The Violet Ground Beetle

Yesterday, while I was on-line looking up whether UK fish leeches suck human blood (there are only two known to do so) , Linnaea found a beetle. She came in with her hands closed around this beetle and quickly opened them to show me. David got her a mayonnaise jar to place the beetle in, and I switched from looking for leeches to looking for beetles. She said it had a purplish color to its back. So, I found ground beetles via U.S. sites, narrowing it to Britain I found the Violet Ground Beetle. Linnaea, happily carrying the jar, came around to compare the picture with the in person beetle, and I noticed it was wriggling around on its back. I tried to turn it over, but it wouldn't go. Linnaea brought it to David who noticed that it was covered in little red spider-like creatures. All of the joints into it's carapace seemed to be covered. I tried to take pictures, but without a macro lens they are a bit fuzzy. I've put arrows on to show where the mite-like creatures are.

I assume, from the way the little creatures are all bunched together, that these are a parasite of the violet ground beetle. That is, they were born inside it, so mom laid eggs on or in the little fellow and when they hatched they began to eat their way out. I went looking on the internet to try and find exactly what parasatizes violet ground beetles and I couldn't find anything. However, I found a wonderful William D. Hamilton story.

William D. Hamilton is an evolutionary theorist, one of the most amazing of evolutionary theorists, who died in 2000 of a cereberal hemorrage brought on by malaria. His burial request was this:

I will leave a sum in my last will for my body to be carried to Brazil and to these forests. It will be laid out in a manner secure against the possums and the vultures just as we make our chickens secure; and this great Coprophanaeus beetle will bury me. They will enter, will bury, will live on my flesh; and in the shape of their children and mine, I will escape death. No worm for me nor sordid fly, I will buzz in the dusk like a huge bumble bee. I will be many, buzz even as a swarm of motorbikes, be borne, body by flying body out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars, lofted under those beautiful and un-fused elytra which we will all hold over our backs. So finally I too will shine like a violet ground beetle under a stone.

I cried reading that. The wonderful athiesm in it all makes my heart leap with joy. I like that kind of reincarnation. It reminds me of Lee Hayes' song:

If I should die before I wake,
All my bone and sinew take
Put me in the compost pile
To decompose me for a while
Worms, water, sun, will have their way,
Returning me to common clay
All that I am will feed the trees
And little fishies in the seas.
When radishes and corn you munch,
You may be having me for lunch
And then excrete me with a grin,
Chortling, "There goes Lee again."
Twill be my happiest destiny
To die and live eternally.

Bill Hamilton wasn't buried in the Brazilian wilderness. He was buried in Wytham Woods. Which I now want to go wander through.

Oh, and our suffering violet ground beetle is still wriggling and jiggling to the horrible, macabre munchings of its parasitic load.

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