THE LUNARY COPRIS; THE BISON ONITIS

The Sacred Beetle, and Others by Jean-Henri Fabre, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. THE LUNARY COPRIS; THE BISON ONITIS

Chapter XVI. THE LUNARY COPRIS; THE BISON ONITIS

Smaller than the Spanish Copris and less particular about a mild climate, the Lunary Copris (C. lunaris, Lin.) will confirm what the Sisyphus has told us of the part played by the father’s collaboration in the prosperity of the family. Our country districts cannot show his match for oddity of male attire. Like the other, he wears a horn on his forehead; in addition, he has an embattled promontory in the middle of his corselet and a halberd-point and a deep, crescent-shaped groove on his shoulders. The climate of Provence and the niggardly supply of food in a wilderness of thyme do not suit him. He wants a country that is less dry, with meadows where the patches of cattle-dung will supply him with plenty of provender.

Unable to reckon on the rare specimens which we meet here from time to time, I have stocked my insect-house with strangers sent from Tournon by my daughter Aglaé. When April comes, she conducts an indefatigable search at my request. Seldom have so many Cow-claps been lifted with the point of the sunshade; seldom have delicate fingers with so much affection broken the cakes on the pastures. I thank the heroine in the name of science![249]

Her zeal meets with due reward. I become the proud possessor of six couples, which are immediately installed in the insect-house where the Spanish Copris used to work last year. I serve up the national dish, the superlative loaf furnished by my neighbour’s Cow. There is not a sign of home-sickness among the exiles, who bravely begin their labours under the mysterious shelter of the cake.

I make my first excavation in the middle of June and am delighted with what my knife gradually lays bare as it cuts up the soil in thin slices. Each couple has dug itself a splendid vaulted room in the sand, more spacious than any that the Sacred Beetle or the Spanish Copris ever showed me and with a bolder arch. The greatest breadth is fully six inches; but the ceiling is very low, rising to hardly two inches.

The contents correspond with the extravagant dimensions of the hall. They form a dish worthy of the wedding of Camacho the Rich, a cake as broad as one’s hand, of no great thickness and varying in outline. I have found them oval-shaped, kidney-shaped, shaped like a Starfish, with short, thick rays, and long and pointed, like a Cat’s tongue. These minor details represent the pastry-cook’s fancies. The essential and constant fact is this: in the six bakeries of my insect-house, the sexes are always both present beside the lump of paste, which, after being kneaded according to rule, is now fermenting and maturing.

What does this long cohabitation prove? It proves that the father has taken part in digging the cellar, in storing the victuals gathered by separate armfuls on the threshold of the door, and in kneading all the scraps into a single lump, which is more likely to improve by [250]keeping. Were he a useless, idle incubus, he would not stay there, he would go back to the surface. The father therefore is a diligent fellow-worker. His assistance even looks as if it ought to extend farther still. We shall see.

Dear insects, my curiosity has disturbed your housekeeping. But you were only starting, you were having your house-warming, so to speak. Perhaps you may be able to make good the damage which I have wrought. Let us try. I will restore the condition of the establishment by supplying fresh provisions. It is for you now to dig new burrows, to carry down the wherewithal to replace the cake of which I have robbed you, and afterwards to divide the lump, improved by time, into rations suited to the needs of your larvæ. Will you do all this? I hope so.

My faith in the perseverance of the sorely-tried couples is not disappointed. A month later, in the middle of July, I venture on a second inspection. The cellars have been rebuilt, as spacious as at first. Moreover, by this time they are padded with a soft lining of dung on the floor and on a part of the side-walls. The two sexes are still there; they will not separate until the rearing is completed. The father, who has less family-affection, or perhaps is more timid, tries to steal off by the back-way as the light enters the shattered dwelling; the mother, squatting on her precious pellets, does not budge. These pellets are oval-shaped plums, very like those of the Spanish Copris, but not quite so large.

Knowing how few compose the latter’s collection, I am greatly surprised at the sight that now meets my eyes. In a single cell I count seven or eight ovoids, standing one against the other and lifting up their nippled [251]tops, each with its hatching-chamber. Notwithstanding its size, the hall is cram-full; there is hardly room left for the two guardians to move about. It may be compared with a bird’s nest containing its eggs and no empty spaces.

The comparison is inevitable. What indeed are the Copris’ pills but eggs of another sort, in which the nutritive mass of the white and the yolk is replaced by a pot of preserved foodstuffs? Here the Dung-beetles rival the birds and even surpass them. Instead of producing from within themselves, merely by the mysterious processes of nature, that which will provide for the latter growth of their young, they are actively and openly industrious, and by dint of their own skill provide food for their grubs which will achieve the adult form without other assistance. They know nothing of the long and tortuous process of incubation; the sun is their incubator. They have not the continual worry of providing food, for they prepare this in advance and make only one distribution. But they never leave the nest. Their watch is incessant. Father and mother, those vigilant guardians, do not quit the house until the family is fit to sally forth.

The father’s usefulness is manifest so long as there is a house to dig and wealth to amass; it is less evident when the mother is cutting up her loaf into rations, shaping her ovoids, polishing them and watching over them. Can it be that the cavalier also takes part in this delicate task, which would rather seem to be a feminine monopoly? Is he able, with his sharp leg, to slice up the cake, to remove from it the requisite quantity for a larva’s sustenance and to round the piece into a sphere, thus shortening the work, which could be revised and perfected by the mother? Does he know [252]the art of stopping up chinks, of repairing breaches, of soldering slits, of scraping pellets and clearing them of any dangerous vegetable matter? Does he show the brood the same attentions which the mother lavishes by herself in the burrows of the Spanish Copris? Here the two sexes are together. Do they both take part in bringing up the family?

I tried to obtain an answer by installing a couple of Lunary Copres in a glass jar screened by a cardboard sheath, which enabled me readily and quickly to produce light or darkness. When suddenly surprised, the male was perched upon the pellets almost as often as the female; but, whereas the mother would frequently go on with her ticklish nursery-work, polishing the pellets with the flat of her leg and feeling and sounding them, the father, more cowardly and less engrossed in his duties, would drop down as soon as the daylight was admitted and run away to hide in some corner of the heap. There is no way of seeing him at work, so quick is he to shun the unwelcome light.

Still, though he refused to display his talents on my behalf, his very presence on the top of the ovoids betrays them. Not for nothing was he in that uncomfortable attitude, so ill-adapted to an idler’s slumbers. He was then watching like his companion, touching up the damaged parts, listening through the walls of the shells to find out how the youngsters were progressing. The little that I saw assures me that the father almost rivals the mother in domestic solicitude until the family is finally emancipated.

The offspring gain in numbers by this paternal devotion. In the Spanish Copris’ mansion, where the mother alone resides, we find four nurselings at most, often two [253]or three, sometimes only one. In that of the Lunary Copris, where the two sexes cohabit and help each other, we count as many as eight, twice the largest population of the other. The hard-working father enjoys a magnificent proof of his influence upon the fate of the household.

Apart from labour in common, this prosperity demands another condition without which the zeal of the couple would be ineffectual. Before everything, if you want a big family you must have enough to feed it on. Remember the victualling methods of the Copris-tribe generally. They do not, like the pill-rollers, go gathering here and there a booty which is rounded into a ball and subsequently rolled to the burrow; they settle immediately underneath the heap which they find, and there, without leaving the threshold of the house, carve themselves slices which they carry down singly to their store until they have collected enough.

The Spanish Copris, at least in my neighbourhood, handles the product of the Sheep. It is of high quality, but not plentiful, even when the purveyor’s intestines are in their most generous mood. The whole of it, therefore, is packed into the cavern and the insect does not come out again, being kept underground by family-cares, even though there be but one youngster to attend to. The niggardly morsel as a rule supplies material only for two or three larvæ. Consequently the family is a small one, through the difficulty in procuring provisions.

The Lunary Copris works under different conditions. His part of the country provides the Cow-clap, that rich patch of dung in which the insect finds inexhaustible supplies of the food needed by a flourishing offspring. This prosperity is assisted by the size of the abode, whose ceiling, with its exceptional breadth, is able to [254]shelter a number of pills that would never fit into the Spanish Copris’ much less roomy burrow.

For lack of space at home and of a well-furnished flour-bin, the latter restricts the number of her children, which is sometimes reduced to one. Can this be due to impotence of the ovaries? No. I have shown in an earlier chapter that, given free scope and a well-spread table, the mother is capable of producing twice her usual family and more. I described how for the three or four ovoids I substituted a loaf kneaded with my paper-knife. By means of this artifice, which increased the space in the narrow enclosure of the jar and provided fresh materials for modelling, I obtained from the mother a family of seven in all. It was a magnificent result, but far inferior to that derived from the following experiment, which was better managed.

This time I take away the pellets as they are formed, all but one, so as not to discourage the mother by my kidnapping. If she found nothing at all left of her previous products, she might perhaps weary of her fruitless labour. When the main loaf, of her constructing, has all been used, I replace it with another, made by myself. I go on doing this, removing the ovoid that has just been completed and renewing the finished lump of food until the insect refuses to accept any more. For five or six weeks the sorely tried mother never loses her patience and each time begins all over again and perseveringly restocks her empty nursery. At last the dog-days arrive, the brutal season which arrests all life by its excessive heat and dryness. My loaves, however carefully made, are scorned. The mother, overcome with torpor, refuses to work. She buries herself in the sand, at the foot of the last pellet, and there, motionless, awaits the liberating September rain. The indefatigable [255]creature has bequeathed me thirteen ovoids, each modelled to perfection, each supplied with an egg; thirteen, a number unparalleled in the Copris’ annals; thirteen, ten more than the normal laying.

The proof is established: if the horned Dung-beetle strictly limits her family, it is not through penury of the ovaries, but through fear of famine.

Is it not thus that things happen in our country, which, the statisticians tell us, is threatened with depopulation? The clerk, the artisan, the civil servant, the workman, the small shopkeeper are a daily increasing multitude with us; and all of them, having hardly enough to live upon, refrain as far as possible from adding to the numbers gathered around their ill-furnished table. When bread is short, the Copris is not wrong in becoming almost a celibate. Why should we cast a stone at his imitators? The motive is one of prudence on either side. It is better to live alone than surrounded by hungry mouths. The man who feels strong enough to struggle with poverty for himself shrinks in dismay from the poverty of a crowded home.

In the good old days, the tiller of the soil, the peasant, the backbone of the nation, found that a numerous family added to his wealth. All used to work and bring their bit of bread to the frugal repast. While the eldest drove the team afield, the youngest, clad in his first pair of breeches, took the brood of Ducklings to the pond.1

These patriarchal ways are becoming rare. Progress sees to that. Of course, it is an enviable thing to scorch along on a bicycle, working your legs up and down like a distracted Spider; but there is a reverse to the medal: progress brings luxury, but creates expensive tastes. In [256]my village, the commonest factory-girl, earning her ten-pence a day, sports on a Sunday sleeves puffed at the shoulders and feathers in her hat like the fine ladies’; she has a sunshade with an ivory handle, a padded chignon, patent-leather shoes, with open-work stockings and lace flounces. O Goose-girl, I in my short linen jacket dare not look at you as you pass my door on your Sunday parade along the high-road! You make me feel too small with your smart raiment.

The young men, on the other hand, are assiduous frequenters of the café, which is much more luxurious than the old-fashioned pot-house. Here they find vermouth, bitters, absinthe, amer Picon, in short the whole collection of stupefying drugs. Such tastes as these make the fields seem too humble and the soil too stubborn. Since the receipts no longer come up to the expenses, they leave the land for the town, which is better-suited, so they imagine, for money-making. Alas, saving is no more practicable there than here! The workshop, where opportunities of spending money lie in wait by the score, makes a man no richer than the plough. But it is too late: you have made your bed; and you remain a poverty-stricken townsman, in terror of paternity.

And yet this country, with its glorious climate, fertility, and geographical position, is invaded by a host of cosmopolitans, sharks and sharpers of every sort. Long ago, it used to attract the sea-roving Phœnicians; the peace-loving Greeks, who brought us the alphabet, the vine and the olive-tree; the Romans, those harsh rulers, who handed down to us barbarities very difficult to eradicate. Swooping on this rich prey came the Cymri, the Teutons, the Vandals, the Goths, the Huns, the Burgundians, the Suevi, the Alani, the Franks, the [257]Saracens, hordes driven hither by every wind that blows. And all this heterogeneous mixture was melted down and absorbed by the Gallic nation.

To-day the foreigner is stealthily making his way into our midst. We are threatened with a second barbarian invasion, peaceful, it is true, but yet disturbing. Will our language, so clear and so harmonious, become an obscure jargon, harsh with exotic gutturals? Will our generous character be dishonoured by rapacious hucksters? Will the land of our fathers cease to be a country and become a caravanserai? There is a fear of it, unless the old Gallic blood runs swift and strong once more and engulfs the stream of invaders.

Let us hope that it may be so and let us listen to what the horned Dung-beetle has to teach us. A large family demands food. But progress brings new needs, which cost much to satisfy; and our revenues are far from increasing at the same rate. When men have not enough for six or five or four, they are content to live as a family of three or two, or even to remain single. Guided by such principles as these, a nation, in its successive stages of progress, is on the road to suicide.

Let us go back then to where we were, suppress our artificial needs, those unwholesome fruits of a hot-house civilization, honour rustic frugality once again and remain on the land, where we shall find the soil bountiful enough to satisfy us if we moderate our desires. Then and not till then will the family flourish once more; then will the peasant, delivered from the town and its temptations, be our salvation.

The third Dung-beetle that has shown me the gift of paternal instinct is likewise a stranger. He comes to me from near Montpellier. He is the Bison Onitis, or, [258]according to others, the Bison Bubas. Taking no interest in nomenclature subtleties, I shall not choose between the two generic names, but will retain the specific denomination of Bison, which has the sound which Linnæus wanted. I made his acquaintance many years ago in the country around Ajaccio,2 among the saffrons and cyclamens that bloom so sweetly under the shade of the myrtles. Come hither and let me admire you yet once again, O beauteous insect! You recall my youthful enthusiasm on the shores of the glorious gulf, so rich in shell-fish. Far was I from suspecting at the time that it would one day fall to my share to sing your praises! I have not seen you since. Welcome to my vivarium! And now tell us something about yourself.

You are a sturdy little chap, short-legged and packed into a solid rectangle, a sign of strength. On your head you wear two abbreviated horns, curved like a Steer’s; and you prolong your corselet into a blunt forehead adorned with two pretty dimples, one on the right and one on the left. Your general appearance and your male finery make you a near neighbour of the coprinary group. The entomologists, in fact, class you immediately after the Copres and a long way from the Geotrupes. Does your trade tally with the place which the systematists allot to you? What can you do?

In common with others, I admire the classifier who, studying the mouth, the legs and the antennæ in the dead insect, is sometimes happy in his grouping and able, for instance, to include in the same family the Scarab and the Sisyphus, who differ so greatly in appearance and so little in habits. Yet this method, which ignores the higher manifestations of life in order to pore [259]over the smallest details of the corpse, too often misleads us as to the insect’s real talent, which is a much more important characteristic than a joint more or less in the antennæ. The Bison, like many others, warns us to be careful where we are going. Though akin to the Copris in structure, he is much nearer the Geotrupes in his industry. Like them, he packs sausages in a cylindrical mould; like them again, he has the paternal instinct.

I inspect my one couple in the middle of June. Under a plentiful pile provided by the Sheep is a perpendicular shaft a finger’s-breadth in diameter, open freely throughout its length and running some nine inches down. The bottom of this well branches out into five different galleries, each occupied by a roly-poly pudding similar to the Geotrupes’, but less bulky and not so long. The mass of fodder has a warty surface, is rounded off clumsily and has a hatching-chamber scooped out of it at the lower end. This chamber is a little round cell, coated with a semifluid wash. The egg is oval, white and comparatively large, as is the rule among Dung-beetles. In short, the Bison’s rustic work is a very close reproduction of the Geotrupes’.

I am disappointed: I expected better things. The insect’s elegance seemed to promise something more artistic, a finer craftsmanship, skilled in the modelling of pears, gourds, balls and ovoids. Once again, be careful how you judge animals, any more than men, by appearances. The structure gives us no idea of the insect’s all-round ability.

I surprise the couple at the cross-roads where the five blind-alleys, the sausages, start. The intrusion of the light has frightened them into immobility. Before the disturbance caused by my excavations, what were the two faithful partners doing at this spot? They were [260]watching over the five cells, ramming down the last column of provisions, completing it with new contributions of material, brought down from above and taken from the heap that forms a cover to the shaft. They were perhaps preparing to dig a sixth chamber, if not more, and to stock it like the others. I realize at any rate that there must be many ascents from the bottom of the pit to the rich warehouse on the surface, whence the bundles of material are carried down in the legs of the one to be methodically pressed on top of the egg by the other.

The shaft indeed is open throughout its length. Moreover, to prevent the crumbling of the walls which would result from frequent journeys, the sides are plastered with stucco from end to end. This coat is made of the same material as the puddings and is more than a twenty-fifth of an inch thick. It is continuous and fairly even, without having too elaborate a finish. It keeps the surrounding earth in place, so much so that big fragments of the tunnel can be removed without losing their shape.

In the hamlets on the Alps, the south fronts of the buildings are coated with Cow-dung, which, after drying in the summer sun, becomes the winter fuel. The Bison knows this pastoral method, but practises it with another object: he hangs his house with manure to keep it from crumbling. The father might well be entrusted with this work in the intervals of rest which the mother leaves him while she is busy in the ticklish work of making her pudding layer by layer. The Geotrupes, by way of yet another industrial resemblance, has already shown us a similar consolidating plaster. Hers, it is true, is less regular and less complete.

After being ousted by my curiosity, the Bison couple set to work again and, by the middle of July, supplied me with three more puddings, making a total of eight. [261]This time I find my two captives dead, one on the surface, the other in the ground. Can it be an accident? Or is it not more likely that the Bison constitutes an exception to the longevity of the Scarabs, Copres and others, who behold their offspring and even fly away to their second wedding in the following spring?

I incline to the belief that we come back here to the general insect law of a short life deprived of the chief joy of parenthood, the sight of one’s children, for no regrettable incident happened, so far as I know, in the vivarium. If I am right in my conjectures, why does the Bison, though a near kinsman of the Copris, who attains a green old age, die so quickly, like the common herd, once the future of his family is assured? Here again we have an unsolved mystery.

A rapid sketch of the larva is preferable to long descriptions of its jaws and palpi, which make dull reading. I shall have said enough, I think, on the subject if I mention that it is bent into a crook, that it carries a knapsack on its back, that it is a quick evacuator and that it is clever at stopping up any cracks in the dwelling: characteristics and talents which are a general rule among the Dung-beetles. In August, when the pudding has been consumed in the middle and has become something of a ruin, the grub retires to the lower end and here isolates itself from the remainder of the cavity by means of a spherical enclosure, of which the mortar-bag supplies the materials.

The work, a graceful sphere about the size of a large cherry, is a masterpiece of stercoral architecture and may be compared with that which the Bull Onthophagus has already shown us. Little nodes, arranged in concentric lines and alternating like the tiles of a roof, adorn the object from pole to pole. Each of them must correspond with a stroke of the trowel putting its load [262]of mortar in place. If you did not know what it was, you would take the thing for the chiselled kernel of some tropical fruit. A sort of rough pericarp completes the illusion. It is the rind of the pudding which surrounds the central jewel but is easily removed, just as the husk separates from the nut. When we have done the shelling, we are quite surprised to find this splendid kernel under its rustic wrapper.

Such is the chamber built with a view to the metamorphosis. The larva spends the winter there in a state of torpor. I hoped to obtain the adult insect in the spring. To my great surprise, the larval stage continued until the end of July. It takes about a year, therefore, for the nymph to make its appearance.

This slowness in maturing surprises me. Can it be the rule in the open fields? I think so, for in the confinement of my insect-house nothing happened, to my knowledge, that would occasion this delay. I therefore enter the result of my manœuvres without any fear of making a mistake: lying lifeless in its elegant and solid casket, the larva of the Bison Onitis takes twelve months to develop into a nymph, whereas those of the other Dung-beetles effect their transformation in a few weeks. As to stating or even suspecting the cause of this strange larval longevity, these are points which must be left in the limbo of the unexplained.

Softened by the September rains, the stercoral shell, until now as hard as a plum-stone, yields to the hermit’s thrust; and the adult Beetle comes up into the light of day to lead a life of revelry so long as the mild atmosphere of the last days of summer permits. When the first cold weather sets in, he retires to his winter quarters underground and reappears in the spring to begin the cycle of life all over again.

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