Toktokkie!

When we take Alfie for his daily walk, we are always very careful to look where we put our feet! Apart from the fact that if I don’t look where I’m going I end up falling over, there are many things that it is best to avoid stepping on. Things like scorpions! We haven’t seen that many so far this summer though, thank goodness! Snakes tend to move out of the way and snails just make a mess between my toes! We have a range of ants too, from tiny and harmless to fairly large with quite a bite, so when we stand and gaze at the sea we have to keep checking the ground and stamping our feet if necessary. Or yelping with pain and doing a quick ant-dance if we forget!

We also have large (up to 65 mm) shiny black beetles known as ‘toktokkie’ beetles (Psammodes striatus). Stout with heavy bodies and unable to fly, they obviously do a lot of running! However, they frequently stop along the way to tap their abdomen several times in succession on the ground before running off and repeating the process. Over and over! This habit of knocking and running has given rise to a game that children play, called toktokkie, where they knock on someone’s door and then run away!

A toktokkie in our garden.

The male beetle taps to attract a mate and is answered by a receptive female. How on earth do they know whether the ‘tapper’ is male or female? But they obviously do, because after a prolonged exchange of signals, they finally make contact. The females lay single eggs about 6mm long which they place in a shallow hollow in the ground. The long, yellow larvae live in the soil and once they are adults they eat a variety of plant debris like grass seeds and bits of leaf.

He was tapping when I took this photo.

The toktokkie beetles have worked out a very clever way of finding water to drink. In the Namib Desert they dig small trenches to collect the moisture from fog banks that roll off the sea. Others in the same area do a sort of ‘head-stand’ so that the condensed dew that collects on their bodies trickles into their mouths.

Isn’t nature amazing?