Birds and All Nature, Vol. 6, No. 2, September 1899: Illustrated by Color Photography — John Shaqi
Birds and All Nature, Vol. 6, No. 2, September 1899: Illustrated by Color PhotographyVarious
History
Birds and All Nature, Vol. 6, No. 2, September 1899: Illustrated by Color Photography
Various
Birds -- Periodicals; Natural history -- Periodicals
Other insects living above ground all their lives hide their eggs
underground. Most grasshoppers, for example, do this, and many of the
closely related crickets not only hide their eggs in this way, but live
underground themselves in the day time, and come forth at night to
feed, or to collect grass leaves, which they carry into their burrows
and eat at leisure. Other insects also hide below ground during the
day and feed only at night. The full grown May-beetles do this, and
the cut-worms also. The cut-worms are soft-bodied caterpillars and are
greedily eaten by birds and carnivorous insects, so it is essential to
their safety that they conceal themselves as much as possible. There
is an interesting cut-worm which occasionally becomes so numerous that
it has to migrate in great armies in search of food, and these great
masses of caterpillars hurry on, driven by hunger, by day as well as by
night, followed by flocks of birds and other enemies until the majority
of them are destroyed. This cut-worm is generally called the "army
worm."
Other caterpillars, while living above ground and feeding on the
leaves of plants, instead of spinning cocoons for their protection
when they transform to the helpless chrysalis or pupal condition,
burrow beneath the surface of the ground and there transform without a
cocoon. Hundreds of species do this and sometimes these brown pupæ are
so abundant that they are turned up in numbers with every spadeful of
earth.
We are now able to say that the insects found beneath the surface of
the earth are as follows:
1. Insects which live underground during their whole lives, feeding
(_a_) on roots and rootlets; (_b_) on dead and decaying vegetable
matter; (_c_) on other insects.
2. Insects which live in the nests of ants.
3. Insects which have their nests underground, but which get their food
elsewhere.
4. Insects which live underground only in their younger stages of life.
5. Insects which hide their eggs or pupæ underground.
6. Carnivorous insects, and insects which feed on decaying animal
matter, which occasionally burrow underground in search of food.
I hope it will be clear from what we have said that insects must take
an important part in the changes in the character of the soil which are
constantly going on, quite as important indeed as do the earthworms
about which Darwin wrote.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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