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Updated: June 24, 2025
A census would seem important. To take it at once is impracticable: the germs form a compact mass, which would be difficult to count. The best thing is to rear the family in a jar and to reckon by the pupae buried in the sand. I find a hundred and fifty-seven.
In the very unlikely supposition that the distribution of the sexes might vary in different parts of the colony, I make a second excavation, at a few yards' distance from the other. It supplies me with another collection both of perfect insects and of pupae and larvae. When the metamorphosis of the laggards is completed, which does not take many days, I proceed to take a general census.
Save for the skin, which has hardened into a brown shell, the substance of the maggot has disappeared, changed into a restless swarm. There are thirty-five occupants. I replace them in their casket. The rest of my harvest, wherein, no doubt, are other pupae similarly stocked, is arranged in tubes that will easily show me what happens.
It seems probable that the swimming feet of the Copepoda, as also of the pupae of Cirripedia and Rhizocephala, represent the abdominal feet of the Malacostraca, that is to say, are derived by inheritance from the same source with them.
Above the pupae is a perpendicular column of fine, dry sand, the height of which varies in different tubes. April comes and the hatching begins. A tube with six centimeters of sand, the shallowest of the columns under experiment, yields the best result. Of the fifteen subjects interred in the pupa stage, fourteen easily reach the surface when they become flies.
At the same time I laid on the same place a small parcel of the pupae of another species, F. flava, with a few of these little yellow ants still clinging to the fragments of the nest. This species is sometimes, though rarely, made into slaves, as has been described by Mr. Smith. Although so small a species, it is very courageous, and I have seen it ferociously attack other ants.
The frightened insects swarm out at every orifice, but the huge beast is in upon them. With his sharp hoofs he tears apart the crusty walls of the earth-nests, and licks out their living contents fat pupae, eggs, and all rolling down the sweet morsels, half sucking, half chewing, with a delighted gusto that repays him for all his mighty toil.
With twenty-four pupae of Imperialis I obtained nineteen moths from the 21st of June to the 19th of July; five pupae died. Two pairings took place; the first from the evening of the 13th to the morning of the 14th; the second from the evening of the 15th to the morning of the 16th of July.
The latter ruthlessly killed their small opponents, and carried their dead bodies as food to their nest, twenty-nine yards distant; but they were prevented from getting any pupae to rear as slaves.
Knowing these difficulties, the mothers, however greatly tempted by the smell, abstain from breeding. As a matter of fact, after long waiting, fearing lest some packets of eggs may have escaped my attention, I inspect the contents of the jar from top to bottom. Meat and sand contain neither larvae nor pupae: the whole is absolutely deserted.
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