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Updated: May 7, 2025
Thus do the Ammophilae go to work when dealing with their caterpillars and the Sphex-wasps when dealing with their Locusts, Ephippigers and Crickets. With the Scoliae we come once again to a soft prey, with a skin penetrable by the sting no matter where it be attacked. Will the tactics of the caterpillar-hunters, who stab and stab again, be repeated here?
By your experiments, from age to age, to have discovered variety in diet; to have practised it, to the great advantage of your race, and to end up with uniformity, the cause of decadence; to have known the excellent and to repudiate it for the middling: oh, my Sphex-wasps, it would be stupid if the theory of evolution were correct!
The close similarity in form, in colouring and, above all, in habits seem to refer the Tachytes to the same origin. This is ample; let us be satisfied with it. And now please tell me, what did this prototype of the Sphegidae hunt? Was its diet varied or uniform? If we cannot decide, let us examine the two cases. The diet was varied. I heartily congratulate the first born of the Sphex-wasps.
It would be hard for us to discover in what manner Cricket-flesh and Ephippiger-flesh differ as juicy, nourishing foodstuffs; but it does not follow that the two Sphex-wasps addicted to this diet have not very decided opinions on the matter, or that each of them is not filled with the highest esteem for its traditional dish and a profound dislike for the other. There is no discussing tastes.
I at first doubted the universal presence of this spermatic receptacle, having failed to find it under my scalpel in my former investigations into the anatomy of the Sphex-wasps and some other game-hunters.
It is the course adopted, for instance, by the Sphex-wasps and the Anthophora-bees, who, when the whole of the food is consumed, expel at one shot the residues amassed in the intestines since the commencement of the repast.
Abundance is assured; painful and often fruitless searches are avoided; the larder is crammed without being subject to the accidents of time, place and climate. When Ephippigers run short, you fall back upon Crickets; when there are no Crickets, you capture Grasshoppers. But no, my beautiful Sphex-wasps, you were not such fools as that.
Though engaged in individual tasks, the first seeks the society of her kind, as do certain of the Sphex-wasps, while the second establishes herself in solitude, after the fashion of the Ammophila. Neither the personal form nor the nature of the occupation determines sociability.
They tell me that in Texas a Pepsis, a huntress of big game akin to the Calicurgi, gives chase to a formidable Tarantula and vies in daring with our Ringed Calicurgus, who stabs the Black-bellied Lycosa. They tell me that the Sphex-wasps of the Sahara, a rival of our own White-banded Sphex, operate on Locusts. But we must limit these quotations, which could easily be multiplied.
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