A DANGEROUS DIET

Too Long; Didn't Read

The Scolia's egg is in no way exceptional in shape. It is white, cylindrical, straight and about four millimetres long by one millimetre thick. (About.156 x.039 inch.—Translator's Note.) It is fixed, by its fore-end, upon the median line of the victim's abdomen, well to the rear of the legs, near the beginning of the brown patch formed by the mass of food under the skin. I watch the hatching. The grub, still wearing upon its hinder parts the delicate pellicle which it has just shed, is fixed to the spot to which the egg itself adhered by its cephalic extremity. A striking spectacle, that of the feeble creature, only this moment hatched, boring, for its first mouthful, into the paunch of its enormous prey, which lies stretched upon its back. The nascent tooth takes a day over the difficult task. Next morning the skin has yielded; and I find the new-born larva with its head plunged into a small, round, bleeding wound.