United States or Guam ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
There is no need to linger over them. I will only mention the promptness with which the Buprestis, lying motionless in the shade, recovers his activity when I carry him away from my table into the broad sunlight of the window.
The Buprestis emerging from the depths of the trunk in which he has spent his larval life; the Geotrupes and the Phanæus leaving their natal burrows possess their final adornments, which will not become richer in the rays of the sun, at the time when they make their appearance in the open air.
A mere nothing makes you fall into it; a mere nothing withdraws you from it, above all a bath of light, that sovran stimulus of activity. In respect of prolonged immobility as the result of emotion, I find a rival of the Giant Scarites in a large black Buprestis, with a flour-speckled corselet, a lover of the blackthorn, the hawthorn and the apricot-tree.
The bottom of the well, better wrought than the rest and ceiled with the aid of an adhesive fluid which holds the fine sawdust of the stopper in place, is a thing of the present; it is the nymphosis-chamber. A second Buprestis, Chrysobothrys chrysostigma, likewise an exploiter of the cherry-tree, between the wood and the bark, although more vigorous, expends less labour on its preparations.
Let me recapitulate: in my various subjects the attitude of death is of very variable duration, governed as it is by a host of unsuspected circumstances. Let us take advantage of favourable opportunities, which are fairly frequent. I subject the Cloudy Buprestis to the different tests undergone by the Giant Scarites. The results are the same. When you have seen the first, you have seen the second.
The Buprestis has his legs symmetrically folded against his chest and belly; the Geotrupes has his outspread, stretched in disorder, rigid and as though attacked by catalepsy. You could not tell if they were dead or alive. They are not dead. In a minute or two, the Geotrupes' tarsi twitch, the palpi quiver, the antennæ wave gently to and fro.
A small Buprestis who ravages the cherry-trees, Anthaxia nitidula, passes his larval existence between the wood and the bark. When the time comes for changing its shape, the pigmy concerns itself, like the others, with future and present needs.
In what respect has the Geotrupes, to defend itself, less need of the stratagem of simulated death than the Black Buprestis, well protected by his massive build and his armour, which is so hard that it resists the point of a pin and even of a needle?
My best capture, however, was the superb insect of the Buprestis family, already mentioned as having been obtained from the natives, who told me they found it in rotten trees in the mountains. In the forest itself the only common and conspicuous coleoptera were two tiger beetles.
I try the effect of a slight decrease in temperature upon the Giant Scarites by subjecting him to a similar sojourn in the cold water of the well. The result does not respond to the hopes which the Buprestis gave me. I do not succeed in obtaining more than fifty minutes' inertia. I have often obtained as long periods of immobility without resorting to the refrigerating artifice.
Word Of The Day