All, as soon as they emerge from underground, are cripples, whose limbs have been amputated at the joints, some higher up, some lower down.

I see one mutilated Beetle who has only one leg left entire.

With this odd limb and the stumps of the others lamentably tattered, scaly with vermin, he rows himself, as it were, over the dusty surface.

A comrade emerges, one better off for legs, who finishes the cripple and cleans out his abdomen.

So my thirteen remaining Necrophori end their days, half-devoured by their companions, or at least shorn of several limbs.
The pacific relations of the outset are succeeded by cannibalism.
History tells us that certain peoples, the Massagetae and others, used to kill their aged folk in order to spare them the miseries of senility.