By pitching the sand with its broad, flat head, just as a man who digs a well would pitch out shovelfuls of dirt, the young ant lion excavates a tiny crater in the sand and hides itself in the crater’s pit with its pincers sticking upwards through the fine, loose sand.
Any child who has jumped into his father’s oat bin and tried to climb up the hillside of tumbling grain, knows how hard it is to get out. If he will imagine a hidden monster waiting with jaws opened at the bottom, he will have some sympathy for the unlucky ant which, slipping upon the rolling sand of the ant lion’s crater slides slowly towards its pit—helped perhaps by dirt thrown on it by the ant lion.
There seems to be no escape, and once within reach, the pincers close on it, and along their grooved inner faces, helped down by special tongue-like licking organs, the blood trickles and is guided to the mouth and thence into the stomach of the lion. And, curiously enough, this stomach is the only organ of digestion which the ant lion has. The stomach has no outlet and everything that is not digested must wait within it until the change of life brings on this winged state, when, like a tiny egg, the gathered excreta of the weeks and even months of feeding is thrown out from the body. Perhaps this strange structure of the beast has something to do with the fact that it can live six months at least without a particle of food.
THE SCORPION FLY
(Panorpa confusa, Westw.)
When the scorpion fly, standing still, raises above its head that pair of pincers which forms its tail, it seems almost like some two-headed monstrosity.
It is interesting to know that the great Aristotle knew these insects and thought of them as winged scorpions. It is only the males which have these curious tails.