United States or Heard Island and McDonald Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
If I do not employ a bell-glass or keep an assiduous watch, rarely does the shrewish Dipteron fail to alight upon my patient and explore him with her proboscis. We will let her have her way this time. Hardly has the Fly grazed this apparent corpse with her legs, when the Scarites' tarsi quiver as though twitched by a slight electric shock.
A Melasoma-beetle, Omocrates abbreviatus, OLIV., whom I frequently discover under the broken stones on the neighbouring hills, continues motionless for over an hour. He rivals the Scarites. We must not forget to add that very often the awakening takes place within a few minutes. Can he owe his long period of inertia to the fact that he is one of the Tenebrionidæ, or Darkling Beetles?
This is not so that he may, like the Ant-lion, wait at the bottom of his funnel for the passing of a victim which stumbles on the shifting slope and rolls into the pit. The Scarites disdains these petty poachers' methods, these fowlers' snares; he prefers a run across country.
The Beetle under experiment is lying on the table. He feels beneath him a hard body which gives him no chance of digging. As he cannot hope to take refuge underground, an easy task for his nimble and vigorous tools, the Scarites lies low in his death-like pose, keeping it up, if need be, for an hour.
When the house is deemed to be long enough, the Scarites returns to the entrance, which he works more carefully than the rest. He makes a funnel of it, a pit with shifting, sloping sides. It is the Ant-lion's crater on a larger scale and constructed in a more rustic fashion. This mouth is continued by an inclined plane, kept free of all rubbish.
The Scarites now works at her for some time with his pincers, in order to reduce her to complete immobility, fearing lest she should escape; then he returns to the mouth of the charnel-house. It is not everything to possess plenty of game; the question next arises how to consume it in peace.
Let me recapitulate: in my various subjects the attitude of death is of very variable duration, governed as it is by a host of unsuspected circumstances. Let us take advantage of favourable opportunities, which are fairly frequent. I subject the Cloudy Buprestis to the different tests undergone by the Giant Scarites. The results are the same. When you have seen the first, you have seen the second.
The Giant Scarites does not stir for an hour, while the Smooth-skinned Scarites, a pigmy, wearies my persistence in turning him over; the large Cloudy Buprestis submits to my manoeuvres for a long period, whereas the Glittering Buprestis, a pigmy again, obstinately refuses to do so.
A mere nothing makes you fall into it; a mere nothing withdraws you from it, above all a bath of light, that sovran stimulus of activity. In respect of prolonged immobility as the result of emotion, I find a rival of the Giant Scarites in a large black Buprestis, with a flour-speckled corselet, a lover of the blackthorn, the hawthorn and the apricot-tree.
Without being constant, similar facts recur repeatedly in my experiments, the duration, of course, varying. They tell us that as a general rule the Scarites lengthens the period of his lifeless posture the oftener the experiment is repeated. Is this a matter of practice, or is it an increase of cunning employed in the hope of finally tiring a too persistent enemy?
Word Of The Day