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Come back to this page each day to read another entry from Cathie Katz's beautifully illustrated journal, "Nature a Day at a Time."
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Earwigs (Forficula) are common and abundant in backyards, fields, and woods. We don't see them as much as we see ants, bees, or flies because earwigs are nocturnal, and they stay hidden under leaf debris or underground most of the day. The female's protective nature is as gentle and dedicated as Lassie's or Mrs. Cleaver's, but for some reason, earwigs don't get as much notoriety for excellence in motherhood. The female earwig constructs a safe burrow under rocks for her eggs which she guards, without leaving, even to eat, until after the eggs have hatched. She then forages for food, returning to the nest to feed her offspring. After a few days she takes them out to learn how to hunt and how to protect themselves from danger. Each night they return to the burrow, guided by a trail of scent left by glands in the earwigs' feet. The pincers at the rear are called cerci and are sharper and more curved in the males although largely ineffective to be harmful by either sex.
There is a class of biologist, to which I belong, whose eyes light up when they hear that the males of a species are endowed with special devices that might be weapons and that either are not possessed by females or are at least reduced in size in the gentler sex. This information signals a species whose males probably spend a good deal of time employing these weapons on one another.John Alcock in In a Desert Garden |
Cathie Katz, the author of several books on natural history, also co-founded The Drifting Seed, an international newsletter about rain forest drift seeds. In her engaging Nature a Day at a Time, published by Sierra Club Books and Random House, Katz interweaves fascinating facts about familiar creatures, pen-and-ink drawings and quotations.
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