Birds and All Nature, Vol. 6, No. 2, September 1899: Illustrated by Color PhotographyVarious
History
Birds and All Nature, Vol. 6, No. 2, September 1899: Illustrated by Color Photography
Various
Birds -- Periodicals; Natural history -- Periodicals
Although the most of these "ant-loving" insects are strictly
subterranean species, living their whole lives underground, the ants,
among which they live, do most of their foraging above ground, and thus
may be taken as typical of a second group of underground insects--those
which have their homes below ground for protection or concealment,
but which themselves live, at least part of the time, above ground.
Volumes have been written about the wonderful habits of ants, of
their community life, of the division of labor among them, of their
slave-making customs, of their courage, patriotism, and indefatigable
industry, of their highly developed instinct, which, in fact, becomes
real intelligence; so that almost everyone knows the main facts
about these wonderful little insects, and we can spend our time to
better advantage on those underground creatures about which there is
less general information. It will suffice to say that most ants have
their nests, consisting of tunnels and chambers, underground; that
there their queen lays her eggs and the young are carefully tended by
workers until they have reached the adult stage, and there the food is
stored for use in the winter months. There is a curious kind of ant
in the southwestern states and Mexico called the honey ant. Certain
individuals in a colony of these honey ants have enormously distended
stomachs and are fed by the other ants with a kind of grape sugar, or
honey, during the summer, as they hang suspended by their legs from the
roof of an underground chamber. When winter comes the other ants are
fed by these honey-bearers, which give put the stored-up honey from
their mouths drop by drop.
There is an interesting class of underground insects which, in their
early stages, hide in especially dug pits and lie in wait for their
prey, but which, when full grown, live above ground. Such are the
ant-lions and the tiger-beetles. The young ant-lion is a heavy-bodied,
clumsy-looking creature, with very long and sharp jaws, which digs for
itself a funnel-shaped pit in loose, dry sand, using its flat head
and jaws as a spade in digging. Then it hides itself at the bottom of
the pit, its body completely covered with the sand, and waits until
some unlucky little insect comes along and stumbles over the edge of
the hollow. The side of the hole is made at such an angle that the
sand slips down with the weight of even an ant and carries it towards
the open jaws of the ant-lion. Every struggle which the poor creature
makes to escape causes the sand to slide down faster, and the ant-lion
at the bottom jerks up a shower of sand with its head, which hastens
the miniature avalanche until the poor victim is within reach of the
powerful jaws and is devoured. The adult ant-lion is a beautiful,
gauzy-winged creature, not at all like its blood-thirsty larva.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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