Book of Monsters Part 11

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ONE OF THE WORST OF THE ROBBER FLIES

(_Deromyia_)

This creature is very savage and pounces upon even large sized insects, paralyzing them instantly by a sting of its poisoned beak.

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THE CULEX MOSQUITO

(_Culex sp._)

The flat white wings of this long-legged creature, vibrating rapidly in the air, make what everyone will agree is the most annoying sound in the world. They make the mosquitos' hum. The cigar-shaped abdomen is striped like a convict's jacket. As a boy there was to me a peculiar fascination in watching that abdomen pinken and turn red along its sides as it filled with blood sucked from my hand.

The large eyes compose almost the entire head of a mosquito and in some species they are of an emerald green hue. Straight out in front, close together, curved downward at the tip, are two antennae furnished with delicate hairs arranged like a bottle brush. With these the creature hears the love hum of its mate and probably scents also the neighborhood of any warm-blooded animal.

Were this a male, instead of a female, these hairs would be much longer and there would be many more of them--they are the smelling organs of the creature and the hearing organs, too, being set into vibration by sound waves of a certain rate. It is important to remember this, for only the females are bloodthirsty. The long, slender proboscis projecting from the head, downward, is furnished with sharp, piercing stylets which, by working up and down, cut their way through the skin. Ordinarily the males and females both are content with sap of plants and fruits as their food, and blood does not seem to be a necessary part of their diet. It is curious that what is supposed to be merely an acquired habit of the female only, of an insignificant little fly, should mean so much to mankind.

Just why a mosquito bite is poisonous is still a matter of question--the suggestion has been made that since both male and female really live on plants, the fluid which the female injects is for the purpose of preventing the plant juice from coagulating during the process of sucking and merely happens to be irritating to warm-blooded animals.

There are three hundred different species of these creatures already described and fortunately this one, a species of culex, is not responsible, so far as known, for the carrying of any human disease.

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ONE OF THE HARMLESS ANOPHELES MOSQUITOS

(_Anopheles punctipennis_, Say)

The malarial mosquito, so called, has spotted wings, but otherwise it looks quite like this harmless form from Maryland. This whole tribe of Anopheles differs from the Culex in the length of its mouth feelers, which project from the base of the proboscis and appear in the photograph almost as long as the proboscis itself, whereas in a photograph of the Culex it would appear so short as to seem merely a thickening of the base of the proboscis.

The wildest fancy of the Arabian story-teller is lacking in imagination compared with the story which the facts of modern science have woven about these tiny representatives of the fly family.

Who could imagine that just because the lady mosquitos, tiring of their usual meal of ripe bananas and plant juices, acquired the habit of sucking blood, vast regions would be devastated and beings millions of times their size would die by thousands. And this, too, not through any real fault of the tiny creatures themselves, but just because some of the persons whose blood they sucked had microscopic wiggling things living in their blood corpuscles, which crawled into the soft throat glands of the mosquito and waited there for a chance to get out into the blood channels of some other human beings.

When one pictures the grief of desolated homes, death-bed agonies of tossing fever patients, the quarantined vessels at anchor in tropical harbors, yellow flagged, with crews dead or dying, the streets of deserted houses from which all life has gone forever through yellow fever and malaria, there is something ghastly in the picture of the winged lady mosquitos flitting airily from pale-faced patients to ruddy-cheeked happy people, unwitting carriers of death.

No conquest of science seems more wonderful in its simplicity and more remarkable in its importance than the discovery that the glands at the base of the mosquito's bill can become diseased and harbor a microscopic parasite, and transform this merely buzzing, annoying insect into one of the most dangerous creatures alive. To Dr. L. O. Howard, the pioneer of economic entomology, is due the great credit for first showing how this creature can be killed by the use of kerosene on the stagnant waters where the females lay their eggs.

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ONE OF THE BEE FLIES

(_Sparnopolius fulvus_, Wied.)

No b.u.t.terfly or any other creature of the air could be more beautiful than this dream of early summer. The black velvet body, into which the sunlight sank and disappeared, the fringe of golden hairs along its sides, the steel gray, myriad-facet eyes of which its head was made, and the delicately formed wings, so thin that the light in pa.s.sing through them was refracted into rainbow tints, made it seem to me more beautiful than almost any of those gorgeous forms of insect life which sometimes fill the clearings in Brazilian forests.

It does seem strange that such a thing as this should live its other life a parasitic grub within the larva of some caterpillar, or in the egg-case of some gra.s.shopper; but so it seems to do. It spends its childhood as a disease, and its mating days as a dainty fly among the nectar-bearing flowers.

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ANOTHER OF THE BEE FLIES

(_Spogostylum simson_, Fab.)

Where you see the carpenter bee you always see these bee flies waiting for the bee to go away from home. When the mother bee is out the female fly goes into the cell of the bee and lays her egg, and when her larva hatches out it eats up the bee's larva.

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LARGE SYRPHID FLY

(_Melesia virginiensis_, Dru.)

This is a very bright-colored syrphid fly often seen soaring in shadowy places, but what he is doing we do not know. He stays poised in the air and is one of the most beautiful flies we have.

The larvae of some of the smaller syrphid flies feed upon the larvae of other insects, aphids in particular; but the larva of this one has never been seen, at least it has never been recognized.

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NOT A HOUSE FLY

(_Archytas aterrima_, Des.)

This portrait of one of the many species of fly, not a house fly, however, is as different as it is possible to be from the maggot from which it grew. The eggs of the mother fly, deposited in some decaying animal matter, hatch in a few days, and out of these eggs come maggots with rudimentary legs and looking like beasts from another world entirely. In a few days more they reach the limit of their growth, and stop, the tissues break down to a mush and out of this mush-like substance are formed flies with wings and sucking, trunklike mouths just like their mothers. The maggots have no s.e.xual organs, and yet, out of the creamy ma.s.s of cells, the s.e.xual organs of the flies are formed as though directed by a force as certain in its effects as the law of gravitation.

We have been so intent on killing the fly and so afraid of it as the great carrier of human diseases that we have lost sight of one phase of its character, so to speak. Think of having under our eyes animals like these dipteras from which you can breed a new generation in twelve days! And would it not be strange if, from studying the fly, we should learn the meaning of heredity and s.e.xuality, for this is one of the places where the scientists of the day are at work on the problem of inheritance, that problem which, when elucidated, is likely to make more changes in the world of humankind than almost anything which has so far been discovered.

The bearing of the fly on the welfare of the world is one of the most spectacular developments of modern times and a tribute to the value of knowing the minutest details of the world in which we live.

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THE HORSE FLY

(_Taba.n.u.s atratus_, Forst.)

The head of the horse fly appears to be all eyes, and it is no wonder that we can so seldom take it by surprise.

Below the oblong, compound eyes are the sharp mouthparts, which in the female are provided with lancets, which enable her to puncture the skin of warm-blooded animals and suck their blood. It is curious that the female should have such habits, while the males are content to lap up nectar from the flowers.

This jet black, loud-buzzing creature flew into my laboratory and made so much noise that I was forced to kill her. This photograph of her is nine times her real diameter.

She belongs to a large and important family of flies, whose females make the lives of men and animals miserable in many parts of the world by their bites, which form most annoying wounds.