Lechuguilla is a fiber plant that keeps its juicy parts underground until it blooms, which it does only once a lifetime, after ten to fifteen years. The bloom stalk shoots up like a giant asparagus spear maybe four meters (15 feet) tall, flowering from the bottom up in close-packed purplish or yellowish blooms. Then the whole plant perishes by degrees. You may find a lechuguilla whose blades have died and dried while the bloomstalk is still moist and green. Eventually the bloomstalk, too, will turn into wood strong enough for a deer to lean against when rubbing velvet from his antlers. Lechuguilla reproduces both by seeds and by rhizomes, and you sometimes find tiny new rosettes breaking ground on the runners of a mature plant. Peccaries often root up the juicy lechuguilla rhizomes, while mule deer relish the tender bloomstalk, munching it much as a cow chews a stalk of corn. Pocket gophers eat the core right out of a standing plant by tunneling underground. The kinds of animals you meet in the desert will differ with the time of day and the time of year. They must find food and moisture, mate, and raise their young without exposing themselves to killing heat and the risk of dehydration. Insects, spiders, scorpions, and reptiles all derive their body temperature from their surroundings. This is why they stiffen up to the point of helplessness when it’s cold, and why crawling on a super-hot surface will kill them in short order. Their temperature regulation problems are compounded by conditions in the desert, and most of them cope by modifying their behavior. In the early morning you may see grasshoppers sunning themselves on a rock as rattlesnakes will do. They line up broadside to the sun’s rays, raising their wings and lowering their legs to expose their abdomens directly to the sun’s warmth. By noonday they line up parallel to the sun’s rays to minimize heat absorption, and they will seek shade. Also, instead of hopping over the ground, many Big Bend grasshoppers live in and fly from bush to bush. The surface of the desert may be 20 to 25 degrees Celsius (40 to 50°F) hotter than is the air just over a meter (4 feet) above the ground. This is why in the daytime you will mostly see only flying insects, such as butterflies, grasshoppers, true bugs, true flies, and bees, and why so many crawling insects stay hidden during the heat of the day. However, there are some curious exceptions: The darkling beetle scurries about over the sand throughout the day. An air-filled space under its hard outer wing-covers acts as a kind of insulation between the back and abdomen. Some darkling beetles also raise the abdomen at an angle of about 45 degrees. Speed is of the essence for this little scavenger as it scurries from cover to shade.