Sept., '06] 



ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. 



245 



T7 



a place. Eggs laid June 15th by a 

 captured adult hatched the 17th, the 

 larvae pupated the night of July 1st, 

 and the imagos emerged on the 3rd. 



If there is not enough food the lar- 

 vae are prone to eat each other. This 

 happened in the case of eggs laid May 

 17th, which hatched the 20th, and by 

 June nth the larvae had all disap- 

 peared. 



On June 22nd larvae were found to 

 be abundant in a rain puddle situated 

 in a back yard in this city. The pud- 

 dle was about four feet in diameter, 

 the water perfectly clear, with a soft, 

 muddy bottom. The whole bottom 

 seem alive with the moving heads of 

 the larvae, which were about thirty to 

 the square inch. There were a few 

 red larvae of Chironomus cristata in the 

 same pool. The dyari from the tank 

 often construct ' ' houses ' ' in the form 

 of tubes in the alga, fastening together 

 bits of alga and excreta with silk. 

 There evidently cannot be much silk 

 for the tubes crumble easily, unlike 

 those of many gnats. The larvae in 

 the puddle did not spin at all, they 

 simply waved about on the surface of 

 the soft mud until they made a hollow, 

 which on deepening allowed the mud 

 to silt in on their backs; or they shove 

 head first into the mud, in either case 

 making a slightly arcuate tube open- 

 ing at the surface at both ends. In 

 this tube they stay, head and thorax 

 protruded, keeping up a constant wav- 

 ing motion. They almost never come 

 out and swim about. The food in the 



