Book of Monsters Part 13

It has, like the spiders, a spinneret and a reservoir of liquid silk with which, as it outgrows its baby state, it can spin its own arbor of tough silk fibers and hide itself from view while it is changing to a b.u.t.terfly.

If in late summer you will put one of these creatures in a tumbler and watch it for a day or two, you can see it plainly through the gla.s.s pouring out the liquid silk in a steady stream, waving its head from side to side. The silk comes from a spinneret which is just behind the jaws and is about the color of thin starch paste. The way it loops back upon itself and flows in curves reminds me most forcibly of the way the pastry cook, with frosting in a paper cornucopia, writes one's name upon a birthday cake.

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A b.u.t.tERFLY'S MUMMY CASE

One of the most marvelously beautiful of all living creatures lies waiting within this case for the resurrection day, when growth shall split open this polished casket and it shall feel the wings, close packed for weeks, unfold, and, stretching to a hundred times their size, bear it away into the suns.h.i.+ne.

Did the Pharaohs, I wonder, or their wise men, seeing this, model their mummy cases after those which the b.u.t.terflies make?

This is the chrysalis of a b.u.t.terfly, that wonder of poets since poetry began, that life-stage of the b.u.t.terfly which our faith and hopes make comparable to our own rest in the tomb from which man in all ages has believed there came a resurrection and another life, no more to be compared with this than the b.u.t.terfly's own existence among the flowers is to be likened to his crawling one upon the leaves. And because the minds of many men in seeking to understand, have broken down this beautiful a.n.a.logy by finding that there is no real decay within the chrysalis, we must not hence conclude they have done more than brush away a fancied similarity. The mystery remains.

If you should open this b.u.t.terfly mummy case, lay bare the mummy as it were, you would find a pair of wings in process of formation, a head, a curled-up sucking beak, legs and embryo antennae, that is, providing it were near the resurrection time. If not, and you had broken in too early, the greater part within the case would be a semi-fluid ma.s.s of broken down cell tissues from which the legs and wings and all the other parts are made.

The portholes along the side lead deep into the body and are probably as necessary to the growing b.u.t.terfly inside as they are to it when it once emerges. The chrysalis must breathe.

To many people there is much confusion as to what is a chrysalis and what a real coc.o.o.n. Every coc.o.o.n is a silken case spun by the caterpillar in which it can securely hide while it changes first into the chrysalis and then into its winged and final form. This chrysalis, or pupa, forms within the body skin and some caterpillars do not spin a coc.o.o.n at all, but merely rest somewhere away from view, until this strange process has been completed within the out-worn sh.e.l.l. This photograph is of such a chrysalis.

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A MOTH

We commonly picture the moths and b.u.t.terflies with their wings spread out or else upright in the air, but many moths trail their wings when they alight and escape our notice by their quiet colors. Walk through the gra.s.s and you will frighten thousands which, when they alight again, you cannot for the life of you detect upon the gra.s.s stems.

There are hardly any b.u.t.terflies that trail their wings like this and not one of them has beautiful feathery antennae.

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NOT GOOD TO EAT

Have you never wondered at the temerity with which certain of these slow-moving, helpless creatures expose themselves to the attacks of their enemies? In a world so full of hungry, winged beings it does seem strange, and when the markings are black and white or some such striking color in contrast with the leaves or bark the temerity seems even more extraordinary, until one learns the simple fact--these creatures are not very good to eat.

Not good enough to eat! Supposing that the fly and the mosquito were equipped with some flavor distasteful to the insectivorous birds; if cattle were not good to eat, nor sheep, nor hogs, nor any living, breathing things, what a change there would be in a world like ours! And yet to chemists there is very little difference between some compounds that are good to eat and others that are deadly poison, no greater than that between the poison bitter almond and the sweet one of our dinner table.

One cannot help but wonder why it is that when the border-land twixt food and poison is so narrow in the chemistry of the living cell that every creature has not equipped itself with prussic acid enough to preserve itself from its enemies.

While this protection holds good against many predaceous creatures, there are various birds and even snakes that have found this particular caterpillar not too bad to eat.

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A HAIRY SPECTACLE

(_Euchaetes egle_, Dru.)

Many of the caterpillars of our fields are striking in their form and color. This one could easily be seen some distance off and might to birds and others of its enemies be what the skunk is to its enemy the dog--a thing to shun.

In the luxuriance of its "plumage" it, in some respects, reminds one of those fantastic forms of fowls produced by close line breeding, the Hudans, for example, or the long-tailed roosters of j.a.pan.

Few creatures that we have photographed have been more beautiful than this black and white larva with its hairs in graceful tufts all over its body.

What it eats or what its other self is like, I have not yet been able to find out.

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AN UNKNOWN CATERPILLAR

Creatures like this, when they come walking down a garden path, are so striking and so gracefully weird that one would think their forms deserving of more study than they get. There is a reason for this, though, that is not hard to find; they are such transient creatures. A few days in the egg, a week or two as caterpillars, and they pa.s.s into their coc.o.o.ns to emerge as moths or b.u.t.terflies, and of the two weeks when they are caterpillars, the first part of the time they are too small to make much impression upon us.

Then too, you cannot collect and keep them as you can the b.u.t.terflies or beetles, in fact this strange horned beast is still unnamed because its carca.s.s shriveled and faded until it bore so little resemblance to its living self that it could not be identified. It is quite unlike the hickory borer or horned devil, being dark red-brown in color. It takes a skilled taxidermist entomologist to squeeze them out, blow up the skin and mount them in a case, and that is the only way to keep these forms, unless we have found another way in these photographs of them.

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A CATERPILLAR DEVOURED BY A FUNGUS

(_Apantesis nais attacked by Empusa sp._, Dru.)

One cold morning in early autumn I saw this caterpillar lying so still on the gra.s.s stem on which you see it that I thought I could photograph it before it woke up. I picked the gra.s.s panicle, but when I came to look closely at the caterpillar I found it was a shriveled corpse and that there were gaping wounds in its sides, filled with the threads of a parasitic fungus; a fungus familiar to me through one of its distant relatives which I spent six months of my life studying, and which lives in the intestines of the frog. There is something ghastly about the slow but resistless working of a fungus in the body of a caterpillar. One cannot help wondering where the plant got in and how the caterpillar felt about it. Was there the horror of finding that it could not be dislodged and the hopelessness of the struggle against it and the impending death and shortening of an already very brief existence?

So these, and seemingly all other creatures, have their diseases, and the studies which men have made and are making upon them in all parts of the world are helping us to understand the causes of those which attack and often conquer human beings.

NERVE-WINGED INSECTS

(_Neuroptera_)

There was a time before all living things were cla.s.sified, when there were no groups of plants or animals or insects. It is something to be proud of that man has grouped the likes together and formed, out of the chaos of living species, a system into which most of them can go like letters into pigeonholes. Is it any wonder that with half a million species in this insect world there should be some groups in which the species forming them seem to have very little likeness to each other? The nerve-winged insects seem to form just such a group, for the princ.i.p.al things they have in common seem to be peculiar nerve-veined wings and blood-thirsty habits.

If we could be quite sure that dragon-flies and scorpion-flies and caddis-flies preyed only upon our foes, we could say with more confidence than we do now, that they are our friends and not our enemies, and that men should find some means by which to help increase the number of them in the world.

It is conceivable that, as we learn more about them, they may take a much more important place in public esteem, just as insectivorous birds are doing. Perhaps they will come to be protected and their breeding places guarded by the drainage engineers.

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THE DRAGON-FLY

No dragon of legend could be more blood-thirsty or terrible than this.

With four wings like the supporting planes of an aerodrome, it can fly as fast as a railway train. With thousands of eyes crowded together like cells in a honeycomb, forming eye ma.s.ses that cover most of its head, it can see in all directions at once. With ma.s.sive jaws and teeth as sharp as needle points, it can pierce and crush the strongest sh.e.l.l of its prey.

With its long-jointed spiny legs held out in front like a basket, it rushes through the air, catches and devours its prey and lets the carca.s.s fall to the ground, all without slackening its terrible speed.

It is hard to realize, as you watch this swiftly moving dragon of the air, that it has spent the first stage of its life as a slowly crawling, ugly water monster lying in wait among the reeds and gra.s.ses for some unsuspecting water bug or larva to pa.s.s by.

The female, as she skims the surface of some pool, drops into the water her clumps of dragon eggs, a thousand at a time, and from these are born the ugly water dragons, which, when come of age, grow wings and, crawling to the surface, split their old skins open, unfold and dry their closely packed wings, and dart away into the suns.h.i.+ne to prey upon the other creatures of the air.