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Updated: June 13, 2025
There are here not any of the signs of life to which I have been accustomed in my old studies of insect paralysis: the antennary threads waving slowly to and fro, the palpi quivering, the mandibles opening and closing for days, weeks and months on end. At most, the tarsi tremble for a minute or two; that constitutes the whole death-struggle. Complete immobility ensues.
Next day, the condition is much the same, with an aggravation of the paralysis, which has now attacked the middle-legs. On the day after that, the legs do not move, but the antennae, the palpi and the ovipositor continue to flutter actively. This is the condition of the Ephippiger stabbed three times in the thorax by the Languedocian Sphex.
On the other hand, the palpi, their very near neighbours, their adjuncts as it were, possess their customary mobility. Without any previous touches, they keep on moving for weeks.
When all movement subsides, the Pompilus makes ready to drag her prey elsewhere. It is then I take charge of it. What strikes me more than anything else is the absolute inertia of the fangs, which I tickle with a straw without succeeding in rousing them from their torpor. The palpi, on the other hand, their immediate neighbours, wave at the least touch.
The other two keep perfectly fresh and move their antennae and palpi at the touch of a straw. The cold weather comes and tickling no longer elicits these signs of life. The inertia is complete; nevertheless their appearance remains excellent, without a trace of the brownish tinge, the sign of deterioration. At the return of the warm weather, in the middle of May, there is a sort of resurrection.
Embryo of a Squilla, magnified 45 diam. a. heart. The corresponding body-segments are already well developed, an unpaired eye is still present, the anterior antennae are already biramose, whilst the flagellum is wanting in the posterior, and the mandibles are destitute of palpi; the four anterior abdominal segments bear biramose natatory feet, without branchiae; the fifth abdominal segment has no appendages, and this is also the case with the tail, which still appears as a simple lamina, fringed on the hinder margin with numerous short teeth.
The latter is exercised by the palpi and the tips of the legs, especially the first pair, but no ear has yet been discovered; neither is anything known of the organs of taste and smell, or even whether the insect possesses these senses at all.
Basing our argument on this latter hypothesis, we see that the Calicurgus has only one means of suppressing the movement of the poisoned pincers without affecting the mobility of the palpi, above all without injuring the cephalic centres and thus producing death, namely, to reach with her sting the two fibres actuating the fangs, fibres as fine as a hair. I insist upon this point.
Despite their extreme delicacy, these two filaments must be injured directly; for, if it were enough for the sting to inject its poison "there or thereabouts," the nerves of the palpi, so close to the first, would undergo the same intoxication as the adjacent region and would leave those appendages motionless.
The second conjecture appears to me the more probable, because of the palpi, whose nerves, it seems to me, must have the same origin as those of the fangs.
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