THE CRIOCERES (continued)

The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles by Jean-Henri Fabre, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. THE CRIOCERES (continued)

CHAPTER XVII. THE CRIOCERES (continued)

The Crioceris has found safety inside its opal globe. Safety? Ah, but what an unfortunate expression I have used! Is there any one in the world who can flatter himself that he has escaped the spoiler?

In the middle of July, at the time when the Twelve-spotted Crioceris comes up from under the ground in the adult form, my rearing-jars yield me swarms of a very small Gall-fly, a slender, graceful, blue-black Chalcid, without any visible boring-tool. Has the puny creature a name? Have the nomenclators catalogued it? I do not know, nor do I much care; the main thing is to learn that the covering of the asparagus-berry, which becomes an opal globe when the grub has emptied it, has failed to save the recluse. The Tachina-midge drains her victim by herself; this other, tinier creature feasts in company. Twenty or more of them batten on the grub together.

When everything seems to foretell a quiet life, a pigmy among pigmies appears, charged with the express duty of exterminating an insect which is protected first by the casket of the berry and next by the shell, the underground work of the grub. To eat the Twelve-spotted Crioceris is its mission in life, its special function. When and how does it deliver its attack? I do not know.

At any rate, proud of her vocation and finding life sweet, the Chalcid curls her antennæ into a crook and waves them to and fro: she rubs her tarsi together, a sign of satisfaction; she dusts her belly. I can hardly see her with the naked eye; and yet she is an agent of the universal extermination, a wheel in the implacable machine which crushes life as in a wine-press.

The tyranny of the belly turns the world into a robber's cave. Eating means killing. Distilled in the alembic of the stomach, the life destroyed by slaughter becomes so much fresh life. Everything is melted down again, everything has a fresh beginning in death's insatiable furnace.

Man, from the alimentary point of view, is the chief brigand, consuming everything that lives or might live. Here is a mouthful of bread, the sacred food. It represents a certain number of grains of wheat which asked only to sprout, to turn green in the sun, to shoot up into tall stalks crowned with ears. They died that we might live. Here are some eggs. Left undisturbed with the Hen, they would have emitted the Chickens' gentle cheep. They died that we might live. Here is beef, mutton, poultry. Horror, it smells of blood, it is eloquent of murder! If we gave it a thought, we should not dare to sit down to table, that altar of cruel sacrifices.

How many lives does the Swallow, to mention only the most peaceable, harvest in the course of a single day! From morning to evening he gulps down Crane-flies, Gnats and Midges joyously dancing in the sunbeams. Quick as lightning he passes; and the dancers are decimated. They perish; then their melancholy remnants fall from the nest containing the young brood, in the form of guano which becomes the turf's inheritance. And so it is with all and everything, with large and small, from end to end of the animal progression. A perpetual massacre perpetuates the flux of life.

Appalled by these butcheries, the thinker begins to dream of a state of affairs which would free us from the horrors of the maw. This ideal of innocence, as our poor nature vaguely sees it, is not an impossibility; it is partly realized for all of us, men and animals.

Breathing is the most imperious of needs. We live by the air before we live by bread; and this happens of itself, without painful struggles, without costly labour, almost without our knowledge. We do not set out, armed for war, to conquer the air by rapine, violence, cunning, barter and desperate labour; the supreme element of life enters our bodies of its own accord; it penetrates us and quickens us. Each of us has his generous share of it without giving the matter a thought.

To crown perfection, it is free. And this will last indefinitely until an ever ingenious Treasury invents distributing-taps and pneumatic receivers from which the air will be doled out to us at so much a piston-stroke. Let us hope that we shall be spared this particular item of scientific progress, for that, woe betide us, would be the end of all things: the tax would kill the tax-payer!

Chemistry, in its lighter moods, promises us, in the future, pills containing the concentrated essence of food. These cunning compounds, the product of our laboratories, would not end our longing to possess a stomach no more burdensome than our lungs and to feed even as we breathe.

The plant partly knows this secret: it draws its carbon quietly from the air, in which each leaf is impregnated with the wherewithal to grow tall and green. But the vegetable is inactive; hence its innocent life. Action calls for strongly flavoured spices, won by fighting. The animal acts; therefore it kills. The highest phase, perhaps, of a self-conscious intelligence, man, deserving nothing better, shares with the brute the tyranny of the belly as the irresistible motive of action.

But I have wandered too far afield. A living speck, swarming in the paunch of a grub, tells us of the brigandage of life. How well it understands its trade as an exterminator! In vain does the Crioceris-larva take refuge in an unassailable casket: its executioner makes herself so small that she is able to reach it.

Adopt such precautions as you please, you pitiable grubs, pose on your sprigs in the attitude of a threatening Sphinx, take refuge in the mysteries of a box, arm yourself with a cuirass of dung: you will none the less pay your tribute in the pitiless conflict; there will always be operators who, varying in cunning, in size, in implements, will inoculate you with their deadly germs.

Not even the lily-dweller, with her dirty ways, is safe. Her grub is as often the prey of another Tachina, larger than that of the Field Crioceris. The parasite, I am convinced, does not sow her eggs upon the victim so long as the latter is wrapped in its repulsive great-coat; but a moment's imprudence gives her a favourable opportunity.

When the time comes for the grub to bury itself in the ground, there to undergo the transformation, it lays aside its mantle, with the object perhaps of easing itself when it descends from the top of the plant, or else with the object of taking a bath in that kindly sunlight whereof it has hitherto tasted so little under its moist coverlet. This naked journey over the leaves, the last joy of its larval life, is fatal to the traveller. Up comes the Tachina, who, finding a clean skin, all sleek with fat, loses no time in dabbing her eggs upon it.

A census of the intact and of the injured larvæ provides us with particulars which agree with what we foresaw from the nature of their respective lives. The most exposed to parasites is the Field Crioceris, whose larva lives in the open air, without any sort of protection. Next comes the Twelve-spotted Crioceris, who is established in the asparagus-berry from her early infancy. The most favoured is the Lily-beetle, who, while a grub, makes an ulster of her excretions.

For the second time, we are here confronted by three insects which look as if they had all come out of one mould, so much are they alike in shape. If the costumes were not different and the sizes dissimilar, we should not know how to tell one from another. And this pronounced resemblance in figure is accompanied by a no less pronounced lack of resemblance in instinct.

The evacuator that soils its back cannot have inspired the hermit living in cleanly retirement inside its globe; the occupant of the asparagus-berry did not advise the third to live in the open and wander like an acrobat through the leafage. None of the three has initiated the customs of the other two. All this seems to me as clear as daylight. If they have issued from the same stock, how have they acquired such dissimilar talents?

Furthermore, have these talents developed by degrees? The Lily-beetle is prepared to tell us. Her grub, let us suppose, once conceived the notion, when tormented by the Tachina, of making the stercoral slit open above. By accident, with no definite purpose in view, it emptied the contents of its intestine over its back. The natty Fly hesitated in the presence of this filth. The grub, in its cunning, recognized, as time went on, the benefit to be derived from its poultice; and what at first was an unpremeditated pollution became a prudent custom.

As success followed upon success, with the aid of the centuries, of course, for these inventions always take centuries, the dung overcoat was extended from the hinder end to the fore-part, right down to the forehead. Finding itself the gainer by this invention, setting the parasite at defiance under its coverlet, the grub made a strict law of what was an accident; and the Crioceris faithfully handed down the repulsive great-coat to her offspring.

So far this is not so bad. But things now begin to become complicated. If the insect was really the inventor of its defensive methods, if it discovered for itself the advantage of hiding under its ordure, I look to its ingenuity to keep up the tricks until the precise moment has come for burying itself. But, on the contrary, it undresses itself some time beforehand; it wanders about naked, taking the air on the leaves, at a time when its fair round belly is more than ever likely to tempt the Fly. It completely forgets, on its last day, the prudence which it acquired by the long apprenticeship of the centuries.

This sudden change of purpose, this heedlessness in the face of danger tells me that the insect forgets nothing, because it has learnt nothing, because it has invented nothing. When the instincts were being distributed, it received as its share the overcoat, of whose methods it is ignorant, though it benefits by its advantages. It has not acquired it by successive stages, followed by a sudden halt at the most dangerous moment, the moment most calculated to inspire it with distrust; it is no more and no less gifted than it was in the beginning and is unable in any way to alter its tactics against the Tachina and its other enemies.

Nevertheless, we must not be in a hurry to attribute to the garment of filth the exclusive function of protecting the grub against the parasite. It is difficult to see in what respect the Lily-grub is more deserving than the Asparagus-grub, which possesses no defensive arts. Perhaps it is less fruitful and, to make up for the poverty of the ovaries, boasts an ingenuity which safeguards the race. Nor is there anything to tell us that the soft coverlet is not at the same time a shelter which screens a too sensitive skin from the sun. And, if it were a mere fal-lal, a furbelow of larval coquetry, even that would not surprise me. The insect has tastes which we cannot judge by our own. Let us end with a doubt and proceed.

May is not over when the grub, now fully-grown, leaves the lily and buries itself at the foot of the plant, at no great depth. Working with its head and rump, it forces back the earth and makes itself a round recess, the size of a pea. To turn the cell into a hollow pill which will not be liable to collapse, all that remains for it to do is to drench the wall with a glue which soon sets and grips the sand.

To observe this work of consolidation, I unearth some unfinished cells and make an opening which enables me to watch the grub at work. The hermit is at the window in a moment. A stream of froth pours from his mouth like beaten-up white of egg. He slavers, spits profusely; he makes his product effervescence and lays it on the edge of the breach. With a few spurts of froth the opening is plugged.

I collect other grubs at the moment of their interment and install them in glass tubes with a few tiny bits of paper which will serve them as a prop. There is no sand, no building-material other than the creature's spittle and my very few shreds of paper. Under these conditions can the pill-shaped cell be constructed?

Yes, it can; and without much difficulty. Supporting itself partly on the glass, partly on the paper, the larva begins to slaver all around it, to froth copiously. After a spell of some hours, it has disappeared within a solid shell. This is white as snow and highly porous; it might almost be a globule of whipped albumen. Thus, to stick together the sand in its pill-shaped nest, the larva employs a frothy albuminous substance.

Let us now dissect the builder. Around the oesophagus, which is fairly long and soft, are no salivary glands, no silk-tubes. The frothy cement is therefore neither silk nor saliva. One organ forces itself upon our attention: it is the crop, which is very capacious, and dilated with irregular protuberances that put it out of shape. It is filled with a colourless, viscous fluid. This is certainly the raw material of the frothy spittle, the glue that binds the grains of sand together and consolidates them into a spherical whole.

When the preparations for the metamorphosis are at hand, the stomachic pouch, having no longer to do duty as a digestive laboratory, serves the insect as a factory, or a warehouse for different purposes. Here the Sitares store up their uric waste products; here the Capricorns collect the chalky paste which becomes the stone lid for the entrance to the cell; here caterpillars keep in reserve the gums and powders with which they strengthen the cocoon; hence the Hymenoptera draw the lacquer which they employ to upholster their silken edifice. And now we find the Lily-beetle using it as a store for frothy cement.1 What an obliging organ is this digestive pouch!

1 This subject is continued in the essay on the Foamy Cicadella. Cf. The Life of the Grasshopper: chap. xx.—Translator's Note.

The two Asparagus-beetles are likewise proficient dribblers, worthy rivals of their kinswoman of the lily in the matter of building. In all three cases the underground shell has the same shape and the same structure.

When, after a subterranean visit of two months' duration, the Lily-beetle returns to the surface in her adult form, a botanical problem remains to be solved before the history of the insect is completed. We are now at the height of summer. The lilies have had their day. A dry, leafless stick, surmounted by a few tattered capsules, is all that is left of the magnificent plant of the spring. Only the onion-like bulb remains a little way down. There, postponing the process of vegetation, it waits for the steady rains of the autumn, which will renew its strength and make it burgeon into a sheaf of leaves.

How does the Lily-beetle live during the summer, before the return of the green foliage dear to its race? Does it fast during the extreme heat? If abstinence is its rule of life in this season of vegetable dearth, why does it emerge from underground, why does it abandon its shell, where it could sleep so peacefully, without the necessity of eating? Can it be need of food that drives it from the substratum and sends it to the sunlight so soon as the wing-cases have assumed their vermilion hue? It is very likely. For the rest, let us look into the matter.

On the ruined stems of my white lilies I find a portion covered with a scrap of green skin. I set it before the prisoners in my jars, who emerged from their sandy bed a day or two ago. They attack it with an appetite which is extremely conclusive; the green morsel is stripped bare to the wood. Soon I have nothing left, in the way of their regulation diet, to offer my famished captives. I know that all the lilies, native or exotic, the Turk's cap lily, or Martagon, the lily of Chalcedon, the tiger lily and many others, are to their taste; I do not forget that the crown imperial fritillary and the Persian fritillary are equally welcome; but most of these delicate plants have refused the hospitality of my two acres of pebbles and those which it is more or less possible for me to grow are now as tattered as the common lily. There is not a patch of green left on them.

In botany the lily gives its name to the family of the Liliaceæ, of which it is the leading representative. Those who feed upon the lily ought also, in the absence of anything better, to accept the other plants of the same group. This is my opinion at first; it is not that of the Crioceris, who knows more than I do about the virtues of plants.

The family of the Liliaceæ is subdivided into three tribes: the lilies, the daffodils and the asparaguses. Not any of the daffodil tribe suit my famishing prisoners, who allow themselves to die of inanition on the leaves of the following genera, the only varieties with which the modest resources of my garden have allowed me to experiment: asphodel, funkia, or niobe, agapanthus, or African lily, tritelia, hemerocallis, or day lily, tritoma, garlic, ornithogalum, or star of Bethlehem, squill, hyacinth, muscari, or grape-hyacinth. I record, for whom it may concern, this profound contempt of the Crioceris for the daffodils. An insect's opinion is not to be despised: it tells us that we should obtain a more natural arrangement by separating the daffodils farther from the lilies.

In the first of the three tribes, the classic white lily, the plant preferred by the insect, takes the chief place; next come the other lilies and the fritillaries, a diet almost as much sought after; and lastly the tulips, which the season is too far advanced to allow me to submit for the approval of the Crioceris.

The third tribe had a great surprise in store for me. The red Crioceris fed, though with a very scornful tooth, on the foliage of the asparagus, the favourite dish of the Field Crioceris and the Twelve-spotted Crioceris. On the other hand, she feasted rapturously on the lily of the valley (Convallaria maialis) and on Solomon's seal (Polygonatum vulgare), both of which are so different from the lily to any eye untrained in the niceties of botanical analysis.

She did more: she browsed, with every appearance of a contented stomach, on a prickly creeper, Smilax aspera, which tangles itself in the hedges with its corkscrew tendrils and produces, in the autumn, graceful clusters of small red berries, which are used for Christmas decorations. The fully-developed leaves are too hard for her, too tough; she wants the tender tips of the nascent foliage. When I take this precaution, I can feed her on the intractable vine as readily as on the lily.

The fact that the smilax is accepted gives me confidence in the prickly butcher's-broom (Ruscus aculeatus), another shrub of sturdy constitution, admitted to the family rejoicings at Christmas because of its handsome green leaves and its red berries, which are like big coral beads. In order not to discourage the consumer with leaves that are too hard, I select some young seedlings, newly sprouted and still bearing the round berry, the nutritive gourd, hanging at their base. My precautions lead to nothing: the insect obstinately refuses the butcher's-broom, on which I thought that I might rely after the smilax had been accepted.

We have our botany; the Crioceris has hers, which is subtler in its appreciation of affinities. Her domain comprises two very natural groups, that of the lily and that of the smilax, which, with the advance of science, has become the family of the Smilaceæ. In these two groups she recognizes certain genera—the more numerous—as her own; she refuses the others, which ought perhaps to be revised before being finally classified.

An exclusive taste for the asparagus, one of the foremost representatives of the Smilaceæ, characterizes the two other Crioceres, those eager exploiters of the cultivated asparagus. I find them also pretty often on the needle-leaved asparagus (A. acutifolius), a forbidding-looking shrub with long, flexible stems bearing many branches, which the Provençal vine-grower uses, under the name of roumiéu, as a filter before the tap of the wine-vat, to prevent the refuse of the grapes from choking up the vent-hole. Apart from these two plants, the two Crioceres refuse absolutely everything, even when in July they come up from the earth with the famishing stomachs which the long fast of the metamorphosis has given them. On the same wild asparagus, disdainful of the rest, lives a fourth Crioceris (C. paracenthesia), the smallest of the group. I do not know enough of her habits to say anything more about her.

These botanical details tell us that the Crioceres, which hatch early, in the middle of summer, have no reason to fear famine. If the Lily-beetle can no longer find her favourite plant, she can browse upon Solomon's seal and smilax, not to mention the lily of the valley and, I dare say, a few others of the same family. The other three are more favoured. Their food-plant remains erect, green and well provided with leaves until the end of autumn. The wild asparagus even, undaunted by the extreme cold, maintains a sturdy existence all the year round. Belated resources, moreover, are superfluous. After a brief period of summer freedom, the various Crioceres seek their winter quarters and go to earth under the dead leaves.

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