Man Animals In New Hebrides by Baker

Author:Baker [Baker]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General
ISBN: 9781317846598
Google: 6GkPEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-05-08T04:43:47+00:00

Fig. 20. Birgus latro and Xylotrupes gideon.

(Photos by the Author.)

but I was assured by natives that it sometimes eats snakes ! At night it is a really formidable object on the native paths, for a bare foot is helpless against its massive pincers.

Birgus deposits its eggs in the sea, and the development of its larvæ takes place there. When once the young have taken to a terrestrial existence, they only return to the sea to spawn. Sometimes they occur at considerable distances from the sea. One specimen I found at an altitude of 380 feet. Such a clumsy creature must have felt at its wits’ end when the irresistible call of the ocean came to it.

Xylotrupes gideon, a gigantic beetle, is the largest (though not the longest) insect in the New Hebrides. (Fig. 20.) I weighed 164 of these animals. The heaviest, a male, weighed no less than 10290 grams. In the male there is a forked horn on the head and another on the prothorax,1 the function of which is not known. I weighed both the head-horn and the prothoracic horn of seventy-seven males, and found that their weights are far more than proportionately smaller in small than in large specimens. The largest beetle, weighing 10*290 grams, had a prothoracic horn weighing 1,149 milligrams. Now the smallest male beetle weighed 2*505 grams, and one would therefore expect its prothoracic horn to weigh 280 milligrams, if it were of the same size proportionately to the body as in the largest beetle. Actually its prothoracic horn only weighed about 36 milligrams ! The smaller the beetle, the smaller by jar the horn. The phenomenon of the disproportionately great size of certain parts in large individuals is of widespread occurrence, especially in Insects and Crustacea, and among the less essential organs.

Xylotrupes has one most peculiar habit in the New Hebrides. It tends to swarm in enormous numbers on Flamboyant trees (an introduced species). I have seen one of these trees alive with them. The natives say that they die as a result of feeding on this tree.

The longest insect in the New Hebrides is the stick-insect, Hermarchus uvarovi, one of the six new species of Orthoptera1 which I found in the New Hebrides. The body of the type specimen measures no less than 172 cm. (about 6¾ inches).

By far the most dangerous animal in the New Hebrides is the mosquito Anopheles punctulatus Dönitz, which carries malaria and probably black-water fever and elephantiasis. In parts of Espiritu Santo, particularly near the mouth of the River Yoro and at Turtle Bay, it is very abundant; in other parts, such as Hog Harbour, it is scarcely ever seen. When camping at the mouth of the Yoro I crawled into bed under my mosquito net at about 7 o’clock each night and stayed there nearly twelve hours to avoid it. It only bites between sundown and sunrise. Its bite is more painful than that of Aëdes, the commonest mosquito of the New Hebrides. At Port Patteson,

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