"Son of a moth", or "son of a moth", is a seme. As the saying goes, it refers to a godson and a goddaughter, which comes from The Book of Songs Xiaoya Xiao Yuan: "A moth has a son, but an ant loses it." Borer refers to "silkworm" and "caterpillar on mulberry" in ancient times; In ancient times, it was interpreted as "blue", "native bee" and "thin waist bee". The ancients thought that the salamander was barren, so they caught the moth and fed it as a seme. So use "cotton bollworm" as a metaphor for sememe. In fact, the conclusion of the ancients was wrong. The moth is a green insect, while the grub is a parasitic bee. It often catches moths and stores them in their nests, lays eggs in their bodies, and the eggs are used as food after hatching. This is actually a parasitic phenomenon. However, the term "the son of a moth" has remained.
Modern biology explains the "stem borer" as the blue tiny larva of Lepidoptera; "Newt" is a kind of slender-waist bee, belonging to the family of Lepidoptera. The explanation for parasitism is that two creatures live together, one benefits and the other suffers, and the latter provides nutrients and shelter for the former. The main parasites are bacteria, viruses, fungi and protozoa. Among animals, parasitic worms are particularly important, and insects are the main parasites of plants.
As can be seen from the Book of Songs, as early as 3000 years ago, the ancients had observed that salamanders had the habit of catching other insect larvae. However, people did not understand the reasons for catching larvae in the pre-Qin period, and scholars did not try to explain it until the Han Dynasty. Yang Xiong said in the book "The Eye of Law": "The son of a moth is wandering around. May he be like me for a long time." He means that grubs caught a young moth and read a spell to it: "Like me! Like me! " If you scream for a long time, the moth will become a larva. At that time, many scholars completely agreed with Yang Xiong's statement without thinking, and some even embellished their mistakes and continued to develop. However, some scholars expressed doubts. After careful observation, they gradually solved the secret of "the son of the moth is responsible"
At the beginning of the 6th century, Tao Hongjing, a famous doctor in the Northern and Southern Dynasties, refuted Yang Xiong's erroneous statement according to his own observation. Tao Hongjing said, "(Bees) have many of these. Although it is called a soil bee, it is not a cave in the soil, but a house. Today, a black, very thin waist holds mud and utensils in people's rooms as a room like a bamboo tube. Its children are as big as corn. In the middle is catching more than a dozen green spiders on the grass. When I am full, I still keep my mouth shut in order to plan my son's food. One of them, those who enter the reed pipe, also take the green worms in the grass. A newt. The poet said, "The moth has a son, but it gave birth to a son." It is a fallacy to say that a slim waist without a daughter is to follow the advice of a caterpillar and become her own child. The author of the poem is unknown, and the master has not been judged for his eccentricity. Sages have shortcomings, and many of them do. According to the observed facts, Tao Hongjing clearly pointed out that it is wrong to say that the thin-waisted bees catch caterpillars in order to educate them into their own offspring.
Han Baosheng, a scholar of Shu after the Five Dynasties, further supported Tao Hongjing's viewpoint with facts. He wrote in the book Shu Ben Cao: Someone once took apart a bee's nest and observed it, and what he saw was the same as what Tao Hongjing saw. Many scholars in the Song Dynasty observed the demolition of nests and agreed with Tao Hongjing's point of view. Kou Zongxuan carefully observed that leptospira laid eggs on the captured caterpillars. Cheng Peng and Fan Chuyi also supplemented the incompleteness of Tao Hongjing's theory with newly discovered facts. Huang Fuan pointed out in his book Xie Yi Xinyu in the late Ming Dynasty that the moth did not die in the nest, but could not move. He also carefully observed that if the prey is a spider, then the salamander lays its eggs in the middle of the spider's stomach, which is the same as the fly maggot laying eggs on silkworms.
1400 after Tao Hongjing put forward the above viewpoint, Faber, a famous French entomologist, and Peckham, an American entomologist, made a very detailed study on the reproductive behavior of LEPIDOPTERA insects. Comparing their research results with those of Tao Hongjing and others, we can see that Tao Hongjing and others' careful observation of insects is modern science, and their conclusions are completely correct.
In addition to salamanders, other insect parasitism was observed in ancient China. For example, the book Erya more than two thousand years ago mentioned a parasitic fly called "sting", which was discovered by the ancients in sericulture practice. Guo Pu of the Jin Dynasty said in Er Ya Zhu that there was another name for Zhi, namely Pupa Insect.
Lu Dian in Song Dynasty made a clear explanation in Yaya: "As the old saying goes, flies are sucked by silkworms, that is, cocoons turn into maggots, vulgarization into mites, and scholars turn into flies." That is to say, this parasitic fly lays eggs on silkworms. When silkworms spin cocoons, fly eggs are born in silkworm pupae and hatch into maggots, commonly known as crabs. This fly maggot enters the soil and soon becomes a fly. Now we know that the moth mentioned by the ancients is actually a kind of sexual silkworm maggot. Flies, whose larvae are parasitic on silkworms, cause maggot disease of silkworms. It can be seen that the reason why Guo Pu calls cockroaches "pupae insects" is because this parasitic fly is one of the main pests of silkworm, and its larvae (maggots) mostly live in the pupae stage of silkworm life history before leaving the silkworm body. So pupae means insects in pupae. This shows that China knew the parasitic phenomenon of silkworm fly maggots at the latest in the Jin Dynasty.
The "son of a moth" in history is not a colorful story. Dong Zhuo and Lu Bu turned against each other, and they were 127 sons of Emperor Wu of the Ming Dynasty and adopted sons of eunuchs in the middle and late Tang Dynasty ... Even in the novel Legend of the Condor Heroes, Yang Kang, as the adopted son of Hong Yanlie, was constantly struggling in his father's country and adoptive father's country. The son of a moth, more importantly, is really hard to understand through the ages.