SURROUNDINGS OF GROWING INSECTS 235 



young must find itself in the midst of an appropriate food 

 supply if it is to survive, and this condition is ensured by the 

 usually certain action of the female in laying eggs in or on the 

 right material. Though comparatively few parent insects, 

 on account largely of the divergence in life-conditions of the 

 larva from the adult, ever see their young, these owe their 

 habitation and food, whatever they may be the leaf, or the 

 bark-gallery, or the timber-tunnel, or the mass of refuse, 

 or the gall, or the body of a host-animal to the predictive 

 action of their mother, Maternal care has its part in the 

 environment of all, even if the eggs be dropped with apparent 

 heedlessness on a running stream. 



From this common mode of behaviour as regards egg- 

 laying which results in a provision of suitable food and shelter 

 for young insects generally, we may pass to those more 

 interesting cases in which the female sees and tends her 

 young after hatching. Instances of such direct maternal care 

 are found among some insects which display the open type of 

 wing-growth ; among those with complete transformation they 

 are more frequent. One of the lowliest exopterygote orders 

 (the Dermaptera) affords in the common earwig (Forficula) 

 an example of a mother insect which broods over the eggs 

 until they are hatched and watches the young for some time 

 after hatching. Beneath an upturned stone a female earwig 

 may often be found sitting on her eggs, and later covering the 

 small members of her newly-hatched family with her body. 

 Among the Orthoptera, the female Mole-cricket (Gryllotalpa) 

 constructs an underground nest in which she deposits her eggs 

 to the number of three hundred or more, and it is said that 

 she changes the position of these with regard to the surface of 

 the soil in correspondence with changes in the air-temperature 

 due to varying degrees of sunshine. She defends the eggs, 

 as well as the young after hatching, from attack by predaceous 

 ground-beetles, and also from males of her own species, for 

 while the mother's care is exemplary, the father is addicted to 

 cannibalism. Mole-crickets are carnivorous, and the mother 

 catches prey for her young, as well as for herself, until they 

 have undergone their first moult. 



The spring and summer aphids which give birth to active 

 young may be seen in numbers on leaves surrounded by their 



