Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/154

148 generally held to be poisonous, these charming little lizards are really quite harmless. Hottentots have a great dread of the getje, believing that if it bites them, they will live just long enough to reach home, at most till sundown.

Among this miscellaneous collection is a wasp (Mutilla), of which I have found some twelve or fourteen kinds. The males are winged, as usual with wasps, but the females are wingless. She has a red thorax and a yellow-spotted hairy abdomen. She runs very quickly among the karoo bushes, and, if alarmed, hides under them or buries herself in the loose hot sand at their roots. She has to be handled carefully, as she has a very powerful sting. She also stridulates, no doubt a call to her flying mate who, by the way, cannot sting. I have found only three males (one dead in a Stegodyphus nest), but the males are very rare. I do not know why the females are wingless and the sexes so different in appearance. But the same thing occurs with some grasshoppers; I have one kind particularly in my mind, the female of which is dark, huge and heavy, with only rudimentary wings, while the male is small, slight, smart, brick red and a splendid flyer. The variety of grasshoppers and ants here is extraordinary, and the protective shapes and colors are most wonderful. Such protective devices are, of course, quite a feature of the fauna of the bare and stony karoo; but no one who had not seen them could believe how efficacious they are. Even a trained eye may lose an insect while looking at it.

Passing on to scorpions, the four species found here embrace three genera. One kind (Opisthophthalmus austerus), a burrower, is very common; one may catch fifty almost any day. They grow to six or seven inches in length and are pugnacious and poisonous. Most Opisthophthalmi dig holes from one to two feet deep, sometimes but not generally under stones, with the opening oval-shaped like a human eye; but O. austerus here is, as far as my experience goes, invariably found under stones by day, sometimes with only a shallow burrow under the stone, at other times with a burrow ending in a hole which varies in depth, often not being deep enough to hide the scorpion. When you raise the stone you expose the scorpion, which runs to and fro in its now roofless burrow, and, if it has sunk a hole, eventually dives down into that, sometimes tail first. If you irritate these scorpions, they tilt the hind part of the body forward and up by straightening their hind legs under it; then jerking it quickly and stridulating angrily, they rush at you; and most ugly creatures they are—all nippers and sting. The stridulating sound is produced by rubbing the jaws which are lined with short, stiff, yellow hairs against the front edge of the head-plate. The male closely resembles the female up