Our Common Insects: A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, Gardens and HousesPackard, A. S. (Alpheus Spring)
Science
Our Common Insects: A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, Gardens and Houses
Packard, A. S. (Alpheus Spring)
Insects
Another puzzle for the evolutionist to solve is how to account for the
change from the caterpillar with its powerful jaws, to the butterfly
with its sucking or haustellate mouth-parts. We shall best approach the
solution of this difficult problem by a study of a wide range of facts,
but a few of which can be here noticed. The older entomologists divided
insects into haustellate or suctorial, and mandibulate or biting
insects, the butterfly being an example of one, and the beetle serving
to illustrate the other category. But we shall find in studying the
different groups that these are relative and not absolute terms. We find
mandibulate insects with enormous jaws, like the Dytiscus, or Chrysopa
larva or ant lion, perforated, as in the former, or enclosing, as in the
latter two insects, the maxillae (_b_), which slide backward and forward
within the hollowed mandibles (_a_, Fig. 209, jaws of the ant lion),
along which the blood of their victims flows. They suck the blood, and
do not tear the flesh of their prey. The enormous mandibles of the adult
Corydalus are too large for use and, as Walsh observed, are converted
in the male into simple clasping organs. And to omit a number of
instances, in the suctorial Hemiptera or bugs we have different grades
of structure in the mouth-parts. In the biting lice (Mallophaga) the
mouth is mandibulate; in the Thrips it is mandibulate, the jaws being
free, and the maxillae bearing palpi, while the Pediculi are suctorial,
and the true bugs are eminently so. But in the bed bug it is easy to see
that the beak is made up of the two pairs of jaws, which are simply
elongated and adapted for piercing and sucking. Among the so-called
haustellate insects the mouth-parts vary so much in different groups,
and such different organs separately or combined perform the function of
sucking, that the term haustellate loses its significance and even
misleads the student. For example, in the house fly the tongue (Fig. 210
_l_, the mandibles, _m_, and maxillae, _mp_, are useless), a fleshy
prolongation of the labium or second maxillae, is the sucker, while the
mandibles and maxillae are used as lancets by the horse fly (Fig. 211,
_m_, mandibles, _mx_, maxillae). The maxillae in the butterfly are united
to form the sucking tube, while in the bee the end of the labium (Fig.
212) is specially adapted for lapping, not sucking, the nectar of
flowers. But even in the butterfly, or more especially the moth, there
is a good deal of misapprehension about the structure of the so-called
"tongue." The mouth-parts of the caterpillar exist in the moth. The
mandibles of the caterpillar occur in the head of the moth as two small
tubercles (Fig. 213, _m_). They are aborted in the adult. While the
maxillae are as a rule greatly developed in the moth, in the caterpillar
they are minute and almost useless. The labium or second maxillae, so
large in the moth, serves simply as a spinneret in the caterpillar. But
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