A CATERPILLAR DEVOURED BY A FUNGUS
(Apantesis nais attacked by Empusa sp., Dru.)
One cold morning in early autumn I saw this caterpillar lying so still on the grass stem on which you see it that I thought I could photograph it before it woke up. I picked the grass panicle, but when I came to look closely at the caterpillar I found it was a shriveled corpse and that there were gaping wounds in its sides, filled with the threads of a parasitic fungus; a fungus familiar to me through one of its distant relatives which I spent six months of my life studying, and which lives in the intestines of the frog. There is something ghastly about the slow but resistless working of a fungus in the body of a caterpillar. One cannot help wondering where the plant got in and how the caterpillar felt about it. Was there the horror of finding that it could not be dislodged and the hopelessness of the struggle against it and the impending death and shortening of an already very brief existence?
So these, and seemingly all other creatures, have their diseases, and the studies which men have made and are making upon them in all parts of the world are helping us to understand the causes of those which attack and often conquer human beings.
NERVE-WINGED INSECTS
(Neuroptera)