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Updated: June 24, 2025
But as ants which are not slave-makers, will, as I have seen, carry off pupae of other species, if scattered near their nests, it is possible that such pupae originally stored as food might become developed; and the foreign ants thus unintentionally reared would then follow their proper instincts, and do what work they could.
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.
The column consisted of two trains of ants, moving in opposite directions; one train empty-handed, the other laden with the mangled remains of insects, chiefly larvae and pupae of other ants.
Yet I always had been in doubt as to precisely how the exit of a pupa case moth took place, until I actually saw the earth move and the sharp abdominal point appear while working in my garden. Living pupae can be had in the fall, by turning a few shovels of soil close vegetables in any country garden.
The older are almost as thick as one's finger; the others hardly attain the diameter of a pencil. I find, in addition, pupae more or less fully coloured, perfect insects, with a distended abdomen, ready to leave the trunk when the hot weather comes again. Life inside the wood, therefore, lasts three years. How is this long period of solitude and captivity spent?
A few weeks later, the buried one awakes, transfigured but weak, having naught wherewith to unearth herself but the throbbing hernia of her open forehead. What the maggot denies itself it is open to me to realize, should I care to know the depth whence the fly is able to mount. I place fifteen bluebottle pupae, obtained in winter, at the bottom of a wide tube closed at one end.
There were, I believe, perfect Insects before larvae and pupae; but, on the contrary, Nauplii and Zoeae far earlier than perfect Prawns. In contradistinction to the INHERITED metamorphosis of the Prawns, we may call that of the Coleoptera, Lepidoptera, etc. an ACQUIRED metamorphosis.* In favour of this view we have:
I then dug up a small parcel of the pupae of F. fusca from another nest, and put them down on a bare spot near the place of combat; they were eagerly seized, and carried off by the tyrants, who perhaps fancied that, after all, they had been victorious in their late combat.
A few words would have saved the complete history of a beautiful moth, to secure which no second opportunity was presented for five years. Several works I consulted united in the simple statement that certain caterpillars pupate in the ground. In Packard's "Guide", you will find this "Lepidopterous pupae should be...kept moist in mould until the image appears."
These pupae had burst the skins at the thorax, and escaped by working the abdomen until they lay an inch or so from the skins. What a "cast off garment" those skins were! Only the frailest outside covering, complete in all parts, and rapidly turning to a dirty brown. The pupae were laid away in a large box having a glass lid.
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