Natural history -- Nicaragua; Nicaragua -- Description and travel
On the third year after I had noticed the attendance of the ants on
my passion-flower, I found that the glands were not so well looked
after as before, and soon discovered that a number of scale-insects
had established themselves on the stems, and that the ants had in a
great measure transferred their attentions to them. An ant would
stand over a scale-insect and stroke it alternately on each side
with its antennae, whereupon every now and then a clear drop of
honey would exude from a pore on the back of the latter and be
imbibed by the ant. Here it was clear that the scale-insect was
competing successfully with the leaves and sepals for the
attendance and protection of the ants, and was successful either
through the fluid it furnished being more attractive or more
abundant.* (* I have since observed ants attending scale-insects on
a large plant of Passiflora macrocarpa in the palm-house at Kew.) I
have, from these facts, been led to the conclusion that the use of
honey-secreting glands in plants is to attract insects that will
protect the flower-buds and leaves from being injured by
herbivorous insects and mammals, but I do not mean to infer that
this is the use of all glands, for many of the small appendicular
bodies, called "glands" by botanists, do not secrete honey. The
common dog-rose of England is furnished with glands on the
stipules, and in other species they are more numerous, until in the
wild Rosa villosa of the northern counties the leaves are thickly
edged, and the fruit and sepals covered with stalked glands. I have
only observed the wild roses in the north of England, and there I
have never seen insects attending the glands. These glands,
however, do not secrete honey, but a dark, resinous, sticky liquid,
that probably is useful by being distasteful to both insects and
mammals.
If the facts I have described are sufficient to show that some
plants are benefited by supplying ants with honey from glands on
their leaves and flower-buds, I shall not have much difficulty in
proving that many plant-lice, scale-insects, and leaf-hoppers, that
also attract ants by furnishing them with honey-like food, are,
similarly benefited. The aphides are the principal ant-cows of
Europe. In the tropics their place is taken in a great measure by
species of Coccidae and genera of Homoptera, such as Membracis and
its allies. My pineapples were greatly subject to the attacks of a
small, soft-bodied, brown coccus, that was always guarded by a
little, black, stinging ant (Solenopsis). This ant took great care
of the scale-insects, and attacked savagely any one interfering
with them, as I often found to my cost, when trying to clear my
pines, by being stung severely by them. Not content with watching
over their cattle, the ants brought up grains of damp earth, and
built domed galleries over them, in which, under the vigilant guard
of their savage little attendants, the scale-insects must, I think,
have been secure from the attacks of all enemies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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