Grub

“ An undisturbed and temperate diet is better than an uneasy feast.
Two or three weeks devoted to these pleasures of the table and our grub has become a fat baby. Then the blissful consumer becomes a craftsman. The placid gratification of the belly is followed by the worries of the future. We have to build ourselves a castle in which to effect the metamorphosis.
From all around it the grub collects hairs, which it chops into fragments of different lengths. It places them in position with the tip of its mandibles, butts them with its head and presses them by rolling them with its rump. ”

“ The grub amazes me no less. It changes its diet. When a denizen of the vine and the poplar, [159] it eats a leaf; when a denizen of the sloe, it takes to starchy food. It changes its means of liberation. When they have attained their full growth and the moment comes for them to go underground, the first two have nothing in front of them but a yielding obstacle, the surface layer of the leafy sheath, softened and wasted by decay; the third, like the Nut-weevil, has to pierce a wall of exceptional strength. ”

“ Then she would spring to boring the turf vigorously with her bill, changing her attitude at each stroke, alert and watchful, throwing up the grass roots and little jets of soil, stabbing deeper and deeper, growing every moment more and more excited, till finally a fat grub was seized and brought forth. ”

“ The grub, still wearing upon its hinder parts the delicate pellicle which it has just shed, is fixed to the spot to which the egg itself adhered by its cephalic extremity. A striking spectacle, that of the feeble creature, only this moment hatched, boring, for its first mouthful, into the paunch of its enormous prey, which lies stretched upon its back. The nascent tooth takes a day over the difficult task. Next morning the skin has yielded; and I find the new-born larva with its head plunged into a small, round, bleeding wound. ”

“ They embrace the Mantis that is being devoured and hold her under the mandibles, while the grub, lying on its side, takes its meal at its ease. They also serve for locomotion. On a firm surface, such as the wooden top of my table, the larva can move about quite well; it toddles along, dragging its belly, with its body straight from end to end. On fine, loose sand, change of position becomes difficult. The grub now bends itself into a bow; it wriggles upon its back, upon its side; it crawls a little way; it digs and heaves with its mandibles. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When the grub peeps out under the thin scales of its nest its head becomes bigger and bigger, till it looks like a throbbing blister. The little creature alternately pushes forward and draws back, in its efforts to free itself, and at each movement the head grows larger. At last the outer skin bursts at the upper part of the chest, and the grub wriggles and tugs and bends about, determined to throw off its overall. ”

“ Supported on every side at once, close-sheathed in the substance traversed, the grub progresses in the normal position as often as in the reversed position and even oftener. By virtue of its dorsal waves, which come into contact with the surrounding materials in every direction, it moves back or belly uppermost, indifferently. Here are no longer fantastic exceptions; matters return to their habitual order; if we could see the grub ambling through the heap of rotting leaves, we should not regard it as in any way peculiar. ”

“ That the grub is no corpse is revealed in another manner. I place in glass tubes, with a plug of cotton, twelve larvæ removed from the Odynerus’ larders. The sign of latent life is the creature’s freshness and its hue, a soft pinky white; the sign of death and corruption is a brown colouring. Well, eighteen days later one of the grubs begins to turn brown. A second is seen to be dead in thirty-one days. ”

“ While still there, the grub develops into a wiggling, twisting, squirming warble and finally works its way out through the air hole and tumbles off to the ground, and if it is spring and it doesn’t get eaten up by a cowbird or a grackle or some other bird, it gets hard and black and finally changes into a fly on the inside of itself. ”

“ Moreover, the grub and especially the egg in many cases defy our severest winters.
The first five days of April put an end to the torpor of the larvæ of both Geotrupes, snuggling on the bottom floor of their cylinder, in a temporary cell. Activity returns, bringing with it a last flicker of appetite. The remains of the autumn banquet are plentiful. The grub makes use of them no longer for greedy feasting, but just as a midnight snack between two slumbers, that of winter and the deeper sleep of the metamorphosis. Hence the sides of the sheath are attacked spasmodically. ”

“ The grub is already beginning to resemble the Sacred Beetle, whose stercoraceous prowess we know: it is a past master in the art of dunging. It possesses above any other animal in the world an intestinal docility which anatomy presently will undertake to explain to us in part. [87]
The plasterer and the mason have their trowels. In the same way, the grub, that zealous repairer of breaches made in its home, has a trowel of its own. The last segment is lopped off slantwise and carries on its dorsal surface a sort of inclined plane, a broad disk surrounded by a fleshy pad. ”

“ As a rule he digs himself in with his dream and with the arts, until the time comes when he has got used to his incarnation, and the grub has achieved its agonizing passage from larva to winged insect. ”

“ I have a new-born grub before my eyes. It has just cast the skin of the egg; it is very busily wriggling in its powdery cup. Why so much excitement? For this reason: to reach the kernel, its ration, the tiny creature has to finish the pit and turn it into an entrance-window.
A stupendous task for a speck of albumen. But this feeble speck boasts a set of carpenter’s tools; its mandibles, a pair of fine chisels, received the necessary temper while their owner was still in the egg. The grub sets to work immediately. ”

“ As soon as the new-born grub has flung aside its swaddling clothes, it forthwith bites into the walls of its chamber. If starts eating its house, not anyhow, but with unerring wisdom. If it nibbled at the thin side of its cell—and there is nothing to dissuade it, for here as elsewhere the materials are of excellent quality—if its mandibles scraped the extreme end of the nipple, the weakest point, it would make a breach in the protecting wall before it had sufficient putty to repair that breach. ”

“ In the single room, or in each of the several rooms, we find a curled-up little shining white grub without legs, and of course without wings, and with a head that doesn't seem much like a head, for it has no eyes nor feelers, and most of the time is drawn back into the body of the grub so that it is hardly visible at all. ”

“ The middle pair, on the contrary, are long and powerful and well in evidence. Standing up like two stout crutches, they lend stability to the fat, curved paunch, which has a tendency to capsize. When seen from behind, the grub gives the impression of being the most whimsical creature on earth. It is just a pot-belly mounted on a pair of stilts.
What is the object of this curious organization? One can understand the grotesque hump worn by the grub of the Onthophagus, the sugar-loaf knapsack whose weight is constantly overturning the little creature when it tries to change its position. ”

“ The bustle of active life will come but too soon. The Minotaurs seem to hold that opinion: they prolong as far as may be the bliss of infancy.
The grub which has just been born in the sand pegs away with its legs and mandibles, strains and heaves with its rump, makes itself a passage and, from one day to the next, reaches the provisions piled up above it. In the glass tube in which I rear it I see it climbing, slipping into crevices, making a selection from the food about it and capriciously [146] tasting on this side and on that. It coils and uncoils, it wriggles about, it sways to and fro. ”

“ The grub is hatched; it pierces the belly of the Cetonia-larva at the requisite point; it plunges its long neck into the entrails, ransacking them and filling itself to repletion. If it bite at random, if it have no other guide in the selection of tit-bits than the preference of the moment and the violence of an imperious appetite, it will infallibly incur the danger of being poisoned by putrid food, for the victim, if wounded in those organs which preserve a remnant of life in it, will die for good and all at the first mouthfuls. ”

“ The grub is boxed in and never stirs out of doors. What becomes of its excretions? Well, they are evacuated at the bottom of the pot. By a gentle movement of the rump, the product is spread upon the walls, strengthening the coat and giving it a velvet lining.
It is better than a lining; it is a precious store of putty. When the grub wants to repair its shell or to enlarge it to fit its figure, which increases daily, it proceeds to clean out its cess-pool. ”

“ Upon the middle thread the grub sits; if startled, it glides away into a hole it has for a hiding-place. The light comes from the hinder part of the body, and the grub can display or darken this as it chooses. ”

“ The grubs of the bumblebee fly roam about the test-tube without touching the live tidbit. The most that they do is to put their mouths for a moment to the morsel; then they take it away again, not caring for the dish.
They want something different: a wounded, a dying grub; a corpse dissolving into sanies. Indeed, if I prick the wasp grub with a needle, the scornful ones at once come and sup at the bleeding wound. If I give them a dead grub, brown with putrefaction, the worms rip it open and feast on its humors. ”

“ In this case the grub is inspired by its intuitions to alter its plan of work to suit the coming Beetle. The perfect insect is a cylinder; the grub is a strap, a ribbon. The former, which wears unyielding armour, needs a cylindrical passage; the latter needs a very low tunnel, with a roof that it can reach with the pads on its back. The grub therefore changes its manner of boring: yesterday the gallery, suited to a wandering life in the thickness of the wood, was a wide burrow with a very low ceiling, almost a slot ”

“ The grub twisted and lashed about, but was torn apart and eaten on the spot. The victor ate furiously, wrin [Pg 154] kling his flexible snout away from his prey in a manner that gave him a peculiarly ferocious, snarling expression.
Nearly six inches in length, with a round, sturdy body, short tail, very short, sturdy legs, and fine fur of a clouded leaden gray, this fierce and implacable little forager might have been mistaken by the careless observer for an ordinary mole. ”

“ We feel it instinctively: there must be a check to these generative enormities. Let us first consider the grub. It is a sturdy maggot, easy to distinguish from the greenbottle's by its larger girth and especially by the way in which its body terminates behind. There is here a sudden breaking off, hollowed into a deep cup. At the bottom of this crater are two breathing holes, two stigmata with amber-red tips. The edge of the cavity is fringed with half a score of pointed, fleshy festoons, which diverge like the spikes of a coronet. ”

“ No larva could possible find sufficient nourishment there, unless it waited for the pea to mature.
But is the grub capable of fasting for any length of time when once hatched? It is doubtful. The little I have seen tells me that the new-born grub must establish itself in the midst of its food as quickly as possible, and that it perishes unless it can do so. I am therefore of opinion that such eggs as are deposited in immature pods are lost. However, the race will hardly suffer by such a loss, so fertile is the little beetle. ”

“ They yawn of their own accord at the least touch that I give to their cell. The lucky creatures have ever-ready stomachs.
Taking a piece of straw with a drop of honey hanging from it, I place the delicious ration between the grub’s mandibles. There is too much for a single mouthful. But the breast swells into a dewlap which catches the surplus. Here the grub will take a few more sips, at its leisure, after swallowing the spoonful which it received direct. When there is no more left, when the pectoral platter is licked clean, the swelling disappears and the larva resumes its immobility. ”

“ That was a particularly fine grub I brought you this morning, and you ate it without one word of thanks, or even a look of gratitude. Nothing but complaints and tears! It is enough to drive any husband mad. I fly away in the morning with a heavy heart, and when I see and hear other sparrows hopping and singing cheerfully about their nests, receiving chirps of encouragement and [Pg 199] love from their sitting mates in return, I feel as though—as though I would rather die than be compelled to return to my unhappy home again. ”

“ Let us observe the grub which has now become the sole tenant of the pea by the death of its brothers. It has had no part in their death; chance has favored it, that is all. In the centre of the pea, a wealthy solitude, it performs the duty of a grub, the sole duty of eating. ”