Harvesting Ants and Trap-Door Spiders: Notes and Observations on Their Habits and DwellingsMoggridge, John Traherne
Science
Harvesting Ants and Trap-Door Spiders: Notes and Observations on Their Habits and Dwellings
Moggridge, John Traherne
Ants; Trap-door spiders
At one point where the rock was almost entirely solid and without
flaw or crevice, and where it was clear that the passages were
entirely the work of the ants, we measured a tunnel by worming
a straw down it, and found it to be ten inches in length. We
subsequently traced this tunnel or rock gallery down until it
communicated with a chamber filled with winged ants and seeds of
several kinds. This granary was horizontal, and merely an enlargement
of an ordinary gallery of a compressed spindle-shape, flattened from
above downwards, measuring as nearly as I could estimate three inches
in length, by a trifle less than an inch in breadth, and half an
inch in height. The walls were tolerably smooth, but not prepared or
glazed in the way that certain small terminal cells which I shall
shortly describe were. The surfaces, however, had a very different
appearance to that of the surrounding sandstone, being of a darker
and brownish colour, and seeming to be coated with some kind of
dressing or cement.
One of these tunnels at first took a horizontal course for two and a
half inches, then descended vertically for an inch and a half to a
point where it made two horizontal branches, and from these latter
several other vertical galleries descended, two of which we were able
to trace until they expanded into a cluster of small pear-shaped
cells, the walls of which were quite smooth and very carefully laid
with plates of mica and cement. I was able to draw this on the spot,
Fig. A, Plate V., while Mr. Lightbody worked it out piecemeal with
hammer and chisel. It was unfortunately impossible to secure more
than very imperfect fragments as specimens. These terminal cells
were empty when we came to them, but it is quite possible that the
ants may have conveyed away larvæ or winged ants from them, having
received abundant notice of the coming danger from the continued
jarring of the chisel-work.
One entrance to this nest lay in a small accumulation of soil in a
hollow of the rock, and it was at this point that the refuse from
the nest was cast out. Indeed, had it not been for the accidental
circumstance of my having traced the ants to the newly hewn step in
the sandstone, I might never have discovered the fact that the nests
are sometimes carried deep into the living rock.
[Illustration: _Plate VI._]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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