Social Life in the Insect World Part 16

Nothing visible betrays the lure. On a sheet of paper, a recent resting-place, around which the visitors had crowded, there was no visible trace, no moisture; the surface was as clean as before the impregnation.

The product is elaborated slowly, and must acc.u.mulate a little before it reveals its full power. Taken from her couch and placed elsewhere the female loses her attractiveness for the moment and is an object of indifference; it is to the resting-place, saturated by long contact, that the arrivals fly. But the female soon regains her power.

The emission of the warning effluvium is more or less delayed according to the species. The recently metamorphosed female must mature a little and her organs must settle to their work. Born in the morning, the female of the Great Peac.o.c.k moth sometimes has visitors the night of the same day; but more often on the second day, after a preparation of forty hours or so. The Oak Eggar does not publish her banns of marriage before the third or fourth day.

Let us return for a moment to the problematical function of the antennae.

The male Oak Eggar has a sumptuous pair, as has the Great Peac.o.c.k or Emperor Moth. Are we to regard these silky "feelers" as a kind of directing compa.s.s?--I resumed, but without attaching much importance to the matter, my previous experiment of amputation. None of those operated on returned. Do not let us draw conclusions from that fact alone. We saw in the case of the Great Peac.o.c.k that more serious reasons than the truncation of the antennae made return as a rule impossible.

Moreover, a second Bombyx or Eggar, the Clover Moth, very like the Oak Eggar, and like it superbly plumed, poses us a very difficult problem.

It is fairly abundant around my home; even in the orchard I find its coc.o.o.n, which is easily confounded with that of the Oak Eggar. I was at first deceived by the resemblance. From six coc.o.o.ns, which I expected to yield Oak Eggars, I obtained, about the end of August, six females of the other species. Well: about these six females, born in my house, never a male appeared, although they were undoubtedly present in the neighbourhood.

If the ample and feathery antennae are truly sense-organs, which receive information of distant objects, why were not my richly plumed neighbours aware of what was pa.s.sing in my study? Why did their feathery "feelers"

leave them in ignorance of events which would have brought flocks of the other Eggar? Once more, the organ does not determine the apt.i.tude. One individual or species is gifted, but another is not, despite an organic equality.

CHAPTER XVI

A TRUFFLE-HUNTER: THE _BOLBOCERAS GALLICUS_

In the matter of physics we hear of nothing to-day but the Rontgen rays, which penetrate opaque bodies and photograph the invisible. A splendid discovery; but nothing very remarkable as compared with the surprises reserved for us by the future, when, better instructed as to the why and wherefore of things than now, and supplementing our feeble senses by means of science, we shall succeed in rivalling, however imperfectly, the sensorial acuteness of the lower animals.

How enviable, in how many cases, is the superiority of the beasts! It makes us realise the insufficiency of our impressions, and the very indifferent efficacy of our sense-organs; it proclaims realities which amaze us, so far are they beyond our own attributes.

A miserable caterpillar, the Processional caterpillar, found on the pine-tree, has its back covered with meteorological spiracles which sense the coming weather and foretell the storm; the bird of prey, that incomparable watchman, sees the fallen mule from the heights of the clouds; the blind bats guided their flight without collision through the inextricable labyrinth of threads devised by Spallanzani; the carrier pigeon, at a hundred leagues from home, infallibly regains its loft across immensities which it has never known; and within the limits of its more modest powers a bee, the Chalicodoma, also adventures into the unknown, accomplis.h.i.+ng its long journey and returning to its group of cells.

Those who have never seen a dog seeking truffles have missed one of the finest achievements of the olfactory sense. Absorbed in his duties, the animal goes forward, scenting the wind, at a moderate pace. He stops, questions the soil with his nostrils, and, without excitement, scratches the earth a few times with one paw. "There it is, master!" his eyes seem to say: "there it is! On the faith of a dog, there are truffles here!"

He says truly. The master digs at the point indicated. If the spade goes astray the dog corrects the digger, sniffing at the bottom of the hole.

Have no fear that stones and roots will confuse him; in spite of depth and obstacles, the truffle will be found. A dog's nose cannot lie.

I have referred to the dog's speciality as a subtle sense of smell. That is certainly what I mean, if you will understand by that that the nasal pa.s.sages of the animal are the seat of the perceptive organ; but is the thing perceived always a simple smell in the vulgar acceptation of the term--an effluvium such as our own senses perceive? I have certain reasons for doubting this, which I will proceed to relate.

On various occasions I have had the good fortune to accompany a truffle-dog of first-cla.s.s capacities on his rounds. Certainly there was not much outside show about him, this artist that I so desired to see at work; a dog of doubtful breed, placid and meditative; uncouth, ungroomed, and quite inadmissible to the intimacies of the hearthrug.

Talent and poverty are often mated.

His master, a celebrated _raba.s.sier_[5] of the village, being convinced that my object was not to steal his professional secrets, and so sooner or later to set up in business as a compet.i.tor, admitted me of his company, a favour of which he was not prodigal. From the moment of his regarding me not as an apprentice, but merely as a curious spectator, who drew and wrote about subterranean vegetable affairs, but had no wish to carry to market my bagful of these glories of the Christmas goose, the excellent man lent himself generously to my designs.

It was agreed between us that the dog should act according to his own instincts, receiving the customary reward, after each discovery, no matter what its size, of a crust of bread the size of a finger-nail.

Every spot scratched by his paw should be excavated, and the object indicated was to be extracted without reference to its marketable value.

In no case was the experience of the master to intervene in order to divert the dog from a spot where the general aspect of things indicated that no commercial results need be expected, for I was more concerned with the miserable specimens unfit for the market than with the choice specimens, though of course the latter were welcomed.

Thus conducted, this subterranean botanising was extremely fruitful.

With that perspicacious nose of his the dog obtained for me both large and small, fresh and putrid, odorous and inodorous, fragrant and offensive. I was amazed at my collection, which comprised the greater number of the hypogenous fungi of the neighbourhood.

What a variety of structure, and above all of odour, the primordial quality in this question of scent! There were some that had no appreciable scent beyond a vague fungoid flavour, more or less common to all. Others smelt of turnips, of sour cabbage; some were fetid, sufficiently so to make the house of the collector noisome. Only the true truffle possessed the aroma dear to epicures. If odour, as we understand it, is the dog's only guide, how does he manage to follow that guide amidst all these totally different odours? Is he warned of the contents of the subsoil by a general emanation, by that fungoid effluvium common to all the species? Thus a somewhat embarra.s.sing question arises.

I paid special attention to the ordinary toadstools and mushrooms, which announced their near advent by cracking the surface of the soil. Now these points, where my eyes divined the cryptogam pus.h.i.+ng back the soil with its b.u.t.ton-like heads, these points, where the ordinary fungoid odour was certainly very p.r.o.nounced, were never selected by the dog. He pa.s.sed them disdainfully, without a sniff, without a stroke of the paw.

Yet the fungi were underground, and their odour was similar to that I have already referred to.

I came back from my outings with the conviction that the truffle-finding nose has some better guide than odour such as we with our sense-organs conceive it. It must perceive effluvia of another order as well; entirely mysterious to us, and therefore not utilised. Light has its dark rays--rays without effect upon our retinas, but not apparently on all. Why should not the domain of smell have its secret emanations, unknown to our senses and perceptible to a different sense-organ?

If the scent of the dog leaves us perplexed in the sense that we cannot possibly say precisely, cannot even suspect what it is that the dog perceives, at least it is clear that it would be erroneous to refer everything to human standards. The world of sensations is far larger than the limits of our own sensibility. What numbers of facts relating to the interplay of natural forces must escape us for want of sufficiently sensitive organs!

The unknown--that inexhaustible field in which the men of the future will try their strength--has harvests in store for us beside which our present knowledge would show as no more than a wretched gleaning. Under the sickle of science will one day fall the sheaves whose grain would appear to-day as senseless paradoxes. Scientific dreams? No, if you please, but undeniable positive realities, affirmed by the brute creation, which in certain respects has so great an advantage over us.

Despite his long practice of his calling, despite the scent of the object he was seeking, the _raba.s.sier_ could not divine the presence of the truffle, which ripens in winter under the soil, at a depth of a foot or two; he must have the help of a dog or a pig, whose scent is able to discover the secrets of the soil. These secrets are known to various insects even better than to our two auxiliaries. They have in exceptional perfection the power of discovering the tubers on which their larvae are nourished.

From truffles dug up in a spoiled condition, peopled with vermin, and placed in that condition, with a bed of fresh sand, in a gla.s.s jar, I have in the past obtained a small red beetle, known as the truffle-beetle (_Anisotoma cinnamomea_, Panz.), and various Diptera, among which is a Sapromyzon which, by its sluggish flight and its fragile form, recalls the _Scatophaga scybalaria_, the yellow velvety fly which is found in human excrement in the autumn. The latter finds its refuge on the surface of the soil, at the foot of a wall or hedge or under a bush; but how does the former know just where the truffle lies under the soil, or at what depth? To penetrate to that depth, or to seek in the subsoil, is impossible. Its fragile limbs, barely able to move a grain of sand, its extended wings, which would bar all progress in a narrow pa.s.sage, and its costume of bristling silken pile, which would prevent it from slipping through crevices, all make such a task impossible. The Sapromyzon is forced to lay its eggs on the surface of the soil, but it does so on the precise spot which overlies the truffle, for the grubs would perish if they had to wander at random in search of their provender, the truffle being always thinly sown.

The truffle fly is informed by the sense of smell of the points favourable to its maternal plans; it has the talents of the truffle-dog, and doubtless in a higher degree, for it knows naturally, without having been taught, what its rival only acquires through an artificial education.

It would be not uninteresting to follow the Sapromyzon in its search in the open woods. Such a feat did not strike me as particularly possible; the insect is rare, flies off quickly when alarmed, and is lost to view. To observe it closely under such conditions would mean a loss of time and an a.s.siduity of which I do not feel capable. Another truffle-hunter will show us what we could hardly learn from the fly.

This is a pretty little black beetle, with a pale, velvety abdomen; a spherical insect, as large as a biggish cherry-stone. Its official t.i.tle is _Bolboceras gallicus_, Muls. By rubbing the end of the abdomen against the edge of the wing-cases it produces a gentle chirping sound like the cheeping of nestlings when the mother-bird returns to the nest with food. The male wears a graceful horn on his head; a duplicate, in little, of that of the _Copris hispa.n.u.s_.

Deceived by this horn, I at first took the insect for a member of the corporation of dung-beetles, and as such I reared it in captivity. I offered it the kind of diet most appreciated by its supposed relatives, but never, never would it touch such food. For whom did I take it? Fie upon me! To offer ordure to an epicure! It required, if not precisely the truffle known to our _chefs_ and _gourmets_, at least its equivalent.

This characteristic I grasped only after patient investigation. At the southern foot of the hills of Serignan, not far from the village, is a wood of maritime pines alternating with rows of cypress. There, towards Toussaint, after the autumnal rains, you may find an abundance of the mushrooms or "toadstools" that affect the conifers; especially the delicious Lactaris, which turns green if the points are rubbed and drips blood if broken. In the warm days of autumn this is the favourite promenade of the members of my household, being distant enough to exercise their young legs, but near enough not to fatigue them.

There one finds and sees all manner of things: old magpies' nests, great bundles of twigs; jays, wrangling after filling their crops with the acorns of the neighbouring oaks; rabbits, whose little white upturned scuts go bobbing away through the rosemary bushes; dung-beetles, which are storing food for the winter and throwing up their rubbish on the threshold of their burrows. And then the fine sand, soft to the touch, easily tunnelled, easily excavated or built into tiny huts which we thatch with moss and surmount with the end of a reed for a chimney; and the delicious meal of apples, and the sound of the aeolian harps which softly whisper among the boughs of the pines!

For the children it is a real paradise, where they can receive the reward of well-learned lessons. The grown-ups also can share in the enjoyment. As for myself, for long years I have watched two insects which are found there without getting to the bottom of their domestic secrets. One is the _Minotaurus typhaeus_, whose male carries on his corselet three spines which point forward. The old writers called him the Phalangist, on account of his armour, which is comparable to the three ranks of lances of the Macedonian phalanx.

This is a robust creature, heedless of the winter. All during the cold season, whenever the weather relents a little, it issues discreetly from its lodging, at nightfall, and gathers, in the immediate neighbourhood of its dwelling, a few fragments of sheep-dung and ancient olives which the summer suns have dried. It stacks them in a row at the end of its burrow, closes the door, and consumes them. When the food is broken up and exhausted of its meagre juices it returns to the surface and renews its store. Thus the winter pa.s.ses, famine being unknown unless the weather is exceptionally hard.

The second insect which I have observed for so long among the pines is the Bolboceras. Its burrows, scattered here and there, higgledy-piggledy with those of the Minotaur, are easy to recognise. The burrow of the Phalangist is surmounted by a voluminous rubbish-dump, the materials of which are piled in the form of a cylinder as long as the finger. Each of these dumps is a load of refuse and rubbish pushed outward by the little sapper, which shoulders it up from below. The orifice is closed whenever the insect is at home, enlarging its tunnel or peacefully enjoying the contents of its larder.

The lodging of the Bolboceras is open and surrounded simply by a mound of sand. Its depth is not great; a foot or hardly more. It descends vertically in an easily s.h.i.+fted soil. It is therefore easy to inspect it, if we take care first of all to dig a trench so that the wall of the burrow may be afterwards cut away, slice by slice, with the blade of a knife. The burrow is thus laid bare along its whole extent, from the surface to the bottom, until nothing remains of it but a demi-cylindrical groove.

Often the violated dwelling is empty. The insect has departed in the night, having finished its business there. It is a nomad, a night-walker, which leaves its dwelling without regret and easily acquires another. Often, on the other hand, the insect will be found at the bottom of the burrow; sometimes a male, sometimes a female, but always alone. The two s.e.xes, equally zealous in excavating their burrows, work apart without collaboration. This is no family mansion for the rearing of offspring; it is a temporary dwelling, made by each insect for its own benefit.

Sometimes the burrow contains nothing but the well-sinker surprised at its work: sometimes--and not rarely--the hermit will be found embracing a small subterranean fungus, entire or partly consumed. It presses it convulsively to its bosom and will not be parted from it. This is the insect's booty: its worldly wealth. Scattered crumbs inform us that we have surprised the beetle at a feast.

Let us deprive the insect of its booty. We find a sort of irregular, rugged, purse-like object, varying in size from the largeness of a pea to that of a cherry. The exterior is reddish, covered with fine warts, having an appearance not unlike s.h.a.green; the interior, which has no communication with the exterior, is smooth and white. The pores, ovoidal and diaphanous, are contained, in groups of eight, in long capsules.

From these characteristics we recognise an underground cryptogam, known to the botanists as _Hydnocystis arenaria_, and a relation of the truffle.

This discovery begins to throw a light on the habits of the Bolboceras and the cause of its burrows, so frequently renewed. In the calm of the twilight the little truffle-hunter goes abroad, chirping softly to encourage itself. It explores the soil, and interrogates it as to its contents, exactly as does the truffle-gatherer's dog. The sense of smell warns it that the desired object is beneath it, covered by a few inches of sand. Certain of the precise point where the treasure lies, it sinks a well vertically downwards, and infallibly reaches it. So long as there is food left it does not again leave the burrow. It feasts happily at the bottom of its well, heedless of the open or imperfectly closed burrow.

When no more food is left it removes in search of further booty, which becomes the occasion of another burrow, this too in its turn to be abandoned. So many truffles eaten necessitate so many burrows, which are mere dining-rooms or pilgrim's larders. Thus pa.s.s the autumn and the spring, the seasons of the _Hydnocystis_, in the pleasures of the table and removal from one house to another.

To study the insect _raba.s.sier_ in my own house I had to obtain a small store of its favourite food. To seek it myself, by digging at random, would have resulted merely in waste of time; the little cryptogam is not so common that I could hope to find it without a guide. The truffle-hunter must have his dog; my guide should be the Bolboceras itself. Behold me, then, a _raba.s.sier_ of a kind hitherto unknown. I have told my secret, although I fear my original teacher will laugh at me if he ever hears of my singular form of compet.i.tion.

The subterranean fungi grow only at certain points, but they are often found in groups. Now, the beetle has pa.s.sed this way; with its subtle sense of smell it has recognised the ground as favourable; for its burrows are numerous. Let us dig, then, in the neighbourhood of these holes. The sign is reliable; in a few hours, thanks to the signs of the Bolboceras, I obtain a handful of specimens of the _Hydnocystis_. It is the first time I have ever found this fungus in the ground. Let us now capture the insect--an easy matter, for we have only to excavate the burrows.

The same evening I begin my experiments. A wide earthen pan is filled with fresh sand which has been pa.s.sed through a sieve. With the aid of a stick the thickness of a finger I make six vertical holes in the sand: they are conveniently far apart, and are eight inches in depth. A _Hydnocystis_ is placed at the bottom of each; a fine straw is then inserted, to show me the precise position later. Finally the six holes are filled with sand which is beaten down so that all is firm. When the surface is perfectly level, and everywhere the same, except for the six straws, which mean nothing to the insect, I release my beetles, covering them with a wire-gauze cover. They are eight in number.