Page:Insects - Their Ways and Means of Living.djvu/34

it is a human animal, are always parts of its body, or of its jaws or its legs. The set of prongs at the end of the body of the female grasshopper constitutes a digging tool, an instrument by means of which the insect makes a hole in the ground wherein she deposits her eggs. Entomologists call the organ an ovipositor, or egg-placer. Figure 2 B

Fig. 3. The female grasshopper in the position of depositing a pod of eggs in a hole in the ground dug with her ovipositor. (Drawn from a photograph in U. S. Bur. Ent.)

shows the general form of a grasshopper's ovipositor; the prongs are short and thick, the points of the upper pair are curved upward, those of the lower bent downward.

When the female grasshopper is ready to deposit a batch of eggs, she selects a suitable spot, which is almost any place in an open sunny field where her ovipositor can penetrate the soil, and there she inserts the tip of her organ with the prongs tightly closed. When the latter are well within the ground, they are probably spread apart so as to compress the earth outward, for the drilling