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Updated: May 21, 2025
Mantis-paralysing is a most perilous trade and admits of no half-successes; you have to excel in it from the first, under pain of death. No, the surgical art of the Tachytes is not an acquired art. Whence then does it come, if not from the universal knowledge in which all things move and have their being!
Guided by her instinct, which rivals the science of a Latreille, she groups them all together. This instinctive taxonomy becomes more surprising still if we consider the variety of the game stored in a single burrow. The Mantis-killing Tachytes, for instance, preys indiscriminately upon all the Mantides that occur in her neighbourhood.
A natural group, a genus, a family, more rarely almost a whole order: this is the hunting-ground beyond which poaching is strictly forbidden. The law is absolute; and one and all scrupulously refrain from transgressing it. In the place of the Praying Mantis, offer the Mantis-hunting Tachytes an equivalent in the shape of a Locust.
The outward structure of the Praying Mantis would of itself be enough to teach us the arrangement of the nerve-centres which the Tachytes has to injure in order to paralyse its victim, which is destined to be devoured alive but harmless. A narrow and very long prothorax divides the front pair of legs from the two hinder pairs.
While waiting for the truth to be revealed and my suspicions set aside, I will complete the little that I know of her by noting that the Black Tachytes passes the winter in the adult form and away from her cell. She hibernates, like the Hairy Ammophila.
She will scorn the morsel, though it would seem to be of excellent flavour, seeing that Panzer's Tachytes prefers it to any other form of game. Offer her a young Empusa, who differs so widely from the Mantis in shape and colour: she will accept without hesitation and operate before your eyes.
I am rather interested to see the Bembex and the Tachytes, two workers in the same guild, employ such different methods to achieve the same result. The first begins by weaving an eel-trap of pure silk and next encrusts the grains of sand inside; the second, a bolder architect, is economical of the silk envelope, confines itself to a hanging girdle and builds course by course.
I should be even more accurate if I compared it with the secondary larva of Meloe cicatricosus, of which I once published a drawing in the Annales des sciences naturelles. If we reduce the dimensions considerably, we shall have something very like the parasite of the Tachytes. The head is large, faintly tinged with red.
If he had known the tactics of the Hairy Ammophila, the Mantis-hunting Tachytes, the Bee-eating Philanthus, the Calicurgi and other marauders, his anxiety, I believe, would have ended in a frank admission that he was unable to squeeze instinct into the mould of his formula.
By eliminating what was known to me and seeking among the Meloidæ of my neighbourhood for the size that corresponded with the pseudochrysalids unearthed from the Tachytes' burrows, I found, as I have said, only Schaeffer's Cerocoma and the Twelve-spotted Mylabris. I undertook to rear these in order to obtain their eggs.
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