Book of Monsters Part 9

But let us look at the company he keeps. He is in the same cla.s.s 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 princ.i.p.al causes of this gigantic loss.

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THE SPOTTED VINE CHAFER IN FLIGHT

(_Pelidnota punctata_, Linn.)

How often one sees lame b.u.t.terflies 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 sh.e.l.ls, has been of tremendous advantage to the cla.s.s 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.

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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 larvae 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.

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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 s.p.a.ce, are questions too hard for us to answer.

This wonderfully protected creature with long horn-like antennae 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 b.u.t.ter 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 antennae? 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 larvae 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.

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ONE OF THE LONGICORN BEETLES

(_Orthosoma brunneum_, Forst.)

At first glance this longhorn might pa.s.s for a Prionus, but its antennae 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 cla.s.sifying 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.

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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 a.n.a.logy 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-b.a.l.l.s 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.

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THE TWELVE-SPOTTED CUc.u.mBER BEETLE

(_Diabrotica duodecim punctata_, Oliv.)

There are few of our insect enemies which do their destructive work more rapidly than do the cuc.u.mber beetles. Every child in the South who has left his cuc.u.mber hills unscreened knows this, for he has found them some morning literally eaten up over night by the spotted or striped yellow-green cuc.u.mber beetles.

The puzzle is, where do they come from so suddenly? It is as though they were waiting for cuc.u.mbers 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.