Invertebrates

The Invertebrata have long since ceased to constitute one of the primary divisions in the scientific classification of the Animal Kingdom. Their name is now no more than a convenience for designating a group of phyla with which it is often necessary to deal as a whole. The primary lines of real cleavage in the Animal Kingdom divide it, not into the Vertebrata and Invertebrata, but into three unequal sections, the Protozoa, Parazoa and Metazoa, which are ranked … as subkingdoms.

The Protozoa are sundered from the rest of the Animal Kingdom by a perfectly sharp distinction … in the body of a protozoon, whether there be one nucleus, or a few, or many, no nucleus ever has charge of a specialised part of the cytoplasm; whereas in other animals there are always many nuclei, each in charge of a part of the cytoplasm which is specialized for a particular function, such as contraction, or conduction, or secretion.
— Borradaile, Eastham, Potts and Saunders, The Invertebrata, Cambridge University Press, 4th edition, revised by G. A. Kerkut, 1963.

There are said to be a billion billion insects on the earth at any moment, most of them with very short life expectancies by our standards.
— Lewis Thomas (1913 – 1993), The Lives of a Cell, Penguin Books, 1978.

[Insects], in a brain weighing the fraction of a milligram … can store the crafts of the weaver, the ceramicist, the miner, the murderer by poison, the trapper and the wet nurse.
— Primo Levi (1919 – 1987), ‘Butterflies’ in Other People’s Trades, 7.

He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it.
— Holy Bible, Ecclesiastes, 10:8.

Another type of snare is constructed by the ‘ant-lion’ larvae of certain Myrmeleontidae (Neuroptera). They excavate conical pits in dry, sandy places, by backing into the sand in a circular pattern and flicking off the material that falls on to their head and jaws, so that the sides come to lie at the angle of repose of the sand. Ants or other small insects that tumble into the pitfall are usually seized immediately by the ant-lion, which lies concealed in the sand at the bottom of the pit with its mouth-parts agape. However, if the victim attempts to escape up the sides of the pit, sand is flicked up and either dislodges it or causes the walls of the pit to slip beneath it. Vermilionine Rhagionidae (Diptera) have the same habit in the northern hemisphere, a remarkable example of convergent evolution.
— CSIRO, The Insects of Australia, Melbourne University Press, 1970, 129.

You can get to know your own forehead mites the following way: stretch the skin tight with one hand, carefully scrape a spatula or butter knife over the skin in the opposite direction, squeezing out traces of oily material from the sebum glands. (Avoid using too sharp an object, such as a glass edge or sharpened knife.) Next scrape the extracted material off the spatula with a cover slip and lower the slip face down onto a drop of immersion oil previously placed on a glass slide. Then examine the material with an ordinary compound microscope. You will see the creatures that literally make your skin crawl.
— Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life, Belknap 1992, 177.

Finally, there are cicadas in Australia, like the ones in Provence. Without wishing to over-enthuse about this noisy insect which was for that very reason consecrated to Apollo, nor loving it to the point of eating it, as did the ancient Greeks, I nevertheless have for the cicada, with its monotonous, strident, even deafening song, a lifelong affection. Like the poet, I can never ‘see the cicada, and hear it on its leafy branch, sucking up the fragrant dew and heralding in the ardent sun the wheat-harvest to come…’ without feeling moved by memories of the years of my childhood, spent in that dear south of France where I was born. So, when on a journey between Melbourne and Sydney, one hot day, I heard the cicadas sing with such vigour that we were obliged to raise our own voices, I did not doubt that their song was in my honour.
— Oscar Comettant, In the Land of Kangaroos and Gold Mines, translated by Judith Armstrong. Adelaide: Rigby, 1980, originally published as Au Pays des Kangourous et des Mines d’or. Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1890, 79.

An odd little thing is a flea,
You can’t tell a he from a she
But he can, and she can —
Whoopee!
— Anonymous.

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While those again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.
— Augustus de Morgan (1806 – 1871).

Why has not man a microscopic eye?
For this plain reason, man is not a fly.
— Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744), An Essay on Man.

A flea met a fly in a flue
Said the flea let us fly
Said the fly let us flee
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.
— Anonymous.

I wish I was a little grub,
With whiskers round my tummy
I’d climb into a honey-pot
And make my tummy gummy
— Anonymous.

I wish I were a jelly fish,
That cannot fall downstairs;
Of all the things I wish to wish
I wish I were a jelly fish
That hasn’t any cares,
And doesn’t even have to wish
‘I wish I were a jelly fish
That cannot fall downstairs.’
— G. K. Chesterton (1874 – 1936), Triolet.

And the locusts went up over all the land of Egypt, and rested in all the coasts of Egypt: very grievous were they; before them there were no such locusts as they, neither after them shall there be such.
— Holy Bible, Exodus 10:14.

Escargots, escargots, they’re slimy and brown
— Duncan Bain (1944 – ), ‘The Ill, Annoyed Restaurateurs’ March’, in The Michigan Guide.

Springtails: Since living males and females cannot be easily distinguished, the study of the sexual behaviour of these springtails has proved extremely difficult. From a personal investigation of this behaviour I can comment on some of the practical aspects of this kind of research.

I kept my springtail specimens … in isolation and under constant illumination — so as to accustom them to light. When every animal had been given a number, I put them together, two at a time. I then began to keep watch on them in the confident expectation that among the hundreds of combinations I had produced, I should find a pair of willing partners. But for many weeks my patience and perseverance remained unrewarded. I was almost ready when I noticed that two of the animals, which had been together for some time, kept stopping in different places, deflecting their antennae and shaking their heads violently. It was more by chance than by design that I looked at their halting places under a more powerful lens and spotted a shiny droplet upon a tall stalk.
— Friedrich Schaller, Soil Animals, Ann Arbor Science Paperbacks, University of Michigan Press, 1968, pp. 122 – 124.

Dans les champs de l’observation, le hasard ne favorise que les esprits preparés. (In observation, chance favours only the prepared mind.)
— Louis Pasteur (1822 – 1895), quoted by Walter B. Cannon (1871 – 1945), The Way of an Investigator, Norton Books.

In autumn this springtail often appears in deciduous and mixed forests in great numbers, so that the leaf litter and tree trunks seem to be completely covered by them. If we watch the behaviour of these animals, each the size of a pinhead, more closely, we discover the existence of peculiar ‘family relationships.’ The females search for their food, apparently quite indifferent to their partners, rest at intervals, and expend a good deal of energy on self-grooming. The males are far more restless, rushing from leaf to leaf, or from tree trunk to tree trunk in a frantic search for partners. They make a beeline for every moving object the size of a pinhead and touch it with their feelers. If the object should turn out to be the head of a real pin — which does not happen unless a biologist has placed it there — a male will ignore it after a first ‘feel.’ If it turns out to be another male, it is pushed aside with a mighty blow. But if the object turns out to be a female, the pursuer will stay by her side even though she fails to pay the slightest attention to him. The moment she comes to rest, he starts planting stalked spermatophores all around her, until she finds herself inside a sort of picket fence. Though the fence is loose and far from even, she is more likely than not to find her path blocked by one of the spermatophores. If her ova are mature, she will invariably pick one up.
— Friedrich Schaller, Soil Animals, Ann Arbor Science Paperbacks, University of Michigan Press, 1968, pp. 119-120.

Down the hill came running McLachlan kids ready to go fishing for yabbies. These small fresh water crayfish, which inhabited every muddy pool in the bush, were the easiest things to catch in the world.
— Graham McInnes, The Road to Gundagai.

[Family] That dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape.
— Dodie Smith (1896 – 1990), Dear Octopus.

There’s a sucker born every minute.
— Phineas T. Barnum (1810 – 1891) (attrib.)

There were a number of dingo experts called both for the prosecution and for the defence and there seemed to be considerable diversion of views as to whether they were four-legged animals or eight-legged octopi and their views changed from day to day.
— Professor J. M. Cameron in Tom Jullett, Clues to Murder, Bodley Head 1986, 207, also Bryson, Evil Angels, 543, on the Chamberlain case at a meeting of the Medico Legal Society (Jullett), or the Royal Society of Medicine (Bryson), 12 April 1984. Jullett is probably correct, as Bryson is commonly sloppy.

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