CLERUS SP, 215 
it is able apparently to live upon them longer than upon many 
other species, as these beetles remain alive after their ege-laying 
is over and the larvae have hatched out. The mother beetles spend 
their time walking up and down the egg-gallery or going up 
the entrance hole to the outside, and the Clerids watch at the 
mouth of these holes and seize the beetles when they appear 
outside the bark. They catch their prey by sight only, and not 
by scent. Unless the bark-beetle is right in front of them, they 
will pass it by unnoticed. When the beetle, however, comes 
within their line of sight, they pounce upon it, just as a tiger 
does when seizing its prey, with one rush. If out of its hole, 
the bark-borer has not the remotest chance of escape. The 
Clerid seizes it with his forelegs and mandibles (see Pl. X. 
fig. 4, b,), picks it up off the ground, turns it round so as to have 
the ventral surface facing him with the head uppermost. 
(see Pl. X, fig. 4, c.) sits well back on its hind legs, and 
commences to feed upon its prey, whose struggles are quite 
ineffectual in that deadly yrip. In commencing upon the 
beetle the Clerus invariably starts with the head; it gets its 
mandibles round the junction of the head with the prothorax, 7.e., 
round the neck, following the parallel of the tiger, and chews and 
sucks at the neck and head until it has finished them completely. 
It next goes to work on the prothorax, piercing with ease 
through the hard outer chitinous shell with its powerful mandi- 
bles and breaking it to pieces, the contents being entirely 
cleaned out and consumed, for the beetle is a neat feeder an: 
entirely cleans the meat off the chitinous bone before rejecting it 
Having finished the prothorax, it throws away the mangled 
shell and turns its attention to the body consisting of the reso- 
and meta-thorax and the abdomen. Ina bark-beetle this is 
often in the shape of a blunt elliptical cylinder with a flattish 
top where it joins the prothorax. The beetle holds this between 
its front legs flat top upwards and proceeds first to pull off the 
elytra, which are rejected: the under wings being released open 
out to their full extent but remain altached to the trunk. The 
Clerus then entirely cleans out this bottle-shaped cylinder as 
neatly as one could clean out a jar with a spoon. When entirely 
empty, it is thrown away and the insect starts in search of another 
QO 
Ons 
