THE SPANISH COPRIS: THE HABITS OF THE MOTHER

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 SPANISH COPRIS: THE HABITS OF THE MOTHER

Chapter X. THE SPANISH COPRIS: THE HABITS OF THE MOTHER

There are two special points to be remembered in the life-history of the Spanish Copris: the rearing of her family; and her pill-rolling talents.

First, the output of her ovaries is extremely limited; and nevertheless her race thrives just as much as that of many others whose seed is numerous. Maternal care makes up for the small number of her eggs. Prolific layers, after making a few rough and ready arrangements, abandon their progeny to luck, which often sacrifices a thousand in order to preserve one; they are factories turning out organic matter for life’s comprehensive maw. Almost as soon as hatched, or even before hatching, their offspring for the most part perish devoured. Extermination makes short work of superfluity in the interests of the community at large. That which was destined to live lives, but under another form. These excessive breeders know and can know nothing of maternal affection.

The Copres have other and fundamentally different habits. Three or four eggs represent their entire posterity. How are they to be preserved, to a great extent, from the accidents that await them? For them, so few in numbers, as for the others, whose name is legion, existence is an inexorable struggle. The mother knows it and, in order to save her nearest and dearest, sacrifices herself, giving up [150]outdoor pleasures, nocturnal flights and that supreme delight of her race, the investigation of a fresh heap of dung. Hidden underground, by the side of her brood, she never leaves her nursery. She keeps watch; she brushes off the parasitic growths; she closes up the cracks; she drives off any ravagers that may appear: Acari,1 tiny Staphylini,2 grubs of small Flies, Aphodii,3 Onthophagi.4 In September she climbs to the surface with her family, which, having no further use for her, emancipates itself and henceforth lives as it pleases. No bird could be a more devoted mother.

Secondly, the Copris’ abrupt transformation at laying-time into an expert pill-maker provides us, in so far as we are able to get at the truth, with a proof of the theorem which I was almost afraid to formulate just now. Here is a Beetle not equipped for the pill-roller’s art, an art moreover which is not required for her individual prosperity. She has no aptitude, no propensity for kneading the food which she buries and consumes as she finds it; she is totally ignorant of the sphere and its properties in connection with food-preservation; and, all of a sudden, in obedience to an inspiration for which nothing, in the ordinary course of her life, has prepared the way, she moulds into a sphere or ovoid the legacy which she bequeaths to her grub. With her short, clumsy fore-leg she shapes the viaticum of her offspring into a skilful solid mass. The difficulty is great. It is overcome by dint of application and patience. In two days, or three at most, the round cradle is perfected. How does the dumpy creature [151]go to work to achieve mathematical exactness in her ball? The Sacred Beetle has her long legs, which serve as compasses; the Gymnopleurus has similar tools. But the Copris, unprovided with the spread of limb which would enable her to encircle the object, finds nothing in her equipment that favours the formation of a sphere. Perched upon her ovoid, she labours at it bit by bit with an intensity that makes up for her defective implements; she estimates the correctness of its curve by assiduous tactile examinations from one end to the other. Perseverance triumphs over clumsiness and achieves what at first seemed impossible.

Here all my readers will assail me with the same questions: why this abrupt change in the insect’s habits? Why this indefatigable patience in a form of work that bears no relation to the tools at hand? And what is the use of this ovoid shape whose perfection demands so great an outlay of time?

To these queries I see only one possible reply: the preservation of the foodstuffs in a fresh condition demands the globular form. Remember this: the Copris builds her nest in June; her larva develops during the dog-days; it lies a few inches below the surface of the ground. In the cavern, which is now a furnace, the provisions would soon become uneatable, if the mother did not give them the shape least susceptible to evaporation. Very different from the Sacred Beetle in habits and structure but exposed to the same dangers in her larval state, the Copris, in order to ward off the peril, adopts the principles of the great pill-roller, principles whose surpassing wisdom we have already made manifest.

I would ask the philosophers to ponder upon these five manufacturers of preserved meats and the numerous rivals [152]which they doubtless possess in other climes. I submit to them these inventors of the largest possible box with the smallest possible surface for provisions liable to dry; and I ask them how such logical inspirations and so much rational foresight can take birth in the obscure brain of the lower orders of creation.

Let us come down to plain facts. The Copris’ pill is a more or less pronounced ovoid, sometimes differing but slightly from a sphere in shape. It is not quite so pretty as the work of the Gymnopleurus, which is very nearly pear-shaped, or at least reminds one of a bird’s egg, notably a Sparrow’s, because of the similarity in size. The Copris’ work is more like the egg of a nocturnal bird of prey, of any member of the Owl family, as its projecting end does not stand out conspicuously.

From this pole to the other the ovoid measures, on an average, forty millimetres, by thirty-four across.5 Its whole surface is tightly packed, hardened by pressure, converted into a crust with a little earth grained into it. At the projecting end, an attentive eye will discover a ring bristling with short straggling threads. Once the egg is laid in the cup into which the original sphere is hollowed, the mother, as I have already said, gradually brings the edges of the cavity together. This produces the projecting end. To complete the closing, she delicately rakes the ovoid and scrapes a little of the material upwards. This forms the ceiling of the hatching-chamber. At the top of this ceiling, which, if it fell in, would destroy the egg, the pressure is very slight indeed, leaving an area devoid of rind and covered with bits of thread. Immediately under this circle, which is a sort of porous felt, lies the [153]hatching-chamber, the egg’s little cell, which easily admits air and warmth.

Like the Sacred Beetle’s egg and those of other Dung-beetles, the Copris’ egg at once attracts attention by its size, but it grows much larger before hatching, increasing two- or threefold in bulk. Its moist chamber, saturated with the emanations from the provisions, supplies it with nourishment. Through the chalky porous shell of the bird’s egg, an exchange of gases takes place, a respiratory process which quickens matter while consuming it. This is a cause of destruction as well as of life: the sum total of the contents does not increase under the inflexible wrapper; on the contrary, it diminishes.

Things happen otherwise in the Copris’ egg, as in the other Dung-beetles’. We still, no doubt, find the vivifying assistance of the air; but there is also an accession of new materials which come to add to the reserves furnished by the ovary. Endosmosis causes the exhalations of the chamber to penetrate through a very delicate membrane, so much so that the egg is fed, swells and enlarges to thrice its original volume. If we have failed to follow this progressive growth attentively, we are quite surprised at the extraordinary final size, which is out of all proportion to that of the mother.

This nourishment lasts a fairly long time, for the hatching takes from fifteen to twenty days. Thanks to the added substance with which the egg has been enriched, the larva is already pretty big when born. We have not here the weakly grub, the animated speck which many insects show us, but a pretty little creature, at once sturdy and tender, which, happy at being alive, arches its back and frisks and rolls about in its nest.[154]

It is satin-white, with a touch of straw-colour on its skull-cap. I find the terminal trowel plainly marked: I mean that slanting plane with the scalloped edge whereof the Sacred Beetle has already shown us the use when some breach in the cell needs repairing. The implement tells us the future trade. You also, my attractive little grub, will become a knapsacked excreter, a fervent plasterer manipulating the stucco supplied by the intestines. But first I will subject you to an experiment.

Now what are your first mouthfuls? As a rule I see the walls of your nest shining with a greenish, semifluid wash, a sort of thinly-spread jam. Is this a special dish intended for your delicate baby stomach? Is it a childish dainty disgorged by the mother? I used to think so when I first began to study the Sacred Beetle. To-day, after seeing a similar wash in the cells of the various Dung-beetles, including the uncouth Geotrupes,6 I wonder whether it is not rather the result of a mere exudation accumulating on the walls in a sort of dew, the fluid quintessence filtering through the porous matter.

The Copris mother lent herself to observation better than any of the others. I have many times surprised her at the moment when, hoisted on her round pill, she excavates the top in the form of a cup; and I have never seen anything that at all suggests a disgorgement. The cavity of the bowl, which I lose no time in examining, is just like the rest. Perhaps I have missed the favourable moment. In any case, I can take only a brief glance at the mother’s occupations: all work ceases as soon as I raise the cardboard sheath to give light. Under these conditions the secret might escape me indefinitely. Let us look at the [155]difficulty from another angle and enquire whether some special milk-food, elaborated in the mother’s stomach, is necessary for the infant larva.

In one of my cages I rob a Sacred Beetle of her round pill, lately fashioned and briskly rolled. I strip it at one point of its earthy layer and into this clean point I drive the blunt end of a pencil, making a hole a third of an inch deep. I install a newly-hatched Copris-grub in it. The youngster has not yet taken the least refreshment. It is lodged in a cell which in no respect differs from the rest of the mass. There is no creamy coating, whether disgorged by the mother or merely oozing through. What will result from this change of quarters?

Nothing untoward. The larva develops and thrives quite as well as in its native cell. Therefore, when I first started, I was the victim of an illusion. The delicate wash which nearly always covers the egg-chamber in the Dung-beetles’ work is simply an exudation. The grub may be all the better for it, when taking its first mouthfuls; but it is not indispensable. To-day’s experiment confirms the fact.

The grub subjected to this test was put into an open pit. Things cannot remain in this condition. The absence of ceiling is irksome to the young larva, which loves darkness and tranquillity. How will it set to work to build its roof? The mortar-trowel cannot be used as yet, for materials are lacking in the knapsack which so far has done no digesting.

Novice though it be, the little grub has its resources. Since it cannot be a plasterer, it becomes a bricklayer. With its legs and mandibles it removes particles from the walls of its cell and comes and places them one by one on the rim of the well. The defensive work makes rapid [156]progress and the assembled atoms form a vault. It has no strength about it, I admit; the dome falls in if I merely breathe on it. But soon the first mouthfuls will be swallowed; the intestines will fill; and, well supplied, the grub will come and consolidate the work by injecting mortar into the interstices. Properly cemented, the frail awning becomes a solid ceiling.

Let us leave the tiny grub in peace and consult other larvæ which have attained half their full growth. With the point of my penknife I pierce the pill at the upper end; I open a window a few millimetres square. The grub at once appears at the casement, anxiously enquiring into the disaster. It rolls itself over in the cell and returns to the opening, this time, however, presenting its wide, padded trowel. A jet of mortar is discharged over the breach. The product is a little too much diluted and of inferior quality. It runs, it flows in all directions, it does not set quickly. A fresh ejaculation follows and another and yet another, in swift succession. Useless pains! In vain the plasterer tries again, in vain it struggles, gathering the trickling material with its legs and mandibles: the hole refuses to close. The mortar is still too fluid.

Poor, desperate thing, why don’t you copy your young sister? Do what the little larva did just now: build an awning with particles taken from the wall of your house; and your liquid putty will do well on that spongy scaffolding! The large grub, trusting to its trowel, does not think of that method. It exhausts itself, without any appreciable result, in trying to effect repairs which the little grub managed most ingeniously. What the baby knew how to do the big larva no longer knows.

Insect industry has instances like this of professional methods employed at certain periods and then abandoned [157]and utterly forgotten. A few days more or less make changes in the creature’s talents. The tiny grub, devoid of cement, has bricks to fall back upon: the big larva, rich in putty, scorns to build, or rather no longer knows how, though it is even better-endowed than the youngster with the necessary tools. The strong one no longer remembers what as a weakling he so well knew how to do, only a few days before. A poor power of recollection, if indeed there be such a power under that flat skull! However, in the long run and thanks to the evaporation of the ejected materials, the short-memoried plumber ends by stopping up the window. Nearly half a day has been spent in trowel-work.

The idea occurs to me to try whether the mother will come to the distressed one’s aid in like circumstances. We have seen her diligently restoring the ceiling which I smashed above the egg. Will she do for the big grub what she did for the sake of the germ? Will she repair the torn pill in which the plasterer is helplessly floundering?

To make the experiment more conclusive, I select pills that do not belong to the mother entrusted with the work of restoration. I picked them up in the fields. They are far from regular, are all dented because of the stony soil on which they lay, a soil not easily convertible into a roomy workshop and consequently unsuited to exact geometry. They are moreover encrusted with a reddish rind, due to the ferruginous sand in which I packed them in order to avoid dangerous jolting on the road. In short, they differ a good deal from those elaborated in a jar, with plenty of space around them and on a clean support, pills which are perfect ovoids, free from earthy stains. In the top of two of them I make an opening which the grub, faithful to its methods, at once strives to stop up, but [158]without success. One, stored away under a bell-glass, will serve me as a witness. The other I place in a jar where the mother is watching her cradles, two splendid ovoids.

I have not long to wait. An hour later I raise the cardboard screen. The Copris is on the strange pill and so busily engaged that she pays no attention to the daylight admitted. In other, less urgent circumstances, she would at once have slipped down and taken shelter from the troublesome light; this time, she does not move and imperturbably continues her work. Before my eyes she rakes away the red crust and uses the scrapings from the cleansed surface to spread over and solder the breach. It is hermetically sealed in a very short space of time. I stand amazed at the insect’s skill.

Well, while the Copris is restoring a pill that does not belong to her, what is the grub that owns the other doing in the bell-glass? It continues to kick about hopelessly, vainly lavishing cement that is incapable of setting. Put to the test in the morning, it does not succeed until the afternoon in closing the aperture; and then the job is anything but well done. The borrowed mother, on the other hand, has not taken twenty minutes to remedy the accident most excellently.

She does even more. After the most important part is finished and the afflicted grub succoured, she stands all day, all night and the next day on the newly-closed pill. She brushes it daintily with her tarsi to get rid of the layer of earth; she obliterates the dents, smooths the rough places and adjusts the curve, until from a shapeless and soiled pill it becomes an ovoid vying in precision with those which she had already manufactured in her glass jar.[159]

Such care bestowed upon a strange grub deserves attention. I must go on. I slip into the jar a second pill, similar to the foregoing, ruptured at the top, with an opening larger than on the first occasion, one about a sixteenth of an inch square. The greater the difficulty, the more praiseworthy will the restoration be.

It is, indeed, difficult to close. The grub, a fat baby, is wildly gesticulating and excreting through the window. Leaning over the hole, its new mother seems to console it. She is like a nurse bending over the cradle. Meanwhile her helpful legs are working with a will, scratching around the yawning aperture to obtain the wherewithal to stop it. But the materials, half-dried this time, are hard and unyielding. They are slow in coming; and the quantity is too small for so big a hole. No matter: what with the grub continuing to shoot forth its putty and the other mixing it with her own scrapings, to give it consistency, and afterwards spreading it, the opening closes up.

The thankless task has taken a whole afternoon. It is a good lesson for me. I shall be more careful in future. I shall choose softer pills and, instead of opening them by removing the materials, I shall simply lift the wall by shreds until the grub is laid bare. The mother will only have to flatten down those shreds and solder them together.

I act accordingly with a third pill, which is very neatly repaired in a short time. Not a trace remains of the ravages caused by my penknife. I continue in the same way with a fourth, a fifth and so on, at intervals long enough to give the mother a rest. I stop when the receptacle is full, looking like a pot of plums. The contents amount to twelve pieces, of which ten have come from the outside, all ten violated by my [160]penknife and all restored to good condition by the foster-mother.

There are some interesting sidelights to this curious experiment, which I could have continued if the capacity of the jar had permitted. The Copris’ zeal, which was not lessened after the restoring of so many ruins, and her diligence, which was the same at the end as in the beginning, tell me that I had not exhausted the maternal solicitude. Let us leave it at that; it is amply sufficient.

Observe first the arrangement of the pills. Three are enough to occupy the floor-space of the enclosure. The others are therefore gradually superposed in layers, making in the end a four-story structure. The whole forms an irregular pile, an absolute labyrinth with very narrow, winding lanes, through which the insect glides with some difficulty. When her household is in order, the mother stays below, under the pile, touching the sand. It is at this moment that a new broken cell is introduced, right at the top of the pile, on the third or fourth floor. Let us put back the screen, wait a few minutes and then go back to the jar.

The mother is there, hoisted on the torn pill and doing her utmost to close it. How was she informed on the ground-floor of what was happening in the attic? How did she know that a larva up there was calling for her assistance? The babe in distress screams and the nurse comes running up. The grub says nothing; it makes no sound. Its desperate gesticulations are not accompanied by any noise. And the watcher hears this mute appeal. She notices the silence, she sees the invisible. I am bewildered, every one would be bewildered by the mystery of these perceptions which are so foreign to our nature [161]and which ‘topsy turvy the understanding,’ as Montaigne would say. Let us pass on.

I have described elsewhere7 the brutality with which the Bee, that most gifted of insects, treats the eggs of her fellows. Osmiæ, Chalicodomæ and others perpetrate atrocities at times. In a moment of vengeance or of that inexplicable aberration which occurs after the laying is finished, a sister’s egg, savagely torn from the cell with the pincers of the mandibles, is flung into the dust-bin. The thing is pitilessly crushed, is ripped open, is even eaten. How different from the good-natured Copris!

Shall we attribute altruism among families to the Dung-beetle? Shall we do her the signal honour of allowing that she administers relief to foundlings? That would be madness. The mother who so diligently assists the children of others thinks, beyond a doubt, that she is working for her own. The victim of my experiment had two pills that belonged to her; my intervention gave her ten more. And, in the jar filled with prunes to the top, her assiduous care draws no distinction between the real household and the casual family. Her intellect therefore is incapable of the most elementary conception of quantity; she cannot even distinguish between the singular and the plural, the few and the many.

Can it be because of the darkness? No, for my frequent visits give the Copris an opportunity, when the opaque screen is lifted, of looking around her and discovering the strange accumulation, that is if light be really the guide which she lacks. Besides, has she not another means of information? In the natural burrow, the pills, three or at most four in number, all lie on the ground, forming one [162]row only. With my additions they pile up into four stories.

In order to clamber to the top, in order to hoist herself up through such a maze as never Copris mansion knew before, the Beetle must rub against and touch the units of the heap. But she counts none the better for that. To the insect all this is just the home, is just the family, worthy of the same care at the summit as at the base. The twelve produced by my trickery and the two of her own laying are the same thing in her arithmetic.

I present this strange mathematician to any one who comes and talks to me of a glimmer of reason in the insect, as Darwin claimed. It is one of two things: either this glimmer does not exist, or else the Copris reasons divinely and becomes a St. Vincent de Paul of insects, moved to pity by the sad lot of the homeless. Make your choice.

It is possible that, rather than abandon the principle, men will not shrink from sheer folly and that the compassionate Copris will one day figure in the evolutionists’ Book of Moral Deeds. Why not? Does it not already, with an eye to the same argument, contain a certain tender-hearted Boa Constrictor who, on losing his master, lay down and died of grief? Oh, the fond reptile! These edifying stories, compiled with the object of tracing man back to the Gorilla, procure me a few moments of mild amusement when I come across them. But we will not labour the point.

Better that you and I, friend Copris, should speak of things that do not raise storms. Would you mind telling me the reason of the reputation which you enjoyed in the days of antiquity? Ancient Egypt extolled you in pink granite and porphyry; she venerated you, O my fair horned one, and awarded you honours similar to the [163]Scarab’s! You ranked second in the entomological hierarchy.

Horapollo tells us of two Sacred Beetles with horns. One sported a single specimen on her head, the other had two. The first is you, the inmate of my glass jars, or at least some one very like you. If Egypt had known what you have just taught me, she would certainly have placed you above the Scarab, that roving pill-roller who deserts her home and leaves her family, after it has received its inheritance, to shift for itself as best it can. Knowing nothing of your wonderful habits, which history is noting for the first time, she deserves all the greater praise for having divined your merits.

The second, the one with two horns, would, according to the experts, appear to be the insect which the naturalists call the Isis Copris. I know her only in effigy, but her image is so striking that I sometimes catch myself dreaming late in life, just as I did in my youth, of going down to Nubia and exploring the banks of the Nile, in order to cross-examine, under some lump of Camel-dung, the insect that is emblematic of Isis the divine brooder, nature made fruitful by Osiris, the sun.

Oh, simpleton! Attend to your cabbages, sow your turnips: that won’t do you any harm; water your lettuces; and understand, once and for all, how vain are all our questionings when it is simply a matter of enquiring into a muck-raker’s sagacity! Be less ambitious; confine yourself to setting down facts.

So be it. There is nothing striking to be said of the larva, which is a replica of the Sacred Beetle’s, save for some minute details which do not interest us here. It has the same hump in the middle of its back, the same slanting truncature of the last segment, expanding into a trowel [164]on the upper surface. A ready excreter, it understands, though less thoroughly than the other, the art of stopping up breaches to protect itself from draughts. The larval state covers a period of four to six weeks.

At the end of July the nymph appears, first amber-yellow all over, next currant-red on the head, horn, corselet, breast and legs, while the wing-cases have the pale hue of gum arabic. A month later, by the end of August, the perfect insect releases itself from its mummy wrappers. Its costume, now wrought upon by delicate chemical changes, is quite as strange as that of the new-born Sacred Beetle. Head, corselet, breast and legs are chestnut-red. The horn, the epistoma and the denticulations of the fore-legs are shaded with brown. The wing-cases are a rather yellowish white. The abdomen is white, excepting only the anal segment, which is an even brighter red than the thorax. I perceive this early colouring of the anal segment, while the rest of the abdomen is still quite pale, in the Sacred Beetles, the Gymnopleuri, the Onthophagi, the Geotrupes, the Cetoniæ8 and many others. Whence this precocity? One more note of interrogation which will long stand awaiting a reply.

A fortnight passes. The costume becomes ebon-black, the cuirass hardens. The insect is ready for the emergence. We are at the end of September; the earth has drunk in a few showers which soften the stubborn shell and allow of an easy deliverance. This is the moment, prisoners mine. If I have teased you a little, at least I have kept you in plenty. Your shells have hardened in your cages and have become caskets which your own efforts will never succeed in forcing open. I will come to your aid. Let us describe in detail how things happen.[165]

Once the burrow is supplied with the voluminous loaf out of which three or four pilular rations are to be carved, the mother does not appear outside again. Besides, there is no provision made for her. The heap stored away below is the family cake, the exclusive patrimony of the grubs, who will receive equal shares. For four months, therefore, the recluse is without food of any kind.

It is a voluntary privation. Victuals are there, within reach, copious and of superior quality; but they are intended for the larvæ and the mother will take good care not to touch them: anything abstracted for her own use would mean so much less for the grubs. Gluttonous at the outset, when there was no family to consider, she now becomes very abstemious, even to the point of prolonged fasting. The Hen sitting on her eggs forgets to eat for some weeks; the watchful Copris mother forgets it during a third part of the year. The Dung-beetle outdoes the bird in maternal self-abnegation.

Now what does this self-sacrificing mother do underground? To what household cares can she devote the period of so long a fast? My appliances provide a satisfactory answer. I possess, as I have said, two kinds. One consists of glass jars with a thin layer of sand and a cardboard case to create darkness; the other of large pots filled with earth and closed with a pane of glass.

At any moment when I raise the opaque sheath of the first, I find the mother now perched upon the top of her ovoids, now on the ground, half-erect, smoothing the bulging curve with her fore-leg. On rarer occasions, she is dozing in the midst of the heap.

The manner in which she employs her time is obvious. She watches her treasure of pills; her inquisitive antennæ sound them to discover what is happening inside; she [166]listens to the nurselings growing; she touches up faulty spots; she polishes and repolishes the surfaces in order to delay the desiccation within until the development of the inmates is complete.

These scrupulous cares, cares occupying every moment, have results which would strike the attention of the least-experienced observer. The egg-shaped vessels, or better the cradles of the nursery, are wonderful in their regular curves and in their neatness. We see none of those chinks with a blob of putty showing through, none of those cracks, of those peeling scales, in short none of those defects which, towards the end, nearly always disfigure the Sacred Beetle’s pears, handsome though they be at the start.

The horned Dung-beetle’s caskets could not be better shaped, even after they are thoroughly dried up, if they had been worked in plaster by a modeller. What pretty, dark-bronze eggs they are, rivalling the Owl’s in size and form! This irreproachable perfection, maintained until the shell is burst by the emerging larva, is obtained only by incessant touching up, interspersed at long intervals with periods of rest during which the mother composes herself for a nap at the foot of the heap.

The glass jars leave room for doubt. It is possible to say that the insect, imprisoned in an impassable enclosure, stays in the midst of its pills because it is unable to go elsewhere. I agree; but there remains that work of polishing and of continual inspection about which the mother need not trouble at all if these cares did not form part of her habits. Were she solely anxious to recover her liberty, she ought to be roaming restlessly all round the enclosure, whereas I always see her very quiet and absorbed. The only evidence of her excitement, when the raising of the cardboard cylinder suddenly produces daylight, is that [167]she lets herself slide from the top of a pill and hides in the heap. If I moderate the light, composure is soon restored and she resumes her position on the summit, there to continue the work which my visit interrupted.

For the rest, the evidence of the apparatus that is always in darkness is conclusive. The mother buried herself in June in the sand of my pots with copious provisions, which are soon converted into a certain number of pills. She is at liberty to return to the surface when she pleases. She will there find broad daylight under the big sheet of glass which ensures me against her escape; she will find food, which I renew from time to time in order to entice her.

Well, neither the daylight nor the food, desirable though this must seem to be after a fast so long extended, is able to tempt her. Nothing stirs in my pots, nothing rises to the surface until the rains come.

It is exceedingly probable that exactly the same thing happens underground as in the jars. To make certain, I inspect some of my appliances at different periods. I always find the mother beside her pills, in a spacious cave which gives free play to the watcher’s evolutions. She could go lower down in the sand and hide anywhere she pleased, if rest is what she wants; she could climb outside and sit down to fresh victuals, if refreshment became necessary. Neither the prospects of rest in a deeper crypt nor the thought of the sun and of nice soft rolls make her leave her family. Until the last of her offspring has burst his shell, she sticks to her post in the birth-chamber.

It is now October. The rains so greatly desired by man and beast have come at last, soaking the ground to some depth. After the torrid and dusty days of summer, when life is in suspense, we have the coolness that revives it, we have the last festival of the year. In the midst of the [168]heath putting out its first pink bells, the oronge9 splits its white purse and comes into view, looking like the yolk of an egg half deprived of its albumen; the massive purple boletus turns blue under the heel of the passer-by who crushes it; the autumnal squill lifts its little spike of lilac flowers; the strawberry-tree’s coral balls begin to soften.

This tardy springtime has its echoes underground. The vernal generations, Sacred Beetles and Gymnopleuri, Onthophagi and Copres, hasten to burst their shells softened by the damp and come to the surface to take part in the gaieties of the last fine weather.

My captives are denied the friendly shower. The cement of their caskets, baked by the summer heat, is too hard to yield. The file of the shield and legs would make no impression on it. I come to the poor things’ assistance. A carefully graduated watering replaces the natural rain in my glass and earthenware pots. To ascertain once more the effects of water on the Dung-beetles’ deliverance, I leave a few of the receptacles in the state of dryness for which they have to thank the dog-days.

The result of my sprinkling soon becomes apparent. In a few days’ time, now in one jar, now in another, the pills, properly softened, open and fall to pieces under the prisoner’s efforts. The new-born Copris appears and sits down, with his mother, to the food which I have placed at his disposal.

When the hermit, stiffening his legs and humping his back, tries to split the ceiling that presses down on him, does the mother come to his assistance by delivering an assault from the outside? It is quite possible. The [169]watcher, hitherto so careful of her brood, so attentive to what is happening within the pills, can hardly fail to hear the sounds made by the captive in his struggles to emerge.

We have seen her indefatigably stopping the holes caused by my indiscretion; we have seen her, often enough, restoring for the grub’s greater safety the pill which I had opened with my penknife. Fitted by instinct for repairing and building, why should she not be fitted for demolishing? However, I will make no assertions, for I have been unable to see. The favourable conditions always escaped me: I came either too late or too early. And then let us not forget that the admission of light usually interrupts the work.

In the darkness of the sand-filled pots, the liberation must take place in the same way. All that I am able to witness is the insect’s emergence above ground. Attracted by the smell of fresh provisions which I have served on the threshold of the burrow, the newly-released family emerge gradually, accompanied by the mother, wander round for a time under the pane of glass and then attack the pile.

There are three or four of them, five at most. The sons are easily recognized by the greater length of their horns; but there is nothing to distinguish the daughters from the mother. For that matter, the same confusion prevails among themselves. An abrupt change of attitude has taken place; and the erstwhile devoted mother is now utterly indifferent to the welfare of her emancipated family. Henceforward each looks after his own home and his own interests. They no longer know one another.

In the receptacles which are not moistened by artificial showers, things come to a miserable end. The dry shell, almost as hard as an apricot- or peach-stone, offers indomitable resistance. The insect’s legs manage to grate [170]off barely so much as a pinch of dust. I hear the tools rasping against the unyielding wall; then silence follows and not a prisoner survives to tell the tale. The mother too perishes in that home which has remained dry when the season for dryness has passed. The Copris, like the Sacred Beetle, needs the rain to soften the granite shell.

To return to the liberated ones. When the emergence is effected, the mother, we were saying, ceases to trouble about them. Her present indifference, however, must not make us forget the wonderful care which she has lavished for four months on end. Outside the Social Hymenoptera—Bees, Wasps, Ants and so on—who spoon-feed their young and bring them up according to scrupulously hygienic methods, where in the insect world shall we find another example of such maternal self-abnegation, of such wise and tender care for the offspring? I know of none.

How did the Copris acquire this lofty quality, which I would readily call a moral quality, if morality and nescience had any point of contact? How did she learn to surpass in tenderness the Bee and the Ant, both so greatly renowned? I say surpass. The mother Bee, indeed, is simply a germ-factory, a prodigiously fertile factory, I admit. She lays eggs; and that is all. The family is brought up by others, real sisters of charity these, vowed to celibacy.

The Copris mother does more in her humble household. Alone and entirely unaided, she provides each of her children with a cake whose crust, hardening and constantly renovated with the maternal trowel, becomes an inviolable cradle. So intense is her affection that she neglects herself to the extent of losing all need for food. Down in a burrow, for four consecutive months, she [171]watches over her brood, attending to the wants of the germ, the grub, the nymph and the perfect insect. She does not return to the glad outer life until all her family are emancipated. Thus do we behold one of the most brilliant manifestations of maternal instinct in a humble dung-eater. The Spirit breatheth where he will.

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This book is part of the public domain. Jean-Henri Fabre (2022). The Sacred Beetle, and Others. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/66743/pg66743-images.html

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