Coral insect

“ The coral insect can only work under water. When its delicate head rises above the waves it ceases to build, and, having done its duty, it dies. Those which reach the surface first, die first. The others that are still below water work on, widening and strengthening the wall until they too reach the fatal surface, peep for one moment as it were on the upper world and then perish. ”

“ The polyps rise high above the cells, and, with their long, slender, fleecy, silk-like tentacles swaying to and fro, remind one of a living bed of roses, or of a mossy bank covered with heavy frost.
I have seen the animal of a single corallet standing above the surface of its cell an inch in height and expanded to one-third of an inch in diameter, and yet many—I may safely say, most people—believe the "coral-insect" (not an insect at all) to be a microscopic or a very minute animal. ”

“ The insect itself is a soft and very minute worm, which, when washed by the waves, thrusts its head out of its tiny little door, and spreading abroad its numerous feelers, so that it resembles a beautiful little star, moves these about as if enjoying itself—though, doubtless, it is actually engaged in the process of manufacturing its little atom of coral rock. ”

“ Bermuda is the most northern coral-atoll existing, and is the only place where I have actually seen the coral insect at work on the reefs. He is not an insect at all, but a sort of black slug. These curious creatures have all an inherited tendency to suicide, for when the coral-worm gets above the tide-level he dies. Still they work bravely away, obsessed with the idea of raising their own particular reef well out of the water at the cost of their own lives. The coral of a reef is an ugly brown substance which has been inelegantly compared to a decayed tooth. ”

“ The coral insect is constantly working in his briny bed, making masonry which resists the action of the element in which it is placed, thus laying the foundation for islands and continents. It is the work of these madrepores and polyps that form reefs which wreck so many vessels on its coast, thus making fortunes for those who follow salvage entirely for a support. ”

“ Of all the minute inhabitants of the deep, that which is to our mind the most curious, both as to its nature and its stupendous works, is the coral insect. This creature is much too important to be dragged in at the tail of a chapter. ”

“ To swell its grey thread-like abdomen to a coral bead is a delight to the insect, but not necessary to its existence, like food and water to ours; it is the great prize in the lottery of life, which few can ever succeed in drawing. ”

“ In time the old coral insects below die, leaving behind them the hard limestone frame which they have built. The younger coral above lives on, sending forth buds which in turn do their share of the building, and in time,—in countless ages of time,—reefs and islands rise out of the mighty depths of the sea, built by the untiring energy of these marvellous little insects. ”

“ Other lagoons still, are girdled by numbers of small, green islets, very near to each other.
The origin of the entire group is generally ascribed to the coral insect.
According to some naturalists, this wonderful little creature, commencing its erections at the bottom of the sea, after the lapse of centuries, carries them up to the surface, where its labours cease. Here, the inequalities of the coral collect all floating bodies; forming, after a time, a soil, in which the seeds carried thither by birds germinate, and cover the whole with vegetation. ”

“ They are Tubulipora patina and Tubulipora hispida;—and stay—break off that tiny rough red wart, and look at its cells also under the magnifier: it is Cellepora pumicosa; and now, with the Madrepore, you hold in your hand the principal, at least the commonest, British types of those famed coral insects, which in the tropics are the architects of continents, and the conquerors of the ocean surge. ”

“ But against the dark-brown mould of the forest floor on which we found this coral-snake its bright and varied coloration was distinctly revealing; infinitely more so than the duller mottling of the jararaca and other dangerous snakes of the genus lachecis. In the same place, however, we found a striking example of genuine protective or mimetic coloration and shape. A rather large insect larva—at least we judged it to be a larval form, but we were none of us entomologists—bore a resemblance to a partially curled dry leaf which was fairly startling. ”

“ The sea-anemones are wholly soft; they secrete no skeleton, or only the merest particles of hard matter. On the other hand, the coral-producing polyps secrete a stony skeleton. The old notion that coral is something built by an insect is entirely erroneous. The coral-producing animal is in no sense an insect, nor does it toil to build the clusters and reefs of coral which it forms. The coral-polyp lives and eats, and the getting of its food is the only labor of its life. ”

“ You will often hear coral spoken of as having been built by an insect, and you will see at once that this is far from correct. Coral polyps are very different from insects, and their skeletons grow, much as ours do, inside of the animal; so we can not say they have been built. All such animals as coral polyps, which have the mouth in the centre, with other parts radiating from it, are called "Radiates." ”

“ By means of this juice or secretion, the coral insects, at a vast but unknown depth below the surface of the sea, attach themselves to the points and ridges of rocks, which form the bottom of the ocean; upon which foundation the little architects labor, building up, by the aid of the above-mentioned secretion, pile upon pile of their rocky habitations, until at length the work rises above the sea, and is continued to such a height as to leave it almost dry, when the insects leave building on that part, and begin afresh in another direction under the water. ”

“ The coral insects finding it a convenient situation on which to build, the temperature of the water suiting their constitution, commenced operations, and formed an encircling reef round the shore. These creatures can only live at a certain depth beneath the surface; thus, as the land continued to sink, the first builders died, while others continued to work above their habitations. Still the land sank, and the coral insects worked on, building higher and higher till the summit of the mountain was not only covered, but was many fathoms deep below the surface. ”

“ And the same may be said of the Coleoptera among which the species of Scymnus are very numerous. On a recent coral isle [St. Pauls [] the only insects were bird parasites and a few Coprophagi such as a Staphylinus (Philonthus or Quedius) etc. Another isle the only species of insect was a small ant.
Date? I have now a lot of Mss. waiting to be published in the Ent. Mag. And I must send the description of Darwin’s Chalcidites to the Linn. Soc. Or elsewhere ” Francis Walker to Haliday Royal Entomological Society of London library. ”

“ On one part we saw the spray of the breaker washing over the rocks, and millions of little, active, busy creatures continuing the work of building up this living rampart. At another place, which was just a little too high for the waves to wash over it, the coral insects were all dead; for we found that they never did their work above water. They had faithfully completed the mighty work which their Creator had given them to do, and they were now all dead. Again, in other spots the ceaseless lashing of the sea had broken the dead coral in pieces, and cast it up in the form of sand. ”

“ Moreover, the transition from vegetable to animal life is almost imperceptible, so much so, that polypi, such as corals and sponges, were for a long time supposed to be marine plants."
"And what are they?" inquired Willis.
"Insects that live in communities that form a multitude of contiguous cells; some of these are begun at the bottom of the sea and accumulated perpendicularly, one layer being continually deposited over another till the surface is reached."
"Then the coral reefs, that render navigation so perilous in unknown seas, are the work of insects?" ”

“ In the end the insects became, owing to this acquisition of wings, and afterwards to the establishment of a complicated metamorphosis, numerically the most successful type of life in existence, the number of species, extinct and living, mounting into the millions.
All aquatic insects are evidently the descendants of terrestrial forms, and the numberless contrivances and temporary larval organs, particularly of dipterous larvæ, are evidently adaptations to the needs of the insect during its aquatic life, and which are cast aside when the creature passes to a different medium. ”

“ When we think of the diet of the Amphibia we are reminded of the other prominent representatives of land life at the time. Snails, spiders, and myriapods crept over the ground or along the stalks of the trees, and a vast population of insects filled the air. We find a few stray wings in the Silurian, and a large number of wings and fragments in the Devonian, but it is in the Coal-forest that we find the first great expansion of insect life, with a considerable development of myriapods, spiders, and scorpions. ”

“ The insects and reptiles peculiar to the climate are as numerous as the birds and beasts. Of these the centipede, the scorpion, the spider; and amongst the serpents, the rattle snake, the dart, and the dreadful corales, or coral snakes, are the most venomous, the bite of the latter being rarely cured. Whilst the feet of the pedestrian are insecure from the attacks of these dreadful creatures, his face is exposed to the venom of the mosquitoes, which attain a great size, and are exceeding troublesome. ”

“ There is a bit in the house there,—that rough, white, stony stuff on the table in the parlor. It's full of little holes, you know. Well, those holes are the front doors of hundreds of little polypes, or coral worms, who build the great branches of coral, and live there. They are of various shapes and colors,—some like stars; some fine as a thread, and blue or yellow; others like snails and tiny lobsters. Some people say the real coral-makers are shaped like little oblong bags of jelly, closed at one end, the other open, with six or eight little feelers, like a star, all around it. ”

“ Small insects have, as a rule, shorter lives than large ones; those whose larvae devour highly nutritive food generally develop more quickly than those which have to live on dry, poor, substances; life-cycles follow one another most rapidly in summer weather when temperature is high and food plentiful.
In early chapters we have already noticed the long aquatic life of the larva and nymph of a dragon-fly, relatively a large insect, and the rapid multiplication of the repeated summer broods of virgin aphids (p. 18) . ”

“ On the continents, insects are found in salt water lakes where the saline concentration is much greater than in sea water. Other types live in torrential streams and waterfalls where they get much rougher treatment than would come from wave action. There are two probable reasons for the failure to invade the ocean. One is the fact that no insect ever has been able to live in very deep water. ”

“ There are not many species of insects, those seen by Anderson, who accompanied Cook, being only a few dragonflies, butterflies, grasshoppers, spiders, and black ants, vast numbers of scorpion flies, and a sandfly, which is described as the only noxious insect in the country. ”

“ The builder coral, glimmering in its softer parts with delicate hues and tints, throws up its stony barrier through a thousand miles of length and a third as much in breadth, fringing the continents with bays and sounds and atoll islands like fairy rings of the sea. Animate flowers—sea-nettles, sea anemones, plumularia, campanularia, hydropores, confervae, oscillatoria, bryozoa—people the great waters. Sea-urchins, star-fish, sea-eggs, combative gymnoti, polypes, struggle and thrive with ever-renewing change of color; gelatinous worms that shine like stars cling to every weed ”

“ Of corals there is but little variety; these islands being situated nearly in the highest latitude in which coral is ever found. In the vicinity of the harbour are two sorts of Astræa, two Porites, a Pavonia, and a Hornera. The number of insects is small, as is indeed the case with all land animals; it is therefore creditable to our industry, that we are able to muster twenty sorts of beetles. ”

“ Frequently, as in the case of the aphids, many wingless generations intervene between two winged generations. A striking illustration of this fact is afforded by an aquatic bug, Velia currens, commonly to be seen skating over the surface of running water. The adults of Velia are nearly always wingless, but now and then the naturalist meets with a specimen provided with functional wings, the possession of which enables the insect to make its way to a fresh stream. ”

“ The hard substances commonly called captain's biscuits are the objects of attack, together with flour, peas, and similar articles of food, and the attacking insect is the larva of the meal-worm, the entomological title of which is Tenebrio molitor. In vain does the ship's cook, with all his art, prepare a soup composed of the richest ingredients, and calculated, as one would think, to gratify the taste of the greatest epicure. The larvæ have been beforehand with him; they have attacked and become mixed with the flour or the peas ”

“ I have often kept specimens of these larvæ in vessels of water and noticed their predaceous habits; they feed on the larvæ of other water insects, but are not able to destroy fish, not being furnished with jaws or bodies nearly so strong as the perfect insect itself possesses. When the larva wishes to turn into its pupa state, it makes a round hole in the bank of the pond it inhabits, and there undergoes its change, turning into a full-grown beetle in about three [Pg 31] weeks' time. ”