Nothing more and nothing less than usual. After twenty, forty minutes' waiting out of doors, I come upstairs again and return to my insect. I find him as I left him, lying motionless on his back.
This experiment, many times repeated with different subjects, throws a vivid light upon the question. It expressly assures us that the attitude of death is not the ruse of an insect in danger. Here there is nothing to alarm the creature. Around him all is silence, solitude, repose. When he persists in his immobility it cannot now be to deceive an enemy. I have no doubt about it: there is something else involved.
Besides, why should he need special defensive artifices? I could understand that a weak, pacific, ill-protected insect might resort to ruses when in danger; but in him, the warlike bandit, so well armoured, it is more than I can understand. No insect on his native sea-shore has the strength to resist him. The most powerful of them, the Sacred Beetle and the Pimelia, are easy-going creatures which, so far from molesting him, are fine booty for his burrow.
Can he be threatened by the birds? It is very doubtful. As a Carabus, he is saturated with acrid humours which must make his body a far from pleasing mouthful. For the rest, he lives hidden from the light of day in a burrow where no one sees him; he emerges only at night, when the birds are no longer inspecting the beach. There are no beaks about for him to fear.
And this butcher of the Pimeliæ and even occasionally of the Sacred Beetles, this bully whom no danger threatens, is supposed to be such a coward as to sham death on the slightest alarm! I take the liberty of doubting this more and more.
I am confirmed in my doubts by the Smooth-skinned Scarites (S. lavigatus, FAB.), a denizen of the same shores. The first insect is a giant; the second, by comparison, is a dwarf. Otherwise he displays the same shape, the same jet-black costume, the same armour, the same habits of brigandage. Well, the Smooth-skinned Scarites, in spite of his weakness and his smallness, is almost ignorant of the trick of pretending to be dead. When molested for a moment and then turned on his back, he at once picks himself up and flees. I can hardly obtain a few seconds' immobility; once only, daunted by my obstinacy, the dwarf remains motionless for a quarter of an hour.
How different from the giant, motionless the moment that he is thrown upon his back, sometimes picking himself up only after an hour of inaction! It is the reverse of what ought to happen, if the apparent death were really a defensive ruse. The giant, confident in his strength, should disdain this cowardly posture; the timid dwarf should be quick to have recourse to it. And it is just the other way about. What is there behind all this?
Let us try the influence of danger. With what natural enemy shall I confront the big Scarites, motionless on his back? I know none. Let us then create a make-believe assailant. The Flies put me on the track of one.
I have spoken of their importunity during my investigations in the hot season. If I do not employ a bell-glass or keep an assiduous watch, rarely does the shrewish Dipteron fail to alight upon my patient and explore him with her proboscis. We will let her have her way this time.