Note 3 — Chapter vi · THE LARVA AND THE NYMPH

The first ration is finished in six or seven days’ time; none of it remains but the framework of skin, with all its parts more or less in position. The larva, whose length is now twelve millimetres,3 leaves the Cricket’s body through the hole in the thorax which it made to start with. During this operation it moults; and its cast skin often remains caught in the opening through which it made its exit. It rests after the moulting and then attacks a second ration. Being stronger now, the larva has nothing to fear from the feeble movements of the Cricket, whose daily-increasing torpor has had time to extinguish the last glimmers of resisting-power during the week and more that has elapsed since the dagger-thrusts were given. It is therefore assailed with no precautions, usually at the belly, which is the tenderest part and the richest in juices. Soon the turn comes of the third Cricket and lastly of the fourth, who is devoured in ten hours or so. Of these last three victims all that remains is the tough integuments, whose various parts are severed one by one and carefully emptied. If a fifth ration be presented, the larva scorns it, or hardly touches it, not from abstemiousness, but from imperious necessity. For observe that hitherto the larva has ejected no excrement and that its intestines, into which four Crickets have been crammed, are distended to bursting-point. A new ration cannot therefore tempt its gluttony; and henceforth it thinks only of making itself a silken tabernacle.