United States or Djibouti ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Cecropiae of different species are characteristic of Brazilian forest scenery; the kind of which I am speaking grows in great numbers everywhere on the banks of the Amazons where the land is low. It is a dwarf species, and grows in patches resembling beds of osiers; as in the English willows, the leaves were peopled by small chrysomelideous beetles.
Around the whole stood the taller forest trees; palmate-leaved Cecropiae slender Assai palms, thirty feet high, with their thin feathery heads crowning the gently-curving, smooth stems; small fan-leaved palms; and as a background to all these airy shapes, lay the voluminous masses of ordinary forest trees, with garlands, festoons, and streamers of leafy climbers hanging from their branches.
Besides the bull's-horn acacias, I, however, only met with two other genera of plants that furnished the ants with houses, namely the Cecropiae and some of the Melastomae. I have no doubt that there are many others. The stem of the Cecropia, or trumpet tree, is hollow, and divided into cells by partitions that extend across the interior of the hollow trunk.
First, there were the low and most recent alluvial deposits a mixture of sand and mud, covered with tall, broad- leaved grasses, or with the arrow-grass before described, whose feathery-topped flower-stem rises to a height of fourteen or fifteen feet. The only large trees which grow in these places are the Cecropiae. Many of the smaller and newer islands were of this description.
I noticed three different species, all, as far as I know, confined to the Cecropiae, and all farming scale-insects. As in the bull's-horn thorn, there is never more than one species of ant on the same tree. In some species of Melastomae there is a direct provision of houses for the ants.
Word Of The Day