Wednesday's Beetle

You think it's just another Wednesday when you wake up. There's the shower, and breakfast, and drive down the hill to school, down the dirt road that now errupts as a cloud of dirt when anyone passes. It's almost the hot season and almost the dry season, but not quite. It's only Wednesday.

Then, as you are thinking nothing special about an average day, you see a hump in the dirt that looks like a big seed, only it's in the shape of a beetle (only it's the size of your hand), and you kick it and what should have been a seed, because it's soft and brown, suddnly sprouts long black legs that are swimming in the dirt and not letting it move. And you know it's a beetle and you think it's dying.


So, you call over the kids to look because you are right in front of school, and then you take him inside and show him around, and you get to tell the kids, Hey! this is not an ordinary Wednesday. Today is the day you are looking at and touching the strongest animal on Earth! Well, with proportional measuring, anyway. Kids, today you are going to learn about the Rhinocero Beetle!

To be more exact, we found the Megasoma elephas elephas, a member of the scarab beetle family. And these beetle can lift 850 times their weight. So, I have the kids see if they can lift their own weight, and they run around picking up their friends, then I pick up two of them and they think I'm Superman, and then we try to draw a picture of the beetle carrying 850 other beetles and the kids realize they can't count that high, so it must be a lot.

And then the beetle dies. First he slows down, then he rests, his leg stuck into the plum that we had put into his bowl. And by the end of recess he is gone.

Where did the beetle go, they ask me. To join John and Geoge, I say, but they don't get my joke. I think I'll name him Stuart, the fifth Beetle, after death.