were
conferring with the natives of another planet. This is the reason that
makes me constantly renew my unwearied relations with the insect and
hold it in such high esteem.
Minotaurus Typhœus favours the open sandy places where, on their way to
the grazing-ground, the flocks of sheep scatter their trails of black
pellets which constitute his regulation fare. Couples jointly addicted
to nest-building begin to meet in the first days of March. The two
sexes, until then isolated in surface-burrows, are now associated for a
long time to come.
Do the husband and wife recognize each other among their fellows? Are
they mutually faithful? Cases of breach of matrimony are very rare, in
fact unknown, on the part of the mother, who has long ceased to leave
the house; on the other hand, they are frequent on the part of the
father, whose duties often oblige him to come outside. As will be seen
presently, he is, throughout his life, the purveyor of victuals and the
person entrusted with the carriage of the rubbish. Alone, at different
hours of the day, he flings out of doors the earth thrown up by the
mother’s excavations; alone he explores the vicinity of the home at
night, in quest of the pellets whereof his sons’ loaves shall be
kneaded.
Sometimes, two burrows are side by side. Cannot the collector of
provisions, on returning home, easily mistake the door and enter
another’s house? On his walks abroad, does he never happen to meet
ladies taking the air who have not yet settled down; and is he, then,
not forgetful of his first mate and ready for divorce? The question
deserved to be examined. I tried to solve it in the manner that
follows.
Two couples are taken from the ground at a time when the excavations
are in full swing. Indelible marks, contrived with the point of a
needle on the lower edge of the elytra, will enable me to distinguish
them one from the other. The four subjects of my experiment are
distributed at random, one by one, over the surface of a sandy area a
couple of spans thick. A soil of this depth will be sufficient for the
excavations of a night. In case provisions should be needed, a handful
of sheep-droppings is served. A large reversed earthen pan covers the
arena, prevents escape and produces the darkness favourable to mental
concentration.
The next morning provides a splendid response. There are two burrows in
the establishment, no more; the couples have formed again as they were:
each Jack has his Jill. A second experiment, made next day, and a third
meet with the same success: those marked with a point are together,
those not marked are together, at the bottom of the gallery.
Five times more, day after day, I make them set up house anew. Things
now begin to be spoilt. Sometimes, each of the four that are being
experimented on settles apart; sometimes, the same burrow contains the
two males or the two females; sometimes, the same crypt receives the
two sexes, but differently associated from what they were at the start.
I have abused my powers of repetition. Henceforth disorder reigns. My
daily shufflings have demoralized the burrowers; a crumbling home,
always requiring to be begun afresh, has put an end to lawful
associations. Respectable married life becomes impossible from the
moment when the house falls in from day to day.
No matter: the first three experiments, made when alarms, time after
time repeated, had not yet tangled the delicate connecting thread, seem
to point to a certain constancy in the Minotaurus household. He and she
know each other, find each other in the tumult of events which my
mischievous doings force upon them; they show each other a mutual
fidelity, a very unusual quality in the insect class, which is but too
prone to forget its matrimonial obligations.
We recognize one another by our speech, by the sound, the inflection of
our voices. They, on the other hand, are dumb, deprived of all means of
vocal appeal. There remains the sense of smell. Minotaurus finding his
mate makes me think of my friend Tom, the house-dog, who, at his moony
periods, lifts his nose in the air, sniffs the breeze and jumps over
the garden-walls, eager to obey the distant and magical convocation; he
puts me in mind of the Great Peacock Moth, who swiftly covers several
miles to pay his homage to the new-hatched maid.
The comparison, however, is far from perfect. The dog and the big Moth
get wind of the wedding before they know the bride. Minotaurus, on the
other hand, has no experience of long pilgrimages, yet makes his way,
in a brief circuit, to her whom he has already visited; he knows her,
he distinguishes her from the others by certain emanations, certain
individual scents inappreciable to any save the enamoured swain. Of
what do these effluvia consist? The insect did not tell me; and that is
a pity, for it would have taught us things worth knowing about its
feats of smell.
Now how is the work divided in this household? To discover this is not
one of those easy undertakings for which the point of a knife suffices.
He who proposes to visit the burrowing insect at home must have
recourse to arduous sapping. We have here to do not with the apartment
of the Sacred Beetle, the Copris or the others, which is soon laid bare
with a mere pocket-trowel: we have to do with a pit the bottom of which
can be reached only with a stout spade, sturdily wielded for hours at a
stretch. And, if the sun be at all hot, one returns from the drudgery
utterly exhausted.
Oh, my poor joints, grown rusty with age! To suspect the existence of a
fine problem underground and not to be able to dig! The zeal survives,
as ardent as in the days when I used to pull down the spongy slopes
beloved by the Anthophora; the love of research has not abated, but the
strength is lacking. Luckily, I have an assistant, in the shape of my
son Paul, who lends me the vigour of his wrists and the suppleness of
his loins. I am the head, he is the arm.
The rest of the family, including the mother—and she not the least
eager—usually go with us. One cannot have too many eyes when the pit
becomes deep and one has to observe from a distance the minute
documents exhumed by the spade. What the one misses the other
perceives. Huber, [28] when he went blind, studied the bee through the
intermediary of a clear-sighted and devoted adjutrix. I am even
better-off than the great Swiss naturalist. My sight, which is still
fairly good, although exceedingly tired, is aided by the deep-seeing
eyes of all my family. I owe to them the fact that I am able to pursue
my researches: let me thank them here.
We are on the spot early in the morning. We soon find a burrow with a
large mole-hill formed of cylindrical stoppers forced out in one lump
by blows of the rammer. We clear away the mound and a pit of great
depth opens below it. A useful reed, gathered on the way, serves me as
a guide, diving lower and lower down. At last, at about five feet, the
reed touches bottom. We are there, we have reached Minotaurus’ chamber.
The pocket-trowel prudently lays things bare and we see the occupants
appear: the male first and, a little lower, the female. When the couple
are removed, a dark, circular patch shows: this is the end of the
column of victuals. Careful now and let us dig gently! What we have to
do is to cut away the central clod at the bottom of the vat, to isolate
it from the surrounding earth and then, slipping the trowel underneath
and using it as a lever, to extract the block all in a lump. There!
That’s done it! We possess the couple and their nest. A morning of
arduous digging has procured us those treasures: Paul’s steaming back
could tell us at the price of what efforts.
This depth of five feet is not and could not be constant; numbers of
causes induce it to vary, such as the degree of freshness and
consistency of the soil traversed, the insect’s passion for work and
the time available, according to the more or less remote date of the
laying. I have seen burrows go a little lower; I have seen others reach
barely three feet. In any case, Minotaurus, to settle his family,
requires a lodging of exaggerated depth, such as is dug by no other
burrowing insect of my acquaintance. Presently we shall have to ask
ourselves what are the imperious needs that oblige the collector of
sheep-droppings to reside so low down in the earth.
Before leaving the spot, let us note a fact the evidence of which will
be of value later. The female was right at the bottom of the burrow;
above her, at some distance, was the male: both were struck motionless
with fright in the midst of an occupation the nature whereof we are not
yet able to specify. This detail, observed repeatedly in the different
burrows excavated, seems to show that each of the two fellow-workers
has a fixed place.
The mother, more skilled in nursery matters, occupies the lower floor.
She alone digs, versed as she is in the properties of the
perpendicular, which economizes work while giving the greatest depth.
She is the engineer, always in touch with the working-face of the
gallery. The other is her journeyman-mason. He is stationed at the
back, ready to load the rubbish on his horny hod. Later, the excavatrix
becomes a baker: she kneads the cakes for the children into cylinders;
the father is then her baker’s boy. He fetches her from outside the
wherewithal for making flour. As in every well-regulated household, the
mother is minister of the interior, the father minister of the
exterior. This would explain their invariable position in the tubular
home. The future will tell us if these conjectures represent the
reality as it is.
For the moment, let us make ourselves at home and examine at leisure
the central clod so laboriously acquired. It contains preserved
foodstuffs in the shape of a sausage nearly as long and thick as one’s
finger. This is composed of a dark, compact matter, arranged in layers,
which we recognize as the sheep-pellets reduced to morsels. Sometimes,
the dough is fine and almost homogeneous from one end of the cylinder
to the other; more often, the piece is a sort of hardbake, in which
large fragments are held together by a cement of amalgam. The baker
apparently varies the more or less finished confection of her pastry
according to the time at her disposal.
The thing is closely moulded in the terminal pocket of the burrow,
where the walls are smoother and more carefully fashioned than in the
rest of the pit. The point of the knife easily strips it of the
surrounding earth, which peels like a rind or bark. In this way, I
obtain the food-cylinder free of any earthy blemish.
Having done this, let us look into the matter of the egg; for the
pastry has certainly been manipulated in view of a grub. Guided by what
I learnt some time ago from the Geotrupes, who lodge the egg at the
lower end of their pudding, in a special recess contrived in the very
heart of the provisions, I expect to find Minotaurus’ egg right at the
bottom of the sausage. I am ill-informed. The egg sought for is not at
the expected end, nor at the other end, nor at any point whatever of
the victuals.
A search outside the provisions shows it me at last. It is below the
food, in the sand itself, deprived of all the finikin cares dear to
mothers. There is here not a smooth-walled cell, such as the delicate
epidermis of the new-born grub would seem to call for, but a rough
cavity, the result of a mere landslip rather than of maternal industry.
The worm is to be hatched in this rude berth, at some distance from its
provisions. To reach the food, it will have to demolish and pass
through a ceiling of sand some millimetres thick.
With insects held captive in an apparatus of my invention, I have
succeeded in tracing the construction of that sausage. The father goes
out and selects a pellet whose length is greater than the diameter of
the pit. He conveys it to the mouth, either backwards, by dragging it
with his forefeet, or straight ahead, by rolling it along with little
strokes of his shield. He reaches the edge of the hole. Will he hurl
the lump down the precipice with one last push? Not at all: he has
plans that are incompatible with a violent fall.
He enters, embracing the pellet with his legs and taking care to
introduce it by one end. On reaching a certain distance from the
bottom, he has only to slant the piece slightly to make it find a
support at its two ends against the walls of the channel: this because
of the greater length of its main axis. He thus obtains a sort of
temporary flooring suited to receive the burden of two or three
pellets. The whole forms the workshop in which the father means to do
his task without disturbing the mother, who is fully engaged below. It
is the mill whence will be lowered the semolina for making the cakes.
The miller is well-equipped for his work. Look at his trident. On the
solid basis of the corselet stand three sharp spears, the two outer
ones long, the middle one short, all three pointing forwards. What
purpose does this weapon serve? At first sight, one would take it for a
masculine decoration, one of so many others, of very varied forms, worn
by the corporation of Dung-beetles. Well, it is something more than an
ornament: Minotaurus turns his gaud into a tool.
The three unequal points describe a concave arch, wide enough to admit
a spherical sheep-dropping. Standing on his imperfect and shaky floor,
which demands the employment of his four hind-legs, propped against the
walls of the perpendicular channel, how will Minotaurus manage to keep
the elusive olive in position and break it up? Let us watch him at
work.
Stooping a little, he digs his fork into the piece, thenceforth
rendered stationary, for it is caught between the prongs of the
implement. The fore-legs are free; with their toothed armlets they can
saw the morsel, lacerate it and reduce it to particles which gradually
fall through the crevices of the flooring and reach the mother below.
The substance which the miller sends scooting down is not a flour
passed through the bolting-machine, but a coarse grain, a mixture of
pulverized remnants and of pieces hardly ground at all. Incomplete
though it be, this preliminary trituration is of the greatest
assistance to the mother in her tedious job of bread-making: it
shortens the work and allows the best and the middling to be separated
straight away. When everything, including the floor itself, is ground
to powder, the horned miller returns to the upper air, gathers a fresh
harvest and recommences his shredding labours at leisure.
Nor is the baker inactive in her laboratory. She collects the remnants
pouring down around her, subdivides them yet further, refines them and
makes her selection: this, the tenderer part, for the central crumb;
that, tougher, for the crust of the loaf. Turning this way and that,
she pats the material with the battledore of her flattened arms; she
arranges it in layers, which presently she compresses by stamping on
them where they lie, much after the manner of a vine-grower treading
his vintage. Rendered firm and compact, the mass will keep better and
longer.
After some ten days of this united labour, the couple at last obtain
the long, cylindrical loaf. The father has done the grinding, the
mother the kneading.
I have even succeeded in watching the digging of this very deep burrow,
thanks to a complicated series of artifices which it would take too
long to set forth here. The mother is at the bottom of the pit: she
alone attacks the working-face, she alone digs. The male keeps at the
back of his spouse. He gradually collects the rubbish and makes a load
of it which he lifts with his three-pronged fork and hoists outside
with much exhausting labour.
This is the moment to recapitulate Minotaurus’ merits. When the great
colds are over, he sets out in quest of a mate, buries himself with her
and thenceforth remains faithful to her, despite his frequent
excursions out of doors and the meetings to which these are likely to
lead. With indefatigable zeal, he assists the burrower, herself
destined never to leave her home until the emancipation of the family.
For a month and more, he loads the rubbish of the excavation on his
forked hod; he hoists it outside and remains ever patient, never
disheartened by his arduous feats of climbing. He leaves the
comparatively easy work of the excavating rake to the mother and keeps
the more troublesome task, the exhausting carriage through a narrow,
very high and perpendicular gallery, for himself.
Next, the navvy turns himself into a collector of foodstuffs; he goes
after provisions, he gathers the wherewithal for his sons to live upon.
To facilitate the work of his mate, who shreds, stratifies and
compresses the preserves, he once more changes his trade and becomes a
miller. At some distance from the bottom, he bruises and crumbles the
matter found hardened by the sun; he makes it into semolina and flour
that gradually pour down into the maternal bakery. Lastly, worn out by
his efforts, he leaves the house and goes to die outside, at a
distance, in the open air. He has gallantly performed his duty as a
paterfamilias; he has spent himself without stint to secure the
prosperity of his kith and kin.
The mother, on her side, allows nothing to divert her from her
housekeeping. Throughout her working life, she never leaves her home:
domi mansit, as the ancients used to say, speaking of their model
matrons; domi mansit, kneading her cylindrical loaves, filling them
with an egg, watching them until the exodus arrives. When the day comes
for the autumnal merry-makings, she at last returns to the surface,
accompanied by the young people, who disperse at will to feast in the
regions frequented by the sheep. Thereupon, having nothing left to do,
the devoted mother perishes.
Yes, amid the general indifference of fathers for their sons,
Minotaurus displays a very remarkable zeal where his family are
concerned. Forgetful of himself, refusing to be led away by the
delights of spring, when it would be so pleasant to see a little
country, to banquet with his fellows, to tease and flirt with his fair
neighbours, he sticks to his work underground and wears himself out so
as to leave a fortune to his descendants. Here is one who, when he
stiffens his legs for the last time, is well entitled to say:
“I have done my duty; I have worked.”
THE TWO-BANDED SCOLIA