Book of Monsters Part 6

THE c.o.c.kROACH

(_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 c.o.c.kroach, 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 antennae, 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 c.o.c.kroach can live five years, and that it takes a year to develop to maturity from the egg. The female lays her eggs in a h.o.r.n.y 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 c.o.c.kroach babies out of their sh.e.l.ls.

Like the cricket, c.o.c.kroaches 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 c.o.c.kroach carries cancer.

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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 carca.s.s before it is finished and pursuing another victim.

So voracious is its appet.i.te 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 att.i.tude 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 gra.s.shopper 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 ma.s.sive jaws and armor-plated bodies, or flies with their gauzy wings, or gra.s.shoppers with their long jumping legs and then cla.s.s 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 cla.s.sed 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 Jose 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.

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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 sh.e.l.l, 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.

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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.

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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 pa.s.sed its ancient forefather by, and through the weird workings of that little-understood law of heredity this th.o.r.n.y, 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, h.o.a.ry 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 k.n.o.bs 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.

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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 a.s.sa.s.sin 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.