Curious Facts

Everything below is in the book — each fact links straight to the page it comes from.

A big dragon fly may carry forty thousand eyes in its head. Each of its two great eyes is a mosaic of six-sided facets: "some of the largest of the dragon flies have as many as twenty thousand facets, or small eyes, in each large eye. Think of it! Forty thousand eyes in one little dragon fly head." Read it in the book →
No, the darning needle will not sew up your ears. Morley takes on the folk belief head-on: some "say it sews up people's ears when they lie on the grass. This is not true. It does not sew up anything. It has nothing to sew with." Besides, "Why should it want to sew up people's ears, anyway?" Read it in the book →
The baby dragon fly's pug-dog face is a folding harpoon. What looks like a mask over its mouth is a hinged lower lip, and the children watch it fire: it "just darted it out into a long-handled spoon, with hooks at the end, and hooked up that little grub." Larvae of some species are said to take pollywogs and small fishes. Read it in the book →
In the South the praying mantis was called a "mule-killer". When disturbed the mantis spits a brown liquor, and "the people think the brown liquor it spits out of its mouth, when disturbed, is fatal to mules." It also collected the names devil-horse, rear-horse, camel-cricket, prophet and soothsayer. Read it in the book →
Water-bug eggs were baked into cakes in Mexico and shipped to England by the ton. Species near the city of Mexico lay enormous quantities of eggs in the ponds, which were mixed with meal and made into cakes; the adult bugs were "gathered by the ton, too, and sent to England as food for cage birds, fish, and poultry." A ton, the book reckons, is about twenty-five million bugs. Read it in the book →
An early attempt at mosquito control by dragon fly failed instantly. Men reared dragon fly larvae to adulthood as mosquito hunters, and "as soon as they got their wings, away went those dragon flies, - away and away, without stopping to catch a single mosquito for the men who had taken the trouble to raise them." Read it in the book →
A mayfly emergence once lay four inches deep on the steps and drove a naturalist indoors. Swammerdam, the first to study mayflies closely, described a French swarm in which the "ephemeræ filled the air like ... snowflakes in a dense snowstorm," the steps buried "two, three, or even four inches" deep, and the insects "dashed in my face, got into my eyes, mouth, and nose." Read it in the book →
The mantis prays with its arms and eats its prey alive, "as a boy would eat an apple". "Not a thought of devotion lies in that cruel little head." It seizes an unwary insect with those uplifted spiked legs and "would coolly proceed to devour it alive, eating it as a boy would eat an apple" - and if two mantes meet, one is generally eaten by the other. Read it in the book →
The grasshopper fiddles with his hind leg on his wing. A row of fine spines runs down the inside of the femur, which he scrapes across his wing covers: "his femur is his violin bow, and his wing cover is his violin." Only the male sings; "the little lady grasshopper sits still and listens to him." Read it in the book →
Mayflies come into the world with mouths too small to eat. They dance for a day or a few hours and die - hence day flies, or ephemeræ, "which means short-lived." "They have eyes, as you can see, little round eyes, but their mouth is so tiny they cannot eat. Strange little beings to come into the world so helpless!" Read it in the book →
Children in sugarless country districts sucked aphid "honey dew" off leaves for sweetness. Aphids drink more sap than they need and the surplus escapes as a sweet liquid that ants and bees love. "Children sometimes suck the honey dew from the leaves in back country places, where sugar is scarce and where candy is seldom to be had." Read it in the book →
To a bird, eating a dragon fly is like swallowing nails. Birds mostly leave the hard, stiff-winged adults alone: "They are so hard and their wings are so stiff I should think a bird might almost as well swallow nails." Frogs are less fussy, and lie in wait for the mothers coming down to the water to lay. Read it in the book →
An insect's ear may be on its legs, its antennae or its abdomen. "An ear is an ear wherever it happens to be, and the insects hear well enough with theirs" - the book's point being that an ear is only a vibrating membrane plus a sensitive nerve, so its address hardly matters. Read it in the book →
The fearsome-looking male corydalus is the harmless one. The male's long curved jaws "look very dangerous; but in this instance the creature's appearance is worse than its bite, and the real biter is the female whose jaws are smaller but very useful in nipping tormentors." Read it in the book →
The dobson larva collected the nicknames conniption bug, alligator and dragon. So alarming is its look that it earned "many names that are neither complimentary nor beautiful, such as conniption bug, alligator, and dragon, and numerous others equally expressive." Morley's verdict on the monster: "It does no harm, and we will not kill it." Read it in the book →
Dragon flies are older than bees, butterflies, dogs, horses and people. "The dragon fly family is also a very old one. Indeed, it is one of the oldest families on earth. Long before there were bees or butterflies or dogs or horses or human beings, there were dragon flies" - which is why it looks "very old-fashioned, like the pine trees." Read it in the book →
Farmers fought chinch bugs by making them sick. "What, Nell, you never heard of a sick bug?" The class is told that insects catch diseases, that chinch bugs "are not as healthy in some places as in others," and that this was tried as a curious weapon against a pest that had destroyed millions of dollars' worth of American grain. Read it in the book →