United States or Cuba ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
At nightfall, I often surprised the Bolboceras issuing from his well, exploring the stretch of sand, choosing a piece not too big for his strength and gently rolling it towards his abode. He would go in again, leaving the rhizopogon, which was too large to take inside, on the threshold, where it served the purpose of a door. Next day, I found the piece gnawed, but only on the under side.
At the bottom of each burrow is a Bolboceras engaged in eating its truffle. Let us repeat the experiment with the partly eaten fungi. The result is the same. In one short night the food is divined under its covering of sand and attained by means of a burrow which descends as straight as a plumb-line to the point where the fungus lies.
The short-legged Beetles, trotting along with tiny steps, ought, one would think, to make up in cunning, more fully than the others, for their incapacity for rapid flight. The facts do not correspond with this apparently well-founded forecast. I have consulted the genera Chrysomela, Blatta, Silpha, Cleonus, Bolboceras, Cetonia, Hoplia, Coccinella, and so on.
Now, the beetle has passed this way; with its subtle sense of smell it has recognised the ground as favourable; for its burrows are numerous. Let us dig, then, in the neighbourhood of these holes. The sign is reliable; in a few hours, thanks to the signs of the Bolboceras, I obtain a handful of specimens of the Hydnocystis. It is the first time I have ever found this fungus in the ground.
Up to the present, hydnocistes, truffles and rhizopoga are the only food that I have known him to eat. These three instances tell us at any rate that the Bolboceras is not a specialist like the Oxyporus and the Triplax; he is able to vary his diet; perhaps he feeds on all the underground mushrooms indiscriminately. The moth enlarges her domain yet further.
The Bolboceras does not like eating in public, in the open air; he needs the discreet retirement of his crypt. When he fails to find his food by burrowing under ground, he comes up to look for it on the surface. Meeting with a morsel to his taste, he takes it home when its size permits; if not, he leaves it on the threshold of his burrow and gnaws at it from below, without reappearing outside.
This is a pretty little black beetle, with a pale, velvety abdomen; a spherical insect, as large as a biggish cherry-stone. Its official title is Bolboceras gallicus, Muls. By rubbing the end of the abdomen against the edge of the wing-cases it produces a gentle chirping sound like the cheeping of nestlings when the mother-bird returns to the nest with food.
The orifice is closed whenever the insect is at home, enlarging its tunnel or peacefully enjoying the contents of its larder. The lodging of the Bolboceras is open and surrounded simply by a mound of sand. Its depth is not great; a foot or hardly more. It descends vertically in an easily shifted soil.
When the food is broken up and exhausted of its meagre juices it returns to the surface and renews its store. Thus the winter passes, famine being unknown unless the weather is exceptionally hard. The second insect which I have observed for so long among the pines is the Bolboceras. Its burrows, scattered here and there, higgledy-piggledy with those of the Minotaur, are easy to recognise.
The Necrophori, in quest of a place where to establish their family, travel great distances to find the corpses of small animals, informed by such odours as offend our own senses at a considerable distance. The Hydnocystis, the food of the Bolboceras, emits no such brutal emanations as these, which readily diffuse themselves through space; it is inodorous, at least to our senses.
Word Of The Day