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Updated: May 24, 2025
Very probably the specimen selected is a young one, for the adult insect would be too big. Besides, to this consideration of quantity is added that of quality. Young and tender flesh is highly appreciated, as witness the Tarsal Tachytes, the Black Tachytes and the Mantis-killing Tachytes, who all three select game that is not yet made tough by age.
I confine myself to calling her the Mantis-killing Tachytes and leave to the specialists the task of adorning her with a Latin name, if it be really the fact that the Wasp is not yet catalogued. I will be brief in my delineation. To my thinking the best description is this: mantis-hunter. With this information it is impossible to mistake the insect, in my district of course.
I shall return to it, not to solve it, but to show even more plainly how obscure and profound it is. But we will first complete the story of the Mantis-killing Tachytes. The colony which forms the subject of my investigations is established in a mound of fine sand which I myself cut into, a couple of years ago, in order to unearth a few Bembex larvae.
When the time comes we will discover the reason for these differences in the rations served. The Mantis-killing Tachytes wears a red scarf, like her kinswoman, Panzer's Tachytes. This species may well be new to our fauna.
Like the Mantis-killing Tachytes, she hunts the various Mantides of the countryside, consisting mainly of the Praying Mantis; only her large size requires them to be more fully developed, without however having attained the form and the dimensions of the adult. She places three to five of them in each cell.
On the 16th of July, 1883, I was digging, with my son Émile, in the sandy heap where, a few days earlier, I had been observing the labours and the surgery of the Mantis-killing Tachytes. My purpose was to collect a few cocoons of this Digger-wasp. The cocoons were turning up in abundance under my pocket-trowel, when Émile presented me with an unknown object.
Guided by her instinct, which rivals the science of a Latreille, she groups them all together. This instinctive taxonomy becomes more surprising still if we consider the variety of the game stored in a single burrow. The Mantis-killing Tachytes, for instance, preys indiscriminately upon all the Mantides that occur in her neighbourhood.
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