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Updated: May 1, 2025
It is the pupa, and not the larva, of the Chironomus which has this power; and Grimm further shows that this case, to a certain extent, "unites that of the Cecidomyia with the parthenogenesis of the Coccidae;" the term parthenogenesis implying that the mature females of the Coccidae are capable of producing fertile eggs without the concourse of the male.
Certain animals belonging to several classes are now known to have the power of ordinary reproduction at an unusually early age; and we have only to accelerate parthenogenetic reproduction by gradual steps to an earlier and earlier age Chironomus showing us an almost exactly intermediate stage, viz., that of the pupa and we can perhaps account for the marvellous case of the Cecidomyia.
The highest degree of acceleration is seen in the reproductive organs of the Cecidomyian larva of Miastor, which produces a summer brood of young, alive, and living free in the body of the child-parent; and in the pupa of Chironomus, which has been recently shown by Von Grimm, a fellow countryman of Ganin, to produce young in the spring, while the adult fly lays eggs in the autumn in the usual manner.
The typical species of the genus Culex, to which the mosquito belongs, is Culex pipiens, described by Linnæus, and there are already over thirty North American species of this genus described in various works. I have called it provisionally Chironomus oceanicus, or Ocean gnat. The larvæ of other species have been found by Mr. S. I. Smith living at great depths in our Northern lakes.
But already Grimm has shown that another fly, a Chironomus, reproduces itself in nearly the same manner, and he believes that this occurs frequently in the order.
The barren Platygaster larva, the fertile Cecidomyia larva, the fertile Aphis larva, the fertile Chironomus pupa, the fertile hydroid polype, and the fertile adult queen bee are simply animals in different degrees of organization, and with reproductive systems differing not in quality, but in the greater or less rapidity of their development as compared with the rest of the body.
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