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Updated: June 4, 2025
He has six short legs, which he well knows how to use; he is a gad-about, a trot-about. In the adult state the male is correctly garbed in wing-cases, like the true Beetle that he is.
In honour of his exalted functions he exhales an odour of musk; he bears a red tuft at the tip of his antennae; his breast is covered with nankeen; and across his wing-cases he wears a double, scalloped scarf of vermilion. An elegant, almost sumptuous costume, very superior to that of the others, but yet lugubrious, as befits your undertaker's man.
Of these the most interesting are: a large predacious nocturnal bug, shining black, with red wings; a nocturnal Cicindela, a beautiful insect, with dark green striated wing-cases and pale red legs; also several diminutive wingless wasps. Of the last I have counted six species, most of them marked with strongly contrasted colours, black, red, and white.
Of one grand new beetle, glittering with ruby and emerald tints, I got a large quantity, having first detected one of its wing-cases ornamenting the outside of a native's tobacco pouch. It was quite a new species, and had not been found elsewhere than on this little island. It is one of the Buprestidae, and has been named Cyphogastra calepyga.
The wing-cases, which are of a parchment-like nature, and the hollow drum-formed space which they enclose, assists to give resonance to the tones. The music they make is employed undoubtedly to serenade their mates, for the same object which induces the feathered tribe to utter their varied notes in the forest.
The effort being suddenly relaxed, the head and thorax flew up, and in consequence, the base of the wing-cases struck the supporting surface with such force, that the insect by the reaction was jerked upwards to the height of one or two inches. The projecting points of the thorax, and the sheath of the spine, served to steady the whole body during the spring.
In its vibrating coloured wing-cases it departed greatly from the normal character of the Hemiptera, and assumed that of the hornets. All the insects that have special means of protection, by which they are guarded from the attacks of insectivorous mammals and birds, have peculiar forms, or strongly contrasted, conspicuous colours, and often make odd movements that attract attention to them.
It will be repeated later with the Pine- chafer and the Rhinoceros Beetle, accompanied by the usual atrocious tactics of the Carabi. Even better than these last does the Calosoma know the weak point of the armoured Beetles, concealed beneath the wing-cases. And this will go on so long as we keep him provided with victims, for this drinker of blood is never satiated.
Duppo brought us a large wood-cricket, called the Tanana, the wonderfully loud and not unmusical notes of which we had often heard. These sounds, we found, were produced by the overlapping edges of the wing-cases, which they rub together. In each wing-case the inner edge, near the lower part, has a horny expansion.
As far back as he can remember, while still quite a child, "a little monkey of six, still dressed in a little baize frock," or just "wearing his first braces," he sees himself "in ecstasy before the splendours of the wing-cases of a gardener-beetle, or the wings of a butterfly." At nightfall, among the bushes, he learned to recognize the chirp of the grasshopper.
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