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Updated: May 20, 2025
Whereas the Buprestis remains motionless for nearly an hour, the Geotrupes is struggling violently after a minute or two. And even then I rarely attain this limit.
The common dung-beetles at Caripi, which flew about in the evening like the Geotrupes, the familiar "shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hum" of our English lanes, were of colossal size and beautiful colours. A blow from this fellow, as he came heavily flying along, was never very pleasant. All the tribes of beetles which feed on vegetable substances, fresh or decayed, were very numerous.
For days and days they work on the body, examining it from head to foot, without noticing the movable support, the cause of their mishap. In vain I prolong my watch; I never see a single one of them push the support with his foot or butt it with his head. Their defeat is not due to lack of strength. Like the Geotrupes, they are vigorous excavators.
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?
The posterior limbs of the Geotrupes stercorarius, "perfectly developed in the adult, are atrophied in the larvae, reduced to mere specks."
As we know, our sausage-makers, Onites and Geotrupes alike, place the egg at the lower end of their cylinder, in a cell contrived in the very midst of the mass of foodstuffs. Their rival in the pampas adopts a diametrically opposite method: she places the egg above the victuals, at the upper end of the sausage.
Fabre has proved this: let the temperature suddenly fall twenty degrees: the eggs of Geotrupes and the larvae of the cockchafer or the rose-beetle endure such vicissitudes of temperature with impunity; contracted and stiffened into little masses of ice, but not destroyed, they revive in spring no less than the eel fry, the rotifers, or the tardigrades.
Other experiments on these lines tell me nothing more. I see the inert condition persisting sometimes for a longer, sometimes for a shorter period, according as the insect seeks the sunlight or avoids it. Let us change our method. I evaporate a few drops of sulphuric ether in a glass jar and put in a Stercoraceous Geotrupes and a specimen of Buprestis tenebrionis, at the same time.
Black above, the Mimic Geotrupes is the colour of copper pyrites below; also black in all parts exposed to the light of day, the Stercoraceous Geotrupes displays a ventral surface of a glorious amethyst violet. Many other series, of greatly varied habits, Carabi, Cetoniæ, Buprestes, Chrysomelæ, rival and even surpass the magnificent Dung-beetles in the matter of jewellery.
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