THE SIMULATION OF DEATH

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 SIMULATION OF DEATH

CHAPTER XIV. THE SIMULATION OF DEATH

The first insect that we will put to the question is that audacious disemboweller, the savage Scarites. To provoke his state of inertia is a very simple matter: I handle him for a moment, rolling him between my fingers; better still, I drop him on the table, twice or thrice in succession, from a small height. When the shock due to the fall has been administered and, if need be, repeated, I turn the insect on its back.

This is enough: the prostrate Beetle no longer stirs, lies as though dead. The legs are folded on the belly, the antennæ extended like the arms of a cross, the pincers open. A watch beside me tells me the exact minute of the beginning and the end of the experiment. Nothing remains but to wait and especially to arm one's self with patience, for the insect's immobility lasts long enough to become tedious to the observer watching for something to happen.

The duration of the lifeless posture varies greatly on the same day, under the same atmospheric conditions and with the same subject, though I cannot fathom the causes which shorten or lengthen it. How to investigate the external influences, so numerous and often so slight, which intervene in such a case; above all, how to scrutinize the insect's private impressions: these are impenetrable mysteries. Let us confine ourselves to recording the results.

Immobility continues fairly often for as long as fifty minutes; in certain cases, even, it lasts more than an hour. The most frequent length of time averages twenty minutes. If nothing disturbs the Beetle, if I cover him with a glass shade, protecting him from the Flies, who are importunate visitors in the hot weather prevailing at the time of my experiment, the inertia is complete: not a quiver of the tarsi, nor of the palpi, nor of the antennæ. Here indeed is a simulacrum of death, with all its inertia.

At last the apparently deceased comes back to life. The tarsi quiver, those of the fore-legs first; the palpi and the antennæ move slowly to and fro: this is the prelude to the awakening. Now the legs begin to kick. The insect bends slightly at its pinched waist; it buttresses itself on its head and back; it turns over. There it goes, jogging away, ready to become an apparent corpse once more if I renew my shock tactics.

Let us repeat the experiment immediately. The newly resuscitated Beetle is for a second time lying motionless on his back. He prolongs his make-believe of death longer than he did at first. When he wakes up, I renew the test a third, a fourth, a fifth time, with no intervals of repose. The duration of the motionless condition increases each time. To quote the figures, the five consecutive experiments, from the first to the last, have continued respectively for 17, 20, 25, 33 and 50 minutes. Starting with a quarter of an hour, the attitude of death ends by lasting nearly a whole hour.

Without being constant, similar facts recur repeatedly in my experiments, the duration, of course, varying. They tell us that as a general rule the Scarites lengthens the period of his lifeless posture the oftener the experiment is repeated. Is this a matter of practice, or is it an increase of cunning employed in the hope of finally tiring a too persistent enemy? It would be premature to draw conclusions: the cross-examination of the insect has not yet been thorough enough.

Let us wait. Besides, we need not imagine that it is possible to go on like this until our patience is exhausted. Sooner or later, flurried by my pestering, the Scarites refuses to sham dead. Scarcely is he laid on his back after a fall, when he turns over and takes to his heels, as though he judged a stratagem which succeeded so indifferently to be henceforth useless.

If we were to stop here, it would certainly seem that the insect, a cunning hoaxer, seeks, as a means of defence, to cheat those who attack him. He counterfeits death; he repeats the process, becoming more persistent in his fraud in proportion as the aggression is repeated; he abandons his trickery when he deems it futile. But hitherto we have subjected him only to a friendly examination-in-chief. The time has come to put a string of searching questions and to trick the trickster if there be really any deception.

The Beetle under experiment is lying on the table. He feels beneath him a hard body which gives him no chance of digging. As he cannot hope to take refuge underground, an easy task for his nimble and vigorous tools, the Scarites lies low in his death-like pose, keeping it up, if need be, for an hour. If he were reclining on the sand, the loose soil with which he is so familiar, would he not regain his activity more rapidly, would he not at least betray by a few twitches his desire to escape into the basement?

I was expecting to see him do so; and I was mistaken. Whether I place him on wood, glass, sand or garden mould, the Beetle in no way modifies his tactics. On a surface readily excavated he continues his immobility as long as on an unassailable surface.

This indifference to the nature of the support half opens the door to doubt; what follows opens it wide. The patient is on the table before me and I watch him closely. With his gleaming eyes, overshadowed by his antennæ, he also sees me; he watches me; he observes me, if I may so express myself. What can be the visual impression of the insect when face to face with that monstrosity, man? How does the pigmy measure the enormous monument that is the human body? Seen from the depths of the infinitely little, the immense perhaps is nothing.

We will not go so far as that; we will admit that the insect watches me, recognizes me as his persecutor. So long as I am here, he will suspect me and refuse to budge. If he does decide to do so, it will be after he has exhausted my patience. Let us therefore move away. Then, since any trickery will be needless, he will hasten to take to his legs again and make off.

I move ten paces farther from him, to the other end of the room. I hide, I do not move a muscle, for fear of breaking the silence. Will the insect pick itself up? No, my precautions are superfluous. Alone, left to itself, perfectly quiet, it remains motionless for as long a time as when I was standing close beside it.

Perhaps the clear-sighted Scarites has seen me in my corner, at the other end of the room; perhaps a subtle scent has revealed my presence to him. We will do more, then. I cover him with a bell-glass which will save him from being worried by the Flies and I leave the room; I go downstairs into the garden. There is no longer anything likely to disturb him. Doors and windows are closed. Not a sound from without; no cause for alarm indoors. What will happen in the midst of that profound silence?

Nothing more and nothing less than usual. After twenty, forty minutes' waiting out of doors, I come upstairs again and return to my insect. I find him as I left him, lying motionless on his back.

This experiment, many times repeated with different subjects, throws a vivid light upon the question. It expressly assures us that the attitude of death is not the ruse of an insect in danger. Here there is nothing to alarm the creature. Around him all is silence, solitude, repose. When he persists in his immobility it cannot now be to deceive an enemy. I have no doubt about it: there is something else involved.

Besides, why should he need special defensive artifices? I could understand that a weak, pacific, ill-protected insect might resort to ruses when in danger; but in him, the warlike bandit, so well armoured, it is more than I can understand. No insect on his native sea-shore has the strength to resist him. The most powerful of them, the Sacred Beetle and the Pimelia, are easy-going creatures which, so far from molesting him, are fine booty for his burrow.

Can he be threatened by the birds? It is very doubtful. As a Carabus, he is saturated with acrid humours which must make his body a far from pleasing mouthful. For the rest, he lives hidden from the light of day in a burrow where no one sees him; he emerges only at night, when the birds are no longer inspecting the beach. There are no beaks about for him to fear.

And this butcher of the Pimeliæ and even occasionally of the Sacred Beetles, this bully whom no danger threatens, is supposed to be such a coward as to sham death on the slightest alarm! I take the liberty of doubting this more and more.

I am confirmed in my doubts by the Smooth-skinned Scarites (S. lavigatus, FAB.), a denizen of the same shores. The first insect is a giant; the second, by comparison, is a dwarf. Otherwise he displays the same shape, the same jet-black costume, the same armour, the same habits of brigandage. Well, the Smooth-skinned Scarites, in spite of his weakness and his smallness, is almost ignorant of the trick of pretending to be dead. When molested for a moment and then turned on his back, he at once picks himself up and flees. I can hardly obtain a few seconds' immobility; once only, daunted by my obstinacy, the dwarf remains motionless for a quarter of an hour.

How different from the giant, motionless the moment that he is thrown upon his back, sometimes picking himself up only after an hour of inaction! It is the reverse of what ought to happen, if the apparent death were really a defensive ruse. The giant, confident in his strength, should disdain this cowardly posture; the timid dwarf should be quick to have recourse to it. And it is just the other way about. What is there behind all this?

Let us try the influence of danger. With what natural enemy shall I confront the big Scarites, motionless on his back? I know none. Let us then create a make-believe assailant. The Flies put me on the track of one.

I have spoken of their importunity during my investigations in the hot season. If I do not employ a bell-glass or keep an assiduous watch, rarely does the shrewish Dipteron fail to alight upon my patient and explore him with her proboscis. We will let her have her way this time.

Hardly has the Fly grazed this apparent corpse with her legs, when the Scarites' tarsi quiver as though twitched by a slight electric shock. If the visitor be merely passing, matters go no farther; but, if she persist, particularly near the Beetle's mouth, moist with saliva and disgorged secretions of food, the tormented Scarites promptly kicks, turns over and makes off.

Perhaps he did not think it opportune to prolong his fraud in the face of so contemptible an enemy. He resumes his activity because he has recognized the absence of danger. Then let us call in another interloper, one of formidable size and strength. I happen to have handy a Great Capricorn, with powerful claws and mandibles. That the long-horned insect is a peaceful creature I am well aware; but the Scarites does not know it; on the sands of the shore he has never encountered such a colossus as this, who is capable of impressing less timid creatures than he. Fear of the unknown will merely aggravate the situation.

Guided by the tip of my straw, the Capricorn sets his foot upon the prostrate insect. The Scarites' tarsi begin to quiver immediately. If the contact be prolonged or multiplied, or if it become aggressive, the dead insect gets on its legs again and scuttles off, just as the titillations of the Fly have already shown me. When danger is imminent and all the more to be dreaded because its nature is unknown, the trick of the simulation of death disappears and flight takes its place.

The following experiment is not without value. I take some hard substance and knock the foot of the table on which the insect is lying on its back. The shock is very slight, not enough to shake the table perceptibly. The whole thing is limited to the inner vibrations of a resilient body which has received a blow. But it is quite enough to disturb the insect's immobility. At each tap the tarsi are flexed and quiver for a moment.

Lastly, let us try the effect of light. So far, the patient has been treated in the shade of my cabinet, away from the direct sunlight. The sun is shining full upon the window. What will the motionless insect do if I carry it thither, from my table to the window, into the bright light? That we can find out in a moment. Under the direct rays of the sun, the Scarites immediately turns over and moves off.

This is enough. Patient, persecuted creature, you have half-betrayed your insect. When the Fly tickles you, drains your moist lip, treats you as a corpse whose juices she would like to suck; when the huge Capricorn appears to your horrified gaze and puts a foot on your belly, as though to take possession of his prey; when the table quivers, that is to say, when, for you, the ground shakes, undermined perhaps by some invader of your burrow; when a bright light surrounds you, favouring the designs of your enemies and imperilling your safety as an insect that loves the dark, then, in truth, it would be wiser not to move, if really your chief resource, when danger threatens you, is to simulate death.

On the contrary, at those critical moments, you give a start; you move, you resume your normal attitude, you run away. Your fraud is discovered; or, to put it more plainly, there is no trick. Your inertia is not simulated; it is real. It is a condition of temporary torpor into which you are plunged by your delicate nervous organization. A mere nothing makes you fall into it; a mere nothing withdraws you from it, above all a bath of light, that sovran stimulus of activity.

In respect of prolonged immobility as the result of emotion, I find a rival of the Giant Scarites in a large black Buprestis, with a flour-speckled corselet, a lover of the blackthorn, the hawthorn and the apricot-tree. His name is Capnodis tenebrionis, LIN. At times I see him, with his legs closely folded and his antennæ lowered, prolonging his motionless posture upon his back for more than an hour. At other times the insect is bent upon escaping, apparently influenced by atmospheric conditions of which I do not know the secret. One or two minutes' immobility is as much as I can then obtain.

Let me recapitulate: in my various subjects the attitude of death is of very variable duration, governed as it is by a host of unsuspected circumstances. Let us take advantage of favourable opportunities, which are fairly frequent. I subject the Cloudy Buprestis to the different tests undergone by the Giant Scarites. The results are the same. When you have seen the first, you have seen the second. There is no need to linger over them.

I will only mention the promptness with which the Buprestis, lying motionless in the shade, recovers his activity when I carry him away from my table into the broad sunlight of the window. After a few seconds of this bath of heat and light, the insect half-opens his wing-cases, using them as levers, and turns over, ready to take flight if my hand did not instantly snap him up. He is a passionate lover of the light, a devotee of the sun, intoxicating himself in its rays upon the bark of his blackthorn-trees on the hottest afternoons.

This love of tropical temperature suggests the following question: what would happen if I were to chill the creature in its immobile posture? I foresee a more prolonged inertia. The chill, of course, must not be great, for it would be followed by the lethargy into which insects capable of surviving the winter fall when benumbed by the cold.

On the contrary, the Buprestis must as far as possible retain his full vitality. The lowering of the temperature must be gentle, very moderate and such that the insect, under similar climatic conditions, would retain his powers of action in ordinary life. I have a convenient refrigerator at my disposal. It is the water of my well, whose temperature, in summer, is nearly twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit below that of the surrounding air.

The Buprestis, in whom I have just produced inertia by means of a few taps, is installed on his back in a little flask which I seal hermetically and immerse in a bucket full of this cold water. To keep the bath as cool as at first, I gradually renew it, taking care not to shake the flask in which the patient is lying, in his attitude of death.

The result rewards my pains. After five hours under water, the insect is still motionless. Five hours, I say, five long hours; and I might certainly say longer, if my exhausted patience had not put an end to the experiment. But this is enough to banish any idea of fraud on the insect's part. Here, beyond a doubt, the insect is not shamming dead. He is actually somnolent, deprived of the power of movement by an internal disturbance which my teasing produced at the outset and which is prolonged beyond its usual limits by the surrounding coolness.

I try the effect of a slight decrease in temperature upon the Giant Scarites by subjecting him to a similar sojourn in the cold water of the well. The result does not respond to the hopes which the Buprestis gave me. I do not succeed in obtaining more than fifty minutes' inertia. I have often obtained as long periods of immobility without resorting to the refrigerating artifice.

It might have been foreseen. The Buprestis, a lover of the burning sunshine, is affected by the cold bath in a different degree from the Scarites, who prowls about by night and spends his day in the basement. A fall of a few degrees in temperature takes the chilly insect by surprise and has no effect upon the one accustomed to the coolness underground.

Other experiments on these lines tell me nothing more. I see the inert condition persisting sometimes for a longer, sometimes for a shorter period, according as the insect seeks the sunlight or avoids it. Let us change our method.

I evaporate a few drops of sulphuric ether in a glass jar and put in a Stercoraceous Geotrupes and a specimen of Buprestis tenebrionis, at the same time. In a few moments both subjects are motionless, anæsthetized by the etheric vapour. I take them out quickly and lay them on their backs in the open air.

Their attitude is exactly that which they would have assumed under the influence of a shock or any other cause of alarm. The Buprestis has his legs symmetrically folded against his chest and belly; the Geotrupes has his outspread, stretched in disorder, rigid and as though attacked by catalepsy. You could not tell if they were dead or alive.

They are not dead. In a minute or two, the Geotrupes' tarsi twitch, the palpi quiver, the antennæ wave gently to and fro. Then the fore-legs move; and a quarter of an hour has not elapsed before the other legs are struggling. The activity of the insect made motionless by the concussion of a shock would reawaken in precisely the same fashion.

As for the Buprestis, he is in a state of inertia so profound that at first I really believe him to be dead. He recovers during the night; and next day I find him in possession of his usual activity. The ether experiment, which I took care to stop at the moment when it produced the desired effect, has not been fatal to him; but it has had much more serious consequences for him than for the Geotrupes. The insect more sensitive to the alarm due to concussion or to a fall of temperature is also the more sensitive to the action of ether.

Thus the enormous difference which I observe in these two insects, with regard to the inertia provoked by a shock or by handling them in one's fingers, is explained by nice differences of impressionability. Whereas the Buprestis remains motionless for nearly an hour, the Geotrupes is struggling violently after a minute or two. And even then I rarely attain this limit.

In what respect has the Geotrupes, to defend itself, less need of the stratagem of simulated death than the Black Buprestis, well protected by his massive build and his armour, which is so hard that it resists the point of a pin and even of a needle? We should be perplexed by the same question in respect of a multitude of insects, some of which remain motionless while others do not; and we could not possibly foresee what would happen from the genus of the subject, its form, or its way of living.

Buprestis tenebrionis, for example, exhibits a persistent inertia. Will it be the same, because of similarity of structure, with other members of the same group? Not at all. My chance finds provide me with the Brilliant Buprestis (B. rutilans, FAB.), and the Nine-spotted Buprestis (Ptosima novemmaculata, FAB.). The first resists all my attempts. The splendid creature grips my fingers, grips my tweezers and insists on getting up the moment that I lay it on its back. The second readily becomes immobile; but how brief is its attitude of death! Four or five minutes at most.

A Melasoma-beetle, Omocrates abbreviatus, OLIV., whom I frequently discover under the broken stones on the neighbouring hills, continues motionless for over an hour. He rivals the Scarites. We must not forget to add that very often the awakening takes place within a few minutes.

Can he owe his long period of inertia to the fact that he is one of the Tenebrionidæ, or Darkling Beetles? By no means, for here in the same group is Pimelia bipunctata, who turns a somersault on his round back and finds his feet the moment he has turned over; here is a Cellar-beetle (Blaps similis, LATR.), who, unable to turn with his flat back, his big belly and his welded wing-cases,1 struggles desperately after a minute or two of inertia.

1 The Cellar-beetle is one of the wingless Beetles.—Translator's Note.

The short-legged Beetles, trotting along with tiny steps, ought, one would think, to make up in cunning, more fully than the others, for their incapacity for rapid flight. The facts do not correspond with this apparently well-founded forecast. I have consulted the genera Chrysomela,2 Blatta,3 Silpha, Cleonus,4 Bolboceras,5 Cetonia, Hoplia, Coccinella,6 and so on. A few minutes or a few seconds are nearly always long enough for the return to activity. Several of them even obstinately refuse to sham death.

2 Golden-apple Beetles.—Translator's Note.

3 Blackbeetles or Cockroaches.—Translator's Note.

4 A genus of Weevils.—Translator's Note.

5 A mushroom-eating Beetle. Cf. The Life of the Fly: chap. xviii.—Translator's Note.

6 Ladybirds.—Translator's Note.

As much must be said of the Beetles well-equipped for pedestrian escape. Some remain motionless for a few seconds; others, more numerous still, behave in an ungovernable fashion. In short, there is no guide to tell us in advance:

"This one will readily assume the posture of a dead insect; this one will hesitate; that one will refuse."

There is nothing but shadowy probabilities, until experiment has given its verdict. From this muddle shall we draw a conclusion which will set our minds at rest? I hope so.

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