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Updated: May 19, 2025
So favourable was the opportunity for observation, indeed, that we could clearly make out with the naked eye even the joints of their legs, the hairs on their tarsi excuse the phrase and the very shape of their cruel tigerlike claws, as they rushed forth upon their prey in a sort of carnivorous frenzy.
I may add that it is black, with the first two abdominal segments, the legs and the tarsi a rusty red. Clad in the same livery and much smaller than the female, the male is remarkable for his eyes, which are of a beautiful lemon-yellow when he is alive. The length is nearly half an inch for the female and a little more than half this for the male.
If the insect raises one of its tarsi and pulls towards itself, the treacherous thread follows, unwinds slightly and, without letting go or breaking, yields to the captive's desperate jerks. Any limb released only tangles the others still more and is speedily recaptured by the sticky matter.
A., on the prehensile use of the tarsi in male moths; on the rearing of the Ailanthus silkmoth; on breeding Lepidoptera; proportion of sexes of Bombyx cynthia, B. yamamai, and B. Pernyi reared by; on the development of Bombyx cynthia and B. yamamai; on the pairing of Bombyx cynthia.
I find Midges, Plant-lice and Ants caught in it, as well as tufted seeds which have blown from the capitula of the Cichoriaceae. A Gad-fly, as big as a Blue bottle, falls into the trap before my eyes. She has barely alighted on the perilous perch when lo, she is held by the hinder tarsi! The Fly makes violent efforts to take wing; she shakes the slender plant from top to bottom.
There is not sufficient evidence to induce us to believe that mutilations are ever inherited; and I should prefer explaining the entire absence of the anterior tarsi in Ateuchus, and their rudimentary condition in some other genera, by the long-continued effects of disuse in their progenitors; for as the tarsi are almost always lost in many dung-feeding beetles, they must be lost early in life, and therefore cannot be much used by these insects.
They are all alike, these ardent sweepers: in their excessive zeal, they fear lest they should block up the place with a speck of dust which they might drop in front of the new house. The glass tubes, which I myself have rinsed under the tap, are not exempt from a scrupulous cleaning. The Osmia dusts them, brushes them thoroughly with her tarsi and then sweeps them out backwards.
The Buprestis has his legs symmetrically folded against his chest and belly; the Geotrupes has his outspread, stretched in disorder, rigid and as though attacked by catalepsy. You could not tell if they were dead or alive. They are not dead. In a minute or two, the Geotrupes' tarsi twitch, the palpi quiver, the antennæ wave gently to and fro.
The Scarites' tarsi begin to quiver immediately. If the contact be prolonged or multiplied, or if it become aggressive, the dead insect gets on its legs again and scuttles off, just as the titillations of the Fly have already shown me. When danger is imminent and all the more to be dreaded because its nature is unknown, the trick of the simulation of death disappears and flight takes its place.
From time to time some small organ which had escaped earlier observers has been pointed out, such parts as the tensor tarsi, the otic ganglion, or the Pacinian bodies; but some of our best anatomical works are those which have been classic for many generations. The plates of the bones in Vesalius, three centuries old, are still masterpieces of accuracy, as of art.
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