Life Among the Mud Daubers

At 65, George Daniel Shafer had had a full, busy career as professor of physiology at Stanford University. On the first morning of the college year after "Emeritus" was added to his former title, Professor Shafer, feeling lonely and at loose ends, wandered into his beehouse. There he began to watch a mud-dauber wasp as she buzzed purposefully to the window sill, stretched her forefeet out like a kitten, and took a sun bath. She seemed to know exactly what she was about. In a matter of minutes Shafer's admiration was aroused and he found a new and absorbing interest in life. That was in 1940.

Nine years later, old Professor Shafer published a sprightly brief of his findings : The Ways of a Mud Dauber (Stanford University Press; $2.50), a slender (74 pp.) book telling what he learned about Sceliphron cementarium during several happy summers. The volume is dedicated to a crippled mud dauber, "Crumple-Wing," of which Shafer was especially fond.

Tidy Habits. From Crumple-Wing and her kin, Shafer learned some inside details of the mud dauber's life cycle. One of the most striking was the insect's built-in sanitary facilities. Each egg is laid in a separate mud cell, along with perhaps a dozen spiders which have been paralyzed by the mother wasp's sting. After the larva hatches from the egg, it begins to eat the spiders.

The larva has a closed alimentary canal. All the waste matter from its heavy protein diet is stored in an internal sac until the baby mud dauber has finished its food store. Then the larva develops an anus and excretes the entire sac into a back compartment of its bedchamber. It seals off the narrow connecting passage with a blob of quick-hardening cement, secreted especially for the purpose, so that it can spend the winter hygienically in the clean, dry front chamber.

In the larval period (which lasts through the winter) and in spring when the pupa has emerged from the cocoon, no urinary wastes are excreted. Instead, embryonic mud daubers produce uric acid pellets which are stored in an organ called the "fat body." Only after the adult wasp has started to eat its way out of its mud cell are the uric acid pellets excreted.

Sensitive Friends. Dr. Shafer made friends with individual mud daubers. He became convinced that "adult females of this species possess a nervous system which, though tiny in size, enables them to remember, to learn, and to show individuality." Several were trained to eat a drop of honey from his hand. One let him stroke her while she ate. She became so fond of him that Dr. Shafer had difficulty keeping her away from an alcohol lamp with which he was working in the lab. Twice he had to put her out of the room. After the first expulsion, he reports solemnly, she sulked at him for a week. After the second, she would have nothing to do with him--until three weeks later she recognized him in the yard, 50 feet away from the beehouse, and lit on the finger which had fed her. Says Dr. Shafer: "I felt as if I had been forgiven."

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