pseudochrysalis

Pale stigmata, eight pairs of them, placed as in the pseudochrysalis, that is, the first and largest pair on the line dividing the first two segments of the thorax and the seven others on the first seven abdominal segments.

The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles Jean-Henri Fabre 1869

The pseudochrysalis is a body deprived of all movement and clad in horny integuments which may be compared with those of the pupæ and chrysalids.

The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles Jean-Henri Fabre 1869

The horny integuments of the pseudochrysalis are split along a fissure which includes the whole ventral surface and the whole of the head and runs up the back of the thorax.

The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles Jean-Henri Fabre 1869

The irritability, therefore, which in the pseudochrysalis is suspended for a whole year, reawakens for a moment, to relapse instantly into the deepest torpor.

The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles Jean-Henri Fabre 1869

This cast skin, which is stiff and keeps its shape, is half-enclosed, as was the pseudochrysalis, in the skin shed by the secondary larva.

The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles Jean-Henri Fabre 1869

Lastly, through the fissure, which divides it almost in two, a Meloe-nymph half-emerges; so that, to all appearances, the pseudochrysalis has been followed immediately by the nymph, which does not happen with the Sitares, which pass from the first of these two states to the second only by assuming an intermediary form closely resembling that of the larva which eats the store of honey.

The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles Jean-Henri Fabre 1869

Let us pass in silence over this long period of repose, during which the Sitaris, in the form of a pseudochrysalis, slumbers at the bottom of its cell, in a sleep as lethargic as that of a germ in its egg, and come to the months of June and July in the following year, the period of what we might call a second hatching.

The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles Jean-Henri Fabre 1869

I have spoken of the first in another volume; [10] I have mentioned its pseudochrysalis found in the cells of two Osmiæ, namely, the Three-pronged Osmia, which piles its cells in a dry bramble-stem, and the Three-horned Osmia and also

The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles Jean-Henri Fabre 1869

But these appearances are deceptive, for, on removing the nymph from the split sheath formed by the integuments of the pseudochrysalis, we find, at the bottom of this sheath, a third cast skin, the last of those which the creature has so far rejected.

The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles Jean-Henri Fabre 1869

Zonites, whose pseudochrysalis remains wholly enveloped in the skin of the secondary larva, a sort of bag which is sometimes loose, sometimes tight and always unbroken.

The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles Jean-Henri Fabre 1869