The death watch beetle, standby for stories of haunted old castles, bumps its head on the top of its tunnels in wooden walls to send a kind of telegraphic message to its mate.
Some chalcid flies paralyze caterpillars and lay self-multiplying eggs in their bodies. More than 2,000 larvae may be produced from a single egg deposited in this way.
A singular ant lion, dweller near the Egyptian pyramids, has a slender and elongated neck whose caliper jaws seem to be held at the end of an outstretched arm. The neck, in many cases is far longer than the rest of the body. It permits the insects to probe for prey in deep crevasses.
The goat of the insect world, the drugstore beetle, is known to consume 45 different substances, including the poisons aconite and belladonna. Other beetles feed on cigarettes, mustard plasters and red pepper. Ants have shown themselves resistant to cyanide. In the case of some insects a reduced diet slows down growth. Some wood-boring grubs sometimes live in house timbers for years after they have been put in place. In one instance an adult beetle emerged from a porch post that had been standing for twenty years. The dried timber lacks the nutritive qualities of the living tree and the growth of the grub is arrested so that long periods pass before it reaches maturity.
A carnivorous butterfly larva lives in the nests of an Australian ant where it feeds on the young. An especially tough outer shell protects it from attacks by adults ants.
The rat-tailed maggot inhabits stagnant water. It feeds on the bottom and breathes air through an extensible tube that forms its tail. Like a diver obtaining oxygen through an air hose while working on sea bottom, it is able to remain submerged as long as it desires.
The little frog hopper produces its own climate. In spring and summer small masses of froth often appear on grass stems and weeds. Within such a bubble mass, sheltered from direct rays of the sun and kept moist by the foam, the immature insect spends its early days. For millions of years it has been employing its own primitive form of air conditioning.
Gigantic Serpents of the Sky
Titanic pink serpents coiled and wheeled in the sky. The earth below was plunged in a chill twilight as they shut out the December sun. These cosmic reptiles were two or three miles long. They moved about a mile a minute. They made a noise like a tornado punctuated with the rat-tat-tat of machine guns.
Thus the naturalist John Audubon described a mass passenger pigeon flight over Kentucky which, he estimated, included more than a billion birds. As they came out of the northeast they looked like a gigantic, low pink cloud driven by a hurricane. Suddenly they split with almost military precision into the coiling, snake-like formation as predacious hawks hovered above them.