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Updated: June 13, 2025
Will the insect pick itself up? No, my precautions are superfluous. Alone, left to itself, perfectly quiet, it remains motionless for as long a time as when I was standing close beside it. Perhaps the clear-sighted Scarites has seen me in my corner, at the other end of the room; perhaps a subtle scent has revealed my presence to him. We will do more, then.
That the long-horned insect is a peaceful creature I am well aware; but the Scarites does not know it; on the sands of the shore he has never encountered such a colossus as this, who is capable of impressing less timid creatures than he. Fear of the unknown will merely aggravate the situation. Guided by the tip of my straw, the Capricorn sets his foot upon the prostrate insect.
Cautiously, step by step, he climbs his inclined plane. He takes a glance outside the funnel. The Cicada is seen. The Scarites darts out of his pit, runs forward, seizes the Cicada and drags her backwards. The struggle is brief, thanks to the trap of the entrance, which yawns like a funnel to receive even a bulky quarry and contracts into a crumbling precipice that paralyses all resistance.
Let us leave the glutton with his quarry. The brief morning which I spent with him in his native place did not enable me to watch him at his hunting, on the sands of the beach; but the facts gathered in captivity are enough to tell us all about it. They show us in the Scarites a bold hero who is not to be intimidated by the biggest or strongest adversary.
My best subjects have been the Giant Scarites and the Cloudy Buprestis; but how many others have resisted quite indomitably, or remained motionless for only a few seconds! The insect's return to the active state presents certain peculiarities which are well worthy of attention. The key to the problem lies here.
No other insect has yet displayed such persistent immobility, though I confess that my investigations in this respect have been only superficial. The detail is so thoroughly engraved on my memory that, forty years later, when I want to experiment on the insects which are experts in the art of simulating death, I at once think of the Scarites.
It might have been foreseen. The Buprestis, a lover of the burning sunshine, is affected by the cold bath in a different degree from the Scarites, who prowls about by night and spends his day in the basement. A fall of a few degrees in temperature takes the chilly insect by surprise and has no effect upon the one accustomed to the coolness underground.
If the visitor be merely passing, matters go no farther; but, if she persist, particularly near the Beetle's mouth, moist with saliva and disgorged secretions of food, the tormented Scarites promptly kicks, turns over and makes off. Perhaps he did not think it opportune to prolong his fraud in the face of so contemptible an enemy.
It would be premature to draw conclusions: the cross-examination of the insect has not yet been thorough enough. Let us wait. Besides, we need not imagine that it is possible to go on like this until our patience is exhausted. Sooner or later, flurried by my pestering, the Scarites refuses to sham dead.
I try the effect of a slight decrease in temperature upon the Giant Scarites by subjecting him to a similar sojourn in the cold water of the well. The result does not respond to the hopes which the Buprestis gave me. I do not succeed in obtaining more than fifty minutes' inertia. I have often obtained as long periods of immobility without resorting to the refrigerating artifice.
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