Animal Intelligence. George John Romanes
Читать онлайн книгу.
the path they follow becomes in a short time smooth and bare, looking like the impression of a cart-wheel through the herbage.
Each ant carries its semicircular piece of leaf upright over its head, so that the home-returning train is rendered very conspicuous. Nearer observation shows that this home-returning or ladened train of workers keeps to one side of the road, while the outgoing or empty-handed train keeps to the other side; so that on every road there is a double train of ants going in opposite directions. When the leaves arrive at the nest they are received by a smaller kind of workers, whose duty it is to cut up the pieces of leaf into still smaller fragments, whereby the leaves seem to be better fitted for the purpose to which, as we shall presently see, they are put. These smaller workers never take any part in the outdoor labours; but they occasionally leave the nest, apparently for the sole purpose of obtaining air and exercise, for when they leave the nest they merely run about doing nothing, and frequently, as if in mere sport, mount some of the semicircular pieces of leaf which the carrier ants are taking to the nest, and so get a ride home.
From his continued observation of these ants, Bates concludes—and his opinion has been corroborated by that both of Belt and Müller—that the object of all this labour is highly interesting and remarkable. The leaves when gathered do not themselves appear to be of any service to the ants as food; but when cut into small fragments and stored away in the nests, they become suited as a nidus for the growth of a minute kind of fungus on which the ants feed. We may therefore call these insects the 'gardening ants,' inasmuch as all their labour is given to the rearing of nutritious vegetables on artificially prepared soil. They are not particular as to the material which they collect and store up for soil, provided that it is a material on which the fungus will grow. Thus they are very partial to the inside white rind of oranges, and will carry off the flowers of certain shrubs while leaving the leaves untouched. But, to quote again from Bates,—
They are very particular about the ventilation of their underground chambers, and have numerous holes leading up to the surface from them. These they open out or close up, apparently to keep up a regular degree of temperature below. The great care they take that the pieces of leaves they carry into the nest should be neither too dry nor too damp, is also consistent with the idea that the object is the growth of a fungus that requires particular conditions of temperature and moisture to ensure its vigorous growth. If a sudden shower should come on, the ants do not carry the wet pieces into the burrows, but throw them down near the entrances. Should the weather clear up again, these pieces are picked up when nearly dried, and taken inside: should the rain, however, continue, they get sodden down into the ground, and are left there. On the contrary, in dry and hot weather, when the leaves would get dried up before they could be conveyed to the nest, the ants, when in exposed situations, do not go out at all during the hot hours, but bring in their leafy burdens in the cool of the day and during the night. As soon as the pieces of leaves are carried in they must be cut up by the small class of workers into little pieces. Some of the ants make mistakes, and carry in unsuitable leaves. Thus grass is always rejected by them, but I have seen some ants, perhaps young ones, carrying leaves of grass; but after a while these pieces are always brought out again and thrown away. I can imagine a young ant getting a severe ear-wigging from one of the major-domos for its stupidity.
When a nest is disturbed and the masses of ant-food spread about, the ants are in great concern to carry every morsel of it under shelter again; and sometimes, when I had dug into a nest, I found the next day all the earth thrown out filled with little pits, that the ants had dug into it to get out the covered-up food. When they migrate from one part to another, they also carry with them all the ant-food from their old habitations.
In Büchner's 'Geistesleben der Thiere' there is published an interesting description of the habits of these ants, which was communicated to the author by Dr. Fr. Ellendorf of Wiedenbrück, who has lived many years in Central America. Dr. Ellendorf says that—
It would be quite impossible for them to creep even through short grass with loads on their heads for miles. They therefore bite off the grass close to the ground for a breadth of about five inches, and throw it on one side. Thus a road is constructed, which is finally made quite smooth and even by the continual passing to and fro of millions upon millions night and day. . . . . If the road is looked down upon from a height with these millions thickly pressed together, and all moving along with their green bannerets over their heads, it looks as though a giant green snake were gliding slowly along the ground; and this picture is all the more striking in that all these bannerets are swaying backwards and forwards.[33]
This observer made the experiment of interrupting the advance of a column of these ants, with the interesting result which he describes:—
I wished to see how they would manage if I put an obstacle in their way. Thick high grass stood on either side of their narrow road, so that they could not pass through it with the load on their heads. I placed a dry branch, nearly a foot in diameter, obliquely across their path, and pressed it down so tightly on the ground that they could not creep underneath. The first comers crawled beneath the branch as far as they could, and then tried to climb over, but failed owing to the weight on their heads. Meanwhile the unloaded ants from the other side came on, and when these succeeded in climbing over the bough there was such a crush that the unladen ants had to clamber over the laden, and the result was a terrible muddle. I now walked along the train, and found that all the ants with their bannerets on their heads were standing still, thickly pressed together, awaiting the word of command from the front. When I turned back to the obstacle, I saw with astonishment that the loads had been laid aside by more than a foot's length of the column, one imitating the other. And now work began on both sides of the branch, and in about half an hour a tunnel was made beneath it. Each ant then took up its burden again, and the march was resumed in the most perfect order.
A migration of these ants is thus described by the same observer:—
The road led towards a cocoa plantation, and here I soon discovered the building which I afterwards visited daily. As I again went thither one day I was met, at a considerable distance from the nest, by a closely pressed column coming thence, and all the ants laden with leaves, beetles, pupæ, butterflies, &c.; the nearer I came to the nest, the greater was the activity. It was soon plain to me that the ants were in the act of leaving their dwelling, and I walked along the train to discover the new abode. They had gone for some distance along the old road, and had then made a new one through the grass to a cooler place, lying rather higher. The grass on the new road was all bitten off close to the ground, and thousands were busy carrying the path on to the new building. At the new home itself was an unusual stir of life. There were all sorts of labourers—architects, builders, carpenters, sappers, helpers. A number were busy digging a hole in the ground, and they carried out little pellets of earth and laid them together on end to make a wall. Others drew along little twigs, straws, and grass-stalks, and put them near the place of building. I was anxious to know why they had quitted their old home, and when the departure was complete, I dug it up with a spade. At a depth of about a foot and a half I found several tunnels of a large marmot species, the terror of cocoa planters, because in making their passages they gnaw off the thickest roots of the cocoa plants. The interior of the ant-hill had apparently fallen in through these mines. Unfortunately I was unable to follow further the progress of the new building, for I was obliged to leave the next day for San Juan del Sur. When I returned at the end of a week the building was finished, and the whole colony was again busy with the leaves of the coffee plants.
Harvesting Ants (Atta).—The ants which, so far as at present known, practise the peculiar and distinctive habits to be described under this division belong for the most part to one genus, Atta, which, however, comprises a number of species distributed in localised areas over all the four quarters of the globe. Hitherto nineteen species have been detected as having the habits in question. These consist of gathering nutritious seeds of grasses during summer, and storing them in granaries for winter consumption. We owe our present knowledge concerning these insects to Mr. Moggridge,[34] who studied them in the south of Europe, Dr. Lincecum,[35] and Mr. MacCook,[36] who studied them in Texas, and Colonel Sykes[37] and Dr. Jerdon,[38] who made some observations upon them in India. They also occur scattered over a great part of Europe and in Palestine, where they were clearly known to Solomon and other classical writers of antiquity,[39]