IN TOUCH WITH NATURE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20379, 10 April 1928, Page 2

IN TOUCH WITH NATURE

WONDERFUL TAILS. By J. DRUMMOND, F.L.S., F.Z.S. The wonderful tails of grubs gathered by a Christchurch resident in a Now Brighton gutter, overhung with lupins, have attracted as much attention, almost, as any device in the insect world. .Each grub is about an inch long, white, round, worm-shaped, and soft. Each has a long, thin tail This is flexible and telescopic. It can be shot out and retracted with remarkable quickness. Tho grub lives, usually, in foul water, often in putrescent matter. It buries itself head downwards. Its tail projects above the surface, and by it the creature breathes the air requisite for life. This is done through double elastic air tubes that run through the telescope.

Tho air tubes are extended and retracted with the action of the whole instrument. They have been seen doubled up, in a way which seems complicated, but is remarkably simple, at the base of a retracted tail. They are folded with such precision that the tail can be extended °r smartly closed again without a single fold of the air tube hitching over another fold. When one of these creatures wa s placed in spirits of vyine, in order to kill it, the tai; was immediately retracted. The tail was seized between the points of a pair of forceps and was drawn out to its full length. Tho air tubes were seen unfolding themselves with perfect precision. There was no hitch. The folds opened up one after the other, and the convoluted tubes became straight and parallel.

Mr A. L. Tonnoir, entomologist at the Cawthron Institute, Nelson, has kindly identified the owners of the telescopic tails as grubs-r-larvse in his entomological language—of the drone,fly, Eristan tanax, one of the uninvited immigrants to New Zealand. Adult drone-flies are common in the Dominion’s gardens, where they may be seen now flying about the Bowers on which they find their food. An extraordinary feature associated with them is their close resemblance to honey-bees, although they belong to a group widely separated from the bees’ _ family. ' Even their habits seem to mimic the habits of the bees. A drone-fly may be seen carelessly twitching its abdomen like a bee, as if prepared to sting, although it has no weapon to sting with. Many people, misled by the resemblance, treat droneflies with some dread. Even spiders have been deceived, and spiders, it is believed, recognise their prey by touch, not by sight. A blue-bottle fly placed on tho web of a field-spider was seized immediately arid without hesitation. A bumble bee was avoided by the spider, but it sent out a thread and ran round its victim, staying some distance off, until it could safely approach and kill the bee. When a drone-fly was thrown into the web, the spider touched it, recoiled in alarm, returned to the attack, and gingerly dealt with the harmless victim in the same way as it had dealt with tho bee.

Tho resemblance between the drone-fly and tho bee seems to have given rise to an old-time legend shat a swarm of boos could bo created by killing a young bullock, the grubs of the bees coming in the carrion by spontaneous generation, and the adult bees flying off in a swarm. Virgil, on the strength of this belief, states that if tho body of an ox is beaten 1 and is enclosed in a suitable chamber, a swarm of bees will arise from it. Apparently he had seen adult drone flies arising from a carcass, and mistook them for bees In any cast, the . drone-flies did not spring by spontaneous generation from tho body of the ox. The eggs were laid there, the grubs developed and fed on their disgusting food, and, in time, became 1 beautiful perfect insects, hovering over flowers. The legend, as far as it has been traced, originated in Egypt. It is regarded as ‘ a good example of the bad observation and worse conjecture that have clouded knowledge of tho bee.” For about 5000 years, people i believed that the decomposing carcass of an ox, by spontaneous generation could produce a swarm of bees. As a perfect insection, the drones fly maybe readily distinguished front a bee, on inspection, by its possession of only two wings while a bee has four.

A drone-Dv grub extricates itself from tho putrid matter or tho muffi ni winch it spends the 1 grubby stage rif- its life In doing this it uses seven pairs of hooked, feet. It crawls to the ground, burrows in, and calmly awaits tho impulse that transforms it into a chrysalis. Its ski-i shortens and hardens, and becomes a sort of cocoon. Finally, as the Rov. J. tx. Wood has described it, it bcomes a creature of flight, with enormous eyes and glittering powerful wings.

After observing and dissecting many drone-flies. Mr Wood was deeply impressed with their usefulness in the world. A tub sunk in the ground near a church ln laud had been neglected for years It became half full of horrible foetid, mud, composed largely of dead leaves, worms, frogs and toads moths, beetles and other insets, and flolcf-mice that gone to the tub for a drink and had fallen into the water This obscene compound was a pai a dise drone-fly grubs. Mr Wood ound them pusily engaged in the task of trans muting death into life and d«o«ing the poisonous mud. Ho acknowledged a of Q-ntitude to these insects, a debt ne hardly could assess. “ Every drone-fly we see” he stated, “is living proof thats. quantity of pestilential matter has h® l -” consumed inJ rendered harm css These insects should bo protected w»d <*■ C °Teifnyson, studying fossils, marked Nature’s care for the typo, her hoedlessness of the single life. field Osborn t president of the Amer c Museum of Natural History m his «- caichcs into the evolution of man finds that the modern world, m this ' imposed to Nature. The policy is oaie tor ho individual, neglect of the race Ihe osult is racial deterioration. Thi. Tine of individualism, rampant everywhere,” ho states, “is the greatest deterrent to racial progress. To save itsc f, the world must return to a t ur ®- oust care for the race, even if the individual suffers. It must become race■onscious. Every race must discovei and mprovo its own racial traits. Iheie mu t '0 a better understanding of the spintua , ntellectual and murab as well as physical, values of all races. There miist be general espect for the best qualities of each race.

The soul of a race is its spiritual, in rollectual and moral reaction to environment and to daily experiences. Each racr. i, a different kind of soul. Each soul has been developed bv. hundreds of thousands of vears of reaction and experience. With the soul’s awakening, man may climb to the heighths of Parnassus which the Greeks, by worship of their gods, hallowed

In this way, Professor Osborn, answers the question: Is man de’.tinecl to rise or fall ? He is convinced that races of men rise in the same wav ns races and species of other animals Uncivilised mar is sin ject to laws that have dominion over the animal kingdom. The best races of men, like the best races of lower animals, arose when Nature had full control. Civilisation resists the order of man’s natural progress. The on’v way to reverse the downward trend is to develop the racial soul. Tin's means comnlete subordination of the individual to the good of the race. Profpßtor O'born miaht have used as illustration of th : s the social development of the while ant? with their ruthless treatment of the individual for the common "ood His hook. “Man Rises to Parnassus,” is not the last word on human evolution, hut, it is the latest. It tra-e? and explains i-rit’Val enochs in man’s history, from ’ha dawn of‘the Stone Arm to the Pliocene n>erind more than 1.000,00!) venrs a"o. He Vfriends the dawn man, removes from his reputation the bar-sinister of ape descent, and cred ; ts our Stone Age ancestors with moml traits found amongst primitive ncordfu in these days. A ronv of his book, ■hmmhtfiil stimulatin'' and fascinatin'', has ■ „or, b-r die pnhlisho's. the Princeton "r,-Vers?ty Press. United Pontes. Price. 1 0s 6d.