The Sacred Beetle, and Others

by Jean-Henri Fabre

The grub is hatched in about a week; and a strange and paradoxical little creature it is. On its back it has an enormous sugar-loaf hump, the weight of which overbalances it each time that it tries to stand on its legs and walk. At every moment it staggers and falls under the burden of the hunch. The Sacred Beetle’s larva showed us long ago a knapsack which was a storehouse of cement to stop up the accidental cracks in the provision-box and protect the food from drying too rapidly. The Onthophagus’ grub exaggerates a similar [[281]]warehouse to the utmost degree; it makes a cone-shaped monument of it, so extravagant and grotesque as to border on caricature. Is it some mad masquerader’s joke or a rational deformity which will have its uses later? The future will tell us.

Without saying anything more about it, for lack of words to give a picture of anything so extraordinary, I will refer the reader to the grub of the Oniticellus, which I sketched in an earlier chapter.[1] The two hunchbacks are very much alike.

Unable to keep its hump upright, the grub of the Onthophagus lies down on its side in the cell and licks the cream all around it. There is cream everywhere, on the ceiling, on the walls, on the floor. As soon as one spot is thoroughly bared, the consumer moves a little way on with the help of its well-shaped legs; it capsizes again and starts licking again. As the cabin is large and plentifully supplied, the patent-food diet lasts some time.

The fat babies of the Geotrupes, the Copris and the Sacred Beetle finish at one brief sitting the dainty wherewith their narrow lodge is hung, a dainty frugally served and just sufficient to whet the appetite and prepare the stomach for coarser fare; but the Onthophagus’ grub, that puny dwarf, has enough to last it for a week and more. The spacious birth-chamber, which is out of all proportion to the nurseling’s size, has permitted this wastefulness.

At last the real loaf is attacked. In about a month everything is consumed, except the wall of the sack. And now the splendid part played by the hump stands revealed. Glass tubes, which I had got ready in anticipation, [[282]]allow me to watch the grub at work. Growing plumper and plumper and more and more humpbacked, it withdraws to one end of the cell, which has become a crumbling ruin. Here it builds a casket in which the transformation will take place. Its materials are the digestive residuum, converted into mortar and heaped up in the hump. The stercoral architect is about to construct a masterpiece of elegance out of its own ordure, held in reserve in that receptacle.

I follow its movements with the magnifying-glass. It curves itself into a loop, closes the circuit of the digestive apparatus, brings its two ends into contact and, with the tip of its mandibles, seizes a pellet of dung evacuated at that moment. This pellet is extracted very neatly and moulded into a brick which is measured most carefully. A slight bend of the creature’s neck sets the brick in place. Others follow, laid in the most scrupulously regular courses one above the other. Giving a tap here and there with its palpi, the grub makes sure of the steadiness of the parts, their accurate binding, their orderly arrangement. It turns round in the centre of the work as the edifice rises, even as a mason does when building a turret.

Sometimes the brick that has been laid becomes loose, because the cement has given way. The grub takes it up again with its mandibles, but, before replacing it, coats it with an adhesive moisture. It holds it to its anus, whence a gummy consolidating-extract trickles immediately and almost imperceptibly. The hump supplies the materials; the intestines give, if necessary, the glue that sticks them together.

In this way an attractive house is obtained, ovoid in form, polished as stucco within and adorned on the outside [[283]]with slightly projecting scales, similar to those on a cedar-cone. Each of these scales is one of the bricks that have been produced from the hump. The casket is not large: a cherry-stone would about represent its dimensions; but it is so accurate, so prettily fashioned that it will bear comparison with the finest products of entomological industry.

The Bull Onthophagus has not a monopoly of this jeweller’s art: all, throughout the group, excel in it to the same degree. One of the smallest, the Forked Onthophagus, whose work is hardly larger than a pepper-corn, is as expert as the others in the manufacture of boxes shaped like a cedar-cone. It is a family gift, an invariable gift, despite all differences in size, costume or hornery. The Bison Onitis, the Yellow-footed Oniticellus and certainly many others retire, for the transformation, into a residence similar in architecture to that of the Onthophagi; they too tell us that instincts are independent of structure.

In the first week of July let us complete the destruction of the Bull Onthophagus’ cell, already much impaired by the grub, which, after exhausting the contents of its knapsack, has gnawed the inner layer of the walls. The ruins are removed as easily as the husk of a ripe walnut. A sort of shelling process gives us the seed, that is to say, the nymphal casket, which comes out quite neatly, without sticking to its wrapper at any point. Break open the gem. The nymph is there, half-transparent and as it were carved out of crystal. Fortune favours me with a male, who is more interesting because of his frontal armour.