112 FIELD ZOOLOGY. 



as they are called, includes twenty-six families, ten of 

 which are aquatic in their life habits. Hence in any 

 pool in the river or in the ponds, in the warm spring days, 

 the observer will find large numbers of these true bugs, 

 whose feeding habits should be studied while they are 

 darting about the pond in the activities characteristic 

 of their kind. The shore insects do some good as scaven- 

 gers by eating drowned insects along the shore line of 

 bodies of fresh and salt water. The water striders and the 

 water boatmen are to be found in the ponds or pools, 

 also the giant waterbug, the electric-light bug, so called 

 because it may so often be found flying about the electric 

 lights at night. Most of its life is spent in the water; 

 it is only the adult insect which comes out into the air 

 occasionally, and these expeditions seem to be made for 

 the purposes of food-getting and seeking another pond, 

 there to lay its eggs and thus distribute its kind. This 

 insect is fiercely predaceous, and often does serious 

 harm to animals much larger than itself, such as carp 

 and gold-fish. 



Here, also, may be found the water scorpions, dirty 

 stick-like bugs, rather sluggish in their habits. They 

 have a long respiratory tube which they lift up to the 

 surface of the water as they lie in some shallow pool, and 

 through which they take in a new supply of air. Hence 

 they are really air-breathing insects, although they 

 spend their life in the water. This is true of many of the 

 aquatic bugs, and some of them are terrestrial in the 

 adult stage. The back-swimmers, the toad bugs, the 

 marsh treaders, and the shore bugs, all belong here, and 

 they all have a slender piercing and sucking beak. The 

 food of most of the aquatic hemipters consists of other 

 forms of aquatic life, and if the insects thus serving as 



