Natural Enemies. 



131 



it ; for unlike the true chigoe, the female of which deposits 

 eggs in the wound she makes, these harvest mites have no 

 object of the kind, and, when not killed at the hands of 

 those they torment, they soon die — victims to their san- 

 guinary appetite."* The same argument may, I think, 

 be applied to the Locust Mite. 



The Rocky Mountain Locust infested with this mite was 

 sent to me in 1868 by Uriah Bruner, of Omaha, Neb., and 

 in 1869 by Clark Irvine and C. Twine, of Oregon, T. K. 

 Faulkner, of Whitesville, and Jno. P. Dopf, of Rock Port, 

 Mo., — the latter gentleman stating that it was fast causing 

 a diminution in the ranks of the common enemy. I have 

 also received it from Minnesota and Kansas, and found it 

 on several of our native locusts ; while the following pas- 

 sage from an editorial account of the ravages of locusts in 

 Kansas in 1869, which appeared in the Prairie Farmer, 

 (Aug. 21, 1869,) is a sample of many newspaper accounts, 

 and will show how efficient even a mite may be in killing: 



The course of the locusts was brought to a sudden halt by the 

 operation of some parasite, appearing in the shape of small red 

 mites, which attach themselves to the body, under the wings, where 

 they suck the carcass to a dry shell; the dead bodies of the grass- 

 hoppers almost covering some plants, where they have taken hold 

 of a leaf or stalk, and clasped it, with a dead embrace; many others 

 fall to the ground to die, too weak to rise again. In a half day's 

 examination, where they were very thick, we failed to find more than 

 two grasshoppers not so attacked, and this was not local; for a dis- 

 tance of thirty miles across the country they were found similarly 

 affected. 



The Anonymous Tachina-fly. — Our locust, like so many 

 other insects, is also subject to the attacks of certain two- 

 winged flies much resembling the common House-fly, but 

 larger. One is the very same Tachina-fly (Tachina anon- 

 yma) which I have bred from a number of other insects.f 



* Am. Naturalist, Vol. VII, p. 19. 



t See Mo. Ent. Repts., 4, p„ 129, and 5, p. 133. 



