Animal Intelligence: The International Scientific Series, Vol. XLIV.Romanes, George John
Science
Animal Intelligence: The International Scientific Series, Vol. XLIV.
Romanes, George John
Animal behavior; Animal intelligence
and entire migration;' and the next day the nest down which he had last
poured the carbolic acid was entirely deserted. Mr. Belt adds: 'I
afterwards found that when much disturbed, and many of the ants
destroyed, the survivors migrate to a new locality. I do not doubt that
some of the leading minds in this formicarium recollected the nest of
the year before, and directed the migration to it.'
Now, I do not insist that the facts necessarily point to this
conclusion; for it may have been that the leaders of the migration
simply stumbled upon the old and vacant nest by accident, and finding it
already prepared as a nest, forthwith proceeded to transfer the food and
pupæ to it. Still, as the two nests were separated from one another by
so considerable a distance, this hypothesis does not seem probable, and
the only other one open to us is that the ants remembered the site of
their former home for a period of twelve months. And this conclusion is
rendered less improbable from a statement of Karl Vogt in his
'Thierstaaten,' to the effect that for several successive years ants
from a certain nest used to go through certain inhabited streets to a
chemist's shop 600 mètres distant, in order to obtain access to a vessel
filled with syrup. As it cannot be supposed that this vessel was found
in successive working seasons by as many successive accidents, it can
only be concluded that the ants remembered the syrup store from season
to season.
I shall now pass on to consider a class of highly remarkable facts,
perhaps the most remarkable of the many remarkable facts connected with
ant psychology.
It has been known since the observations of Huber that all the ants of
the same nest or community recognise one another as friends, while an
ant introduced from another nest, even though it be an ant of the same
species, is known at once to be a foreigner, and is usually maltreated
or put to death. Huber found that when he removed an ant from a nest and
kept it away from its companions for a period of four months it was
still recognised as a friend, and caressed by its previous
fellow-citizens after the manner in which ants show friendship, viz., by
stroking antennæ. Sir John Lubbock, after repeating and fully confirming
these observations, extended them as follows. He first tried keeping the
separated ant away from the nest for a still longer period than four
months, and found that even after a separation of more than a year the
animal was recognised as before. He repeated this experiment a number of
times, and always with the same invariable difference between the
reception accorded to a foreigner and a native--no matter, apparently,
how long the native had been absent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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