In the morning, when the rays of the sun visit the cage placed in the window of my study, I serve out the day’s ration, a sheaf of green spikes of common grass picked outside my door. The Dectici come running up to the handful, gather round it and, very peaceably, without quarrelling among themselves, dig with their mandibles between the bristles of the spikes to extract and nibble the unripe seeds. Their costume makes one [[213]]think of a flock of Guinea-fowl pecking the grain scattered by the farmer’s wife. When the spikes are robbed of their tender seeds, the rest is scorned, however urgent the claims of hunger may be.
To break the monotony of the diet as much as is possible in these dog-days, when everything is burnt up, I gather a thick-leaved, fleshy plant which is not too sensitive to the summer heat. This is the common purslane, another invader of our garden-beds. The new green stuff meets with a good reception; and once again the Dectici dig their teeth not into the leaves and the juicy stalks, but only into the swollen capsules of half-formed grains.
This taste for tender seeds surprises me: δηκτικός, biting, fond of biting, the lexicon tells us. A name that expresses nothing, a mere identification-number, is able to satisfy the nomenclator; in my opinion, if the name possesses a characteristic meaning and at the same time sounds well, it is all the better for it. Such is the case here. The Decticus is eminently an insect given to biting. Mind your finger if the sturdy Grasshopper gets hold of it: he will rip it till the blood comes.
And can this powerful jaw, of which I [[214]]have to beware when I handle the creature, possess no other function than to chew soft grains? Can a mill like this have only to grind little unripe seeds? Something has escaped me. So well-armed with mandibular pincers, so well-endowed with masticatory muscles that swell out his cheeks, the Decticus must cut up some leathery prey.
This time I find the real diet, the fundamental if not the exclusive one. Some good-sized Locusts are let into the cage. I put in it the species mentioned in a note below,[1] now one, now the other, as they happen to get caught in my net. A few Grasshoppers[2] are also accepted, but not so readily. There is every reason to think that, if I had had the luck to capture them, the entire Locust and Grasshopper family would have met the same fate, provided that they were not too insignificant in size.
Any fresh meat tasting of Locust or Grasshopper suits my ogres. The most frequent victim is the Blue-winged Locust. [[215]]There is a deplorably large consumption of this species in the cage. This is how things happen: as soon as the game is introduced, an uproar ensues in the mess-room, especially if the Dectici have been fasting for some time. They stamp about and, hampered by their long shanks, dart forward clumsily; the Locusts make desperate bounds, rush to the top of the cage and there hang on, out of the reach of the Grasshopper, who is too stout to climb so high. Some are seized at once, as soon as they enter. The others, who have taken refuge up in the dome, are only postponing for a little while the fate that awaits them. Their turn will come; and that soon. Either because they are tired or because they are tempted by the green stuff below, they will come down; and the Dectici will be after them immediately.
Speared by the hunter’s fore-legs, the game is first wounded in the neck. It is always there, behind the head, that the Locust’s shell cracks first of all; it is always there that the Decticus probes persistently before releasing his hold and taking his subsequent meals off whatever joint he chooses.
It is a very judicious bite. The Locust is hard to kill. Even when beheaded, he goes [[216]]on hopping. I have seen some who, though half-eaten, kick out desperately and succeed, with a supreme effort, in releasing themselves and jumping away. In the brushwood, that would be so much game lost.
The Decticus seems to know all about it. To overcome his prey, so prompt to escape by means of its two powerful levers, and to render it helpless as quickly as possible, he first munches and extirpates the cervical ganglia, the main seat of innervation. Is this an accident, in which the assassin’s choice plays no part? No, for I see the murder performed invariably in the same way when the prey is in possession of its full strength; and again no, because, when the Locust is offered in the form of a fresh corpse, or when he is weak, dying, incapable of defence, the attack is made anywhere, at the first spot that presents itself to the assailant’s jaws. In such cases the Decticus begins either with a haunch, the favourite morsel, or with the belly, back or chest. The preliminary bite in the neck is reserved for difficult occasions.
This Grasshopper, therefore, despite his dull intellect, possesses the art of killing scientifically of which we have seen so many [[217]]instances elsewhere;[3] but with him it is a rude art, falling within the knacker’s rather than the anatomist’s domain.