Book of Monsters Part 15

By pitching the sand with its broad, flat head, just as a man who digs a well would pitch out shovelfuls of dirt, the young ant lion excavates a tiny crater in the sand and hides itself in the crater's pit with its pincers sticking upwards through the fine, loose sand.

Any child who has jumped into his father's oat bin and tried to climb up the hillside of tumbling grain, knows how hard it is to get out. If he will imagine a hidden monster waiting with jaws opened at the bottom, he will have some sympathy for the unlucky ant which, slipping upon the rolling sand of the ant lion's crater slides slowly towards its pit--helped perhaps by dirt thrown on it by the ant lion.

There seems to be no escape, and once within reach, the pincers close on it, and along their grooved inner faces, helped down by special tongue-like licking organs, the blood trickles and is guided to the mouth and thence into the stomach of the lion. And, curiously enough, this stomach is the only organ of digestion which the ant lion has. The stomach has no outlet and everything that is not digested must wait within it until the change of life brings on this winged state, when, like a tiny egg, the gathered excreta of the weeks and even months of feeding is thrown out from the body. Perhaps this strange structure of the beast has something to do with the fact that it can live six months at least without a particle of food.

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THE SCORPION FLY

(_Panorpa confusa_, Westw.)

When the scorpion fly, standing still, raises above its head that pair of pincers which forms its tail, it seems almost like some two-headed monstrosity.

It is interesting to know that the great Aristotle knew these insects and thought of them as winged scorpions. It is only the males which have these curious tails.

One might easily mistake the long snout for that of some sucking insect, but at the very tip there are two oblong, plate-shaped jaws, each armed with two very sharp teeth which enable the creature to live a carnivorous existence. Although little is yet known about it, the scorpion fly appears, like a hyena, to live chiefly on dead animal matter, although it has been seen to attack injured or helpless insects.

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A SOLDIER TERMITE

(_Termes flavipes_, Koll.)

Although too poor a photograph, perhaps, to be worthy of a place in this collection, I have a sentimental reason for its reproduction here, for it brings to mind the days I spent in Java lying flat on the ground studying the mushroom gardens of its tropical relatives.

There are few more interesting creatures than these termites. They have been mushroom eaters and mushroom growers for thousands of years. They have their kings and queens, their workers and their soldiers, and they build gigantic caverns and tall mounds out of earth and half-digested wood.

They tear to pieces and reduce to powder the dead trees of the tropical forests.

Their nymphs, the young kings and queens, are winged and perform a marriage flight, then, tearing off their own wings, they settle down to form a home of dirt and start a new and numerous colony.

They seem to be upon a higher plane of social life than are the true ants, with which they are not in any way related, for the members of a species seem all to be quite friendly towards each other even though they may come from widely different nests. This is never true of ants.

Their queens are strange, egg-laying machines as large as a man's thumb, and they lay an egg a second for n.o.body knows how long.

The workers shun the light and make long, covered ways of mud in which they go from place to place. With their untiring energy they honeycomb the building timbers of houses and s.h.i.+ps in the tropics, making mere hollow sh.e.l.ls of them, and so causing disasters of all kinds.

Some of their soldiers have mandibles so strong and sharp as to drive away all animals and make them formidable enemies of man, and some have squirt guns in their heads with which they spray their enemies with an obnoxious fluid.

This tiny representative is all we have in Maryland, but though so small and quiet in his habits he does great work among the pine stumps of my place. The stump of any pine that is felled one year can be kicked out the next, honeycombed with the chambered runways of this creature. Beware lest any pine timbers of your house are near the ground and become infested with termites.

THE STINGING INSECTS

(_Hymenoptera_)

This order is another one in which it takes an entomologist to see the characteristic likenesses in the various species of insects composing it.

They all have membranous wings, and all the females have either a saw, an ovipositor or a sting at the tip of the abdomen. One may say, indeed, that practically all the stinging insects are in this order.

Bees, wasps, ants, gall flies, saw flies, and ichneumon flies are Hymenoptera, the ants coming into this membranous winged order because the males and females are winged for the marriage flight, and lose them only after this is over.

This is considered the highest order of insects because it contains members with the most marvelously developed instincts of any creatures in the world, insects whose habits, skill and industry excite our admiration and wonder. Whether they live in colonies with highly developed social states, or whether they live the lives of solitary hermits, their industry and sacrifice to keep alive and perpetuate their kind, are things that make us wonder whether, after all, we have the right to call ourselves the most altruistic of living creatures.

It is around these Hymenoptera that centers the great question of what instinct is, and how it differs from intelligence. We cannot help but feel that it is memory of some kind, not necessarily like the memory of our own brains, but a race memory, transmitted in the almost microscopic egg laid by the mother before she dies.

The instinct of the bee, or wasp, or ant is quite a different kind of thing from reason. Since these creatures have stood still in their development, or at least have changed but little since tertiary times, it is quite possible that their present state represents the highest type of evolution along the lines of instinct. The power to reason, to meet a new emergency, are things which came much later in the development of the world, and man, the creature having them in the highest degree, seems destined to control all other creatures in the end.

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THE PORTRAIT OF A BALD-FACED HORNET

(_Vespula maculata_, Linn.)

I wish I could convey to you my sensation when, in hunting for the focus on my ground gla.s.s, this creature burst upon my sight. It was as though, exploring in some strange land, I suddenly stood face to face with a beast about which no schoolbook had ever taught me anything. It peered at me out of the gloom of imperfect focus, and it took me some time to realize that I was looking into the eyes of a bald-faced hornet.

There is no wild creature in the northern United States that a man will run away from so fast as from a bald-faced hornet.

At the tip of her flexible armor-plated abdomen is the poison-fed stiletto with which she drives off enemies from the nest or paralyzes her prey.

Her six powerful legs are spined to help her, no doubt, in climbing over the smooth surfaces of flowers and twigs. She has two kinds of eyes--three lens-shaped ones on top of her head and two marvelous compound ones composed of hundreds of little lenses, which take up half the head. Just what she uses each kind for is still unknown.

From her forehead hang ringed antennae, which doubtless are the organs with which she scents the presence of her prey, and they may also help her find her way about.

Her ma.s.sive jaws lie below her eyes and look like shears with jagged edges; they are meant for crus.h.i.+ng, not for grinding, and with these she tears to pieces bits of wood and cements the particles together with the sticky secretion of her salivary glands, making thus the combs and shelter of her wood-pulp paper nest.

She is an undeveloped female, but with the professional care of a baby's nurse she tends her sister hornets in the nest. On the wing, from daylight to dark, she scours the country for the flies and other insects with which to feed the young. Of all the fly-destroyers which frequent the house she is perhaps the most efficient, pouncing upon the flies with murderous voracity, tearing off their heads and legs and wings, and macerating their bodies to a pulp to feed the hungry grub-like baby hornets which are hatching out in the paper nest over the front door. Her life, and the life of every other worker, is ended by the autumn, and it is left to a few of the young queens to carry on the species.

Does this picture represent, I wonder, one of the nightmare visions which haunt the dreams of baby flies?

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THE QUEEN HORNET

(_Vespula maculata_, Linn.)

The summer was over but the cold weather had scarcely begun when I found this creature under a rotten log in the pasture. The paper nest over the front door was empty and rapidly falling to pieces, but even so, it was hard to believe that the active, dangerous creatures we had watched for so many weeks had suddenly disappeared, and that, of the whole busy colony, only a few females were left.

There is something fascinating in the picture of the young queen hornet, after mating is over and all her relatives are dead, crawling away beneath some log and pa.s.sing there the long cold winter. Then, when spring has come, she emerges from her sleep, the only survivor of her race, and builds, unaided even by her mate, the beginning of a nest just large enough to hold her first-laid eggs. From these hatch out the grubs, which later, after days of feeding, emerge as workers, undeveloped females, and help build up around her a colony of hundreds of busy hornets.

The death of the wasp and hornet workers does not seem to be a matter of cold alone, for, in the regions of perpetual summer, the workers of many species live short lives. They feel the cold, of course, as all our insects do, and inside the nest, on the shelves formed by the flat tops of the combs where the larvae live, they find dry roosting places at night.

The heat of their own bodies materially raises the temperature inside the nest.

Though many people think them just alike, the bees and wasps (the hornet is a kind of wasp) are very different creatures. The wasps have trim, slender forms with a few scattered hairs upon their bodies, whereas the bees are generally hairy and short bodied. They both build combs, but the wasps make theirs of paper wetted with saliva, while the bees build theirs of wax secreted from their bodies. The wasps depend upon fresh food gathered in the day's hunt through the air, whereas the bees store up their food in empty cells. The wasps' nests are the wigwams of a season, the bees' hives the more permanent abodes of a higher type of social beings.