Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 1, 2025
These habitations are only temporary, for in a few days not an ant would be seen in the neighbourhood; all would have moved off to fresh hunting-grounds. The Ecitons hunt about in columns, which branch off in various directions. When a fallen log is reached, the column spreads out over it, searching through all the holes and cracks.
Unlike the termites and Ecitons, who harbor a host of weird boarders, the leaf-cutters are able to keep their nest free from undesirables. Once, far down in the nest, I came upon three young queens, recently emerged, slow and stupid, with wings dull and glazed, who crawled with awkward haste back into darkness.
In this they are distinguished from the covered ways made by the termites, who use a glutinous saliva for cementing their edifices. These blind ecitons build up the side of their convex arcade, and in a wonderful manner contrive so to fit in the key-stones, without allowing the loose uncemented structure to fall to pieces.
When the naturalist dug into the earth with a small trowel, the eager freebooters rushed in as fast as he excavated, and carried off the ants, so rapidly tearing them in pieces that he had great difficulty in rescuing a few entire specimens. The little ecitons seemed to be divided into parties, some excavating, others carrying away the grains of earth.
It is possible that the hooked and twisted jaws of the large-headed class may be effective weapons of annoyance when in the gizzards or stomachs of these birds, but I unfortunately omitted to ascertain whether this was really the fact. The life of these Ecitons is not all work, for I frequently saw them very leisurely employed in a way that looked like recreation.
The Sauba is a vegetable feeder, and does not attack other animals; the accounts that have been published regarding carnivorous ants which hunt in vast armies, exciting terror wherever they go, apply only to the Ecitons, or foraging ants, a totally different group of this tribe of insects.
They stream along the ground and climb to the summits of all the lower trees, searching every leaf to its apex, and whenever they encounter a mass of decaying vegetable matter, where booty is plentiful, they concentrate, like other Ecitons, all their forces upon it, the dense phalanx of shining and quickly-moving bodies, as it spreads over the surface, looking like a flood of dark-red liquid.
Its color was identical with the Ecitons' armor, and when it folded up, nothing could harm it. Once a worker stopped and antennæd it suspiciously, but aside from this, it was accepted as one of the line of marchers. Along the same route came the tiny Phorid flies, wingless but swift as shadows, rushing from side to side, over ants, leaves, débris, impatient only at the slowness of the army.
The Ecitons are called Tauoca by the Indians, who are always on the look-out for their armies when they traverse the forest, so as to avoid being attacked. I met with ten distinct species of them, nearly all of which have a different system of marching; eight were new to science when I sent them to England.
Some of these birds, and especially the toucans, have bills beautifully adapted for picking up the ants before they reach the nest. Many of the smaller birds build on the branches of the bull's-horn thorn, which is always thickly covered with small stinging honey-eating ants, that would not allow the Ecitons to ascend these trees.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking