The Sacred Beetle, and Others

by Jean-Henri Fabre

There is something more, therefore; and this is furnished by the mother’s instinct. Whereas the manufacturers of pears and ovoids always dig their burrow at an open spot, with no other protection than the mound of earth flung up, the makers of little thimbles bore their well directly under the material exploited and go by preference to the voluminous droppings of the Horse and the Mule. Under this thick mattress, the soil, protected against sun and wind, keeps fresh and damp for some little time, steeped as it is in the moisture from the dung.

For that matter, the danger does not last long. The egg yields up the grub in less than a week; and the larva attains its full development within a dozen days or so, if nothing untoward happens. This makes about twenty days in all for the critical period of the Onthophagus and the Oniticellus. What does it matter if the walls of the emptied thimble do dry after that! The nymph will be all the better off in a solid casket, which will easily crumble to bits later, when, with the first September rains, the insect effects its release.

In appearance and habits the grub resembles that which the Sacred Beetle and the others have introduced to us. It possesses the same aptitude for defending the cell against the dangerous intrusion of the dry air; the same [[180]]zeal, the same nimbleness in cementing the least breach with the putty of the intestines; the same knapsack hunching the middle of the back.

The grub of the Oniticellus has the most remarkable hump of all. Would you care to have a quick and yet a faithful sketch of it? Draw a short, wrinkled sausage. About the middle of this sausage, on the side, graft an appendix. There you have the beast, in three almost equal parts. The lower portion is the abdomen; the upper, where you are at first inclined to look for the head, so clearly does it appear to be a continuation of the part below, is the hump, the inordinate, extravagant hump, bigger than caricaturist ever dared conceive in the wildest flights of his imagination. It occupies the place which by rights belongs to the chest and head. Then where are these? Thrust aside by the monstrous knapsack, they constitute a lateral appendage, a mere knob. The strange creature bends at right angles under the weight of its hump.

When nature goes in for the grotesque, she leaves us behind. Is grotesque the right word? I have seen representations of Monkeys adorned with preposterous noses which Rabelais, for all his inspired vision of the huge, never conceived; and this though he invented the nose ‘like the beak of a limbeck, in every part thereof most variously diapered with the twinkling sparkles of crimson blisters budding forth, and purpled with pimples all enamelled with thick-set wheals of a sanguine colour, bordered with gules.’[3] I know some who are all scrubby with shock-headed wigs and whiskers and imperials in which every hairy drollery seems to be epitomized; and yet [[181]]there is not a doubt that noses ‘like the beak of a limbeck’ and bristly faces are highly admired in the simian clan. There is no boundary between the fashionable and the grotesque. It all depends upon the appraiser.

If the grub with the outrageous hump were to show itself in public, it would doubtless represent the supreme expression of the beautiful in the eyes of the Oniticellus and the Onthophagus. Because it is a recluse, nobody sees it. Its charms would remain unknown but for the philosophical observer, who says to himself:

‘Everything is good that harmonizes with the functions to be fulfilled. The grub requires a cement-bag to safeguard its provisions against desiccation; it is born with a knapsack on its back so that it may live.’

Thus is the hump excused and abundantly justified.

Its usefulness is displayed from another point of view. The thimble is of such a niggardly size that the grub consumes it almost entirely. All that remains is a thin layer, a crumbling remnant which would provide no security for the nymph. The ruined dwelling has to be strengthened, to be lined with a new wall. For this purpose, the larva of the Oniticellus empties the whole of its knapsack and gives its cell a complete coating of cement, after the manner of the Sacred Beetle and others.

The grub of the different species of Onthophagi does more artistic work. Placing its putty drop by drop, it constructs a mosaic of lightly-projecting scales, suggesting those of a cedar-cone. When finished, well dried and stripped of the last shreds of the original thimble, the shell thus obtained by the Bull Onthophagus is the size of an average filbert and resembles the pretty cone of the alder-tree. The imitation is so good that I was taken in by it the first time that I handled the curious product when [[182]]digging in my cages. It needed the contents of the mock alder-cone to show me my mistake. The hump has an artfulness of its own: it was keeping this elegant specimen of stercoral jewellery in reserve for us.