The World of Insects

The Roman naturalist Pliny wrote of ants in the Himalayas “the color of a cat and as large as an Egyptian wolf.” Pliny naively had accepted tales of travellers but the actual curiosities of the insect world are almost as strange as anything he related. There are bugs that live in ice, bugs that are happy only in near boiling water, snow white bugs that dwell deep in the earth, bugs that make their homes in petroleum pools.

None are as big as wolves, but the insect world has its giants as well as its dwarfs. The Atlas moth of India has a wing-spread of nearly a foot. An East Indian walking stick is 15 inches long. The Hercules beetle of Africa sounds like an airplane in flight. Enormous forelegs, more than twice the length of the rest of the body are characteristic of a black wood beetle which covers a space of eight inches with all its legs extended. A curiosity of the Malay Archipelago is a “fly with horns.” It has protuberances on its head which suggest the horns of a deer.

A South African fly has eyes which extend on stalks from the sides of its head. The stalks are so long that the measurement from eye to eye is a third more than the length of the body from head to tail.

One blood-sucking insect can distend itself with blood to more than twelve times its original weight. As the huge meal is digested the abdomen contracts like a deflating balloon.

The death watch beetle, standby for stories of haunted old castles, bumps its head on the top of its tunnels in wooden walls to send a kind of telegraphic message to its mate.

Some chalcid flies paralyze caterpillars and lay self-multiplying eggs in their bodies. More than 2,000 larvae may be produced from a single egg deposited in this way.

A singular ant lion, dweller near the Egyptian pyramids, has a slender and elongated neck whose caliper jaws seem to be held at the end of an outstretched arm. The neck, in many cases is far longer than the rest of the body. It permits the insects to probe for prey in deep crevasses.

The goat of the insect world, the drugstore beetle, is known to consume 45 different substances, including the poisons aconite and belladonna. Other beetles feed on cigarettes, mustard plasters and red pepper. Ants have shown themselves resistant to cyanide. In the case of some insects a reduced diet slows down growth. Some wood-boring grubs sometimes live in house timbers for years after they have been put in place. In one instance an adult beetle emerged from a porch post that had been standing for twenty years. The dried timber lacks the nutritive qualities of the living tree and the growth of the grub is arrested so that long periods pass before it reaches maturity.

A carnivorous butterfly larva lives in the nests of an Australian ant where it feeds on the young. An especially tough outer shell protects it from attacks by adults ants.

The rat-tailed maggot inhabits stagnant water. It feeds on the bottom and breathes air through an extensible tube that forms its tail. Like a diver obtaining oxygen through an air hose while working on sea bottom, it is able to remain submerged as long as it desires.

The little frog hopper produces its own climate. In spring and summer small masses of froth often appear on grass stems and weeds. Within such a bubble mass, sheltered from direct rays of the sun and kept moist by the foam, the immature insect spends its early days. For millions of years it has been employing its own primitive form of air conditioning.