development. Thereafter her transformations were rhythmical,
alternating with the day and night. Through the nights of activity she
was garbed in rich, warm brown. With the coming of dawn, as she
climbed slowly upward, her color shifted through chestnut to maroon;
this maroon then died out on the mid-back to a delicate, dull
violet-blue, which in turn became obscured in the sunlight by
turquoise, which crept slowly along the sides. Carefully and
laboriously she clambered up, up to the topmost frond, and there
performed her little toilet, scraping head and face with her hands,
passing the hinder limbs over her back to brush off every grain of
sand. The eyes had meanwhile lost their black-flecked, golden,
nocturnal iridescence, and had gradually paled to a clear silvery
blue, while the great pupil of darkness narrowed to a slit.
Little by little her limbs and digits were drawn in out of sight, and
the tiny jeweled being crouched low, hoping for a day of comfortable
clouds, a little moisture, and a swift passage of time to the next
period of darkness, when it was fitting and right for Guineveres to
seek their small meed of sustenance, to grow to frog's full estate,
and to fulfil as well as might be what destiny the jungle offered. To
unravel the meaning of it all is beyond even attempting. The breath of
mist ever clouds the mirror, and only as regards a tiny segment of the
life-history of Guinevere can I say, "There is no need to wipe the
mirror."
VII
A JUNGLE LABOR-UNION
Pterodactyl Pups led me to the wonderful Attas--the most astounding of
the jungle labor-unions. We were all sitting on the Mazaruni bank, the
night before the full moon, immediately in front of my British Guiana
laboratory. All the jungle was silent in the white light, with now and
then the splash of a big river fish. On the end of the bench was the
monosyllabic Scot, who ceased the exquisite painting of mora
buttresses and jungle shadows only for the equal fascination of
searching bats for parasites. Then the great physician, who had come
six thousand miles to peer into the eyes of birds and lizards in my
dark-room, working with a gentle hypnotic manner that made the little
beings seem to enjoy the experience. On my right sat an army captain,
who had given more thought to the possible secrets of French
chaffinches than to the approaching barrage. There was also the
artist, who could draw a lizard's head like a Japanese print, but
preferred to depict impressionistic Laocoön roots.
These and others sat with me on the long bench and watched the
moonpath. The conversation had begun with possible former life on the
moon, then shifted to Conan Doyle's _The Lost World_, based on the
great Roraima plateau, a hundred and fifty miles west of where we were
sitting. Then we spoke of the amusing world-wide rumor, which had
started no one knows how, that I had recently discovered a
pterodactyl. One delightful result of this had been a letter from a
little English girl, which would have made a worthy chapter-subject
for _Dream Days_. For years she and her little sister had peopled a
wood near her home with pterodactyls, but had somehow never quite seen
one; and would I tell her a little about them--whether they had
scales, or made nests; so that those in the wood might be a little
easier to recognize.
When strange things are discussed for a long time, in the light of a
tropical moon, at the edge of a dark, whispering jungle, the mind
becomes singularly imaginative and receptive; and, as I looked through
powerful binoculars at the great suspended globe, the dead craters and
precipices became very vivid and near. Suddenly, without warning,
there flapped into my field, a huge shapeless creature. It was no
bird, and there was nothing of the bat in its flight--the wings moved
with steady rhythmical beats, and drove it straight onward. The wings
were skinny, the body large and of a pale ashy hue. For a moment I was
shaken. One of the others had seen it, and he, too, did not speak, but
concentrated every sense into the end of the little tubes. By the time
I had begun to find words, I realized that a giant fruit bat had flown
from utter darkness across my line of sight; and by close watching we
soon saw others. But for a very few seconds these Pterodactyl Pups, as
I nicknamed them, gave me all the thrill of a sudden glimpse into the
life of past ages. The last time I had seen fruit bats was in the
gardens of Perideniya, Ceylon. I had forgotten that they occurred in
Guiana, and was wholly unprepared for the sight of bats a yard across,
with a heron's flight, passing high over the Mazaruni in the
moonlight.
The talk ended on the misfortune of the configuration of human
anatomy, which makes sky-searching so uncomfortable a habit. This
outlook was probably developed to a greater extent during the war
than ever before; and I can remember many evenings in Paris and London
when a sinister half-moon kept the faces of millions turned
searchingly upward. But whether in city or jungle, sky-scanning is a
neck-aching affair.
The following day my experience with the Pterodactyl Pups was not
forgotten, and as a direct result of looking out for soaring vultures
and eagles, with hopes of again seeing a white-plumaged King and the
regal Harpy, I caught sight of a tiny mote high up in mid-sky. I
thought at first it was a martin or swift; but it descended, slowly
spiraling, and became too small for any bird. With a final, long,
descending curve, it alighted in the compound of our bungalow
laboratory and rested quietly--a great queen of the leaf-cutting Attas
returning from her marriage flight. After a few minutes she stirred,
walked a few steps, cleaned her antennæ, and searched nervously about
on the sand. A foot away was a tiny sprig of indigo, the offspring of
some seed planted two or three centuries ago by a thrifty Dutchman. In
the shade of its three leaves the insect paused, and at once began
scraping at the sand with her jaws. She loosened grain after grain,
and as they came free they were moistened, agglutinated, and pressed
back against her forelegs. When at last a good-sized ball was formed,
she picked it up, turned around and, after some fussy indecision,
deposited it on the sand behind her. Then she returned to the very
shallow, round depression, and began to gather a second ball.
I thought of the first handful of sand thrown out for the base of
Cheops, of the first brick placed in position for the Great Wall, of a
fresh-cut trunk, rough-hewn and squared for a log-cabin on Manhattan;
of the first shovelful of earth flung out of the line of the Panama
Canal. Yet none seemed worthy of comparison with even what little I
knew of the significance of this ant's labor, for this was earnest of
what would make trivial the engineering skill of Egyptians, of Chinese
patience, of municipal pride and continental schism.
Imagine sawing off a barn-door at the top of a giant sequoia, growing
at the bottom of the Grand Cañon, and then, with five or six children
clinging to it, descending the tree, and carrying it up the cañon
walls against a subway rush of rude people, who elbowed and pushed
blindly against you. This is what hundreds of leaf-cutting ants
accomplish daily, when cutting leaves from a tall bush, at the foot of
the bank near the laboratory.
There are three dominant labor-unions in the jungle, all social
insects, two of them ants, never interfering with each other's field
of action, and all supremely illustrative of conditions resulting from
absolute equality, free-and-equalness, communalism, socialism carried
to the (forgive me!) anth power. The Army Ants are carnivorous,
predatory, militant nomads; the Termites are vegetarian scavengers,
sedentary, negative and provincial; the Attas, or leaf-cutting ants,
are vegetarians, active and dominant, and in many ways the most
interesting of all.
The casual observer becomes aware of them through their raids upon
gardens; and indeed the Attas are a very serious menace to agriculture
in many parts of the tropics, where their nests, although underground,
may be as large as a house and contain millions of individuals. While
their choice among wild plants is exceedingly varied, it seems that
there are certain things they will not touch; but when any
human-reared flower, vegetable, shrub, vine, or tree is planted, the
Attas rejoice, and straightway desert the native vegetation to fall
upon the newcomers. Their whims and irregular feeding habits make it
difficult to guard against them. They will work all round a garden for
weeks, perhaps pass through it _en route_ to some tree that they are
defoliating, and then suddenly, one night, every Atta in the world
seems possessed with a desire to work havoc, and at daylight the next
morning, the garden looks like winter stubble--a vast expanse of stems
and twigs, without a single remaining leaf. Volumes have been written,
and a whole chemist's shop of deadly concoctions devised, for
combating these ants, and still they go steadily on, gathering leaves
which, as we shall see, they do not even use for food.
Although essentially a tropical family, Attas have pushed as far north
as New Jersey, where they make a tiny nest, a few inches across, and
bring to it bits of pine needles.
In a jungle Baedeker, we should double-star these insects, and paragraph
them as "_Atta_, named by Fabricius in 1804; the Kartabo species,
_cephalotes_; Leaf-cutting or Cushie or Parasol Ants; very abundant.
_Atta_, a subgenus of _Atta_, which is a genus of _Attii_,
which is a tribe of _Myrmicinæ_, which is a subfamily of
_Formicidæ_," etc.
With a feeling of slightly greater intimacy, of mental possession, we
set out, armed with a name of one hundred and seventeen years'
standing, and find a big Atta worker carving away at a bit of leaf,
exactly as his ancestors had done for probably one hundred and
seventeen thousand years.
We gently lift him from his labor, and a drop of chloroform banishes
from his ganglia all memory of the hundred thousand years of pruning.
Under the lens his strange personality becomes manifest, and we wonder
whether the old Danish zoölogist had in mind the slender toe-tips
which support him, or in a chuckling mood made him a namesake of C.
Quintius Atta. A close-up shows a very comic little being, encased in
a prickly, chestnut-colored armor, which should make him fearless in a
den of a hundred anteaters. The front view of his head is a bit
mephistophelian, for it is drawn upward into two horny spines; but the
side view recalls a little girl with her hair brushed very tightly up
and back from her face.
The connection between Atta and the world about him is furnished by
this same head: two huge, flail-shaped antennæ arching up like aerial,
detached eyebrows--vehicles, through their golden pile, of senses
which foil our most delicate tests. Outside of these are two little
shoe-button eyes; and we are not certain whether they reflect to the
head ganglion two or three hundred bits of leaf, or one large mosaic
leaf. Below all is swung the pair of great scythes, so edged and hung
that they can function as jaws, rip-saws, scissors, forceps, and
clamps. The thorax, like the head of a titanothere, bears three pairs
of horns--a great irregular expanse of tumbled, rock-like skin and
thorn, a foundation for three pairs of long legs, and sheltering
somewhere in its heart a thread of ant-life; finally, two little
pedicels lead to a rounded abdomen, smaller than the head. This
Third-of-an-inch is a worker Atta to the physical eye; and if we catch
another, or ten, or ten million, we find that some are small, others
much larger, but that all are cast in the same mold, all
indistinguishable except, perhaps, to the shoe-button eyes.
When a worker has traveled along the Atta trails, and has followed the
temporary mob-instinct and climbed bush or tree, the same
irresistible force drives him out upon a leaf. Here, apparently,
instinct slightly loosens its hold, and he seems to become individual
for a moment, to look about, and to decide upon a suitable edge or
corner of green leaf. But even in this he probably has no choice. At
any rate, he secures a good hold and sinks his jaws into the tissue.
Standing firmly on the leaf, he measures his distance by cutting
across a segment of a circle, with one of his hind feet as a center.
This gives a very true curve, and provides a leaf-load of suitable
size. He does not scissor his way across, but bit by bit sinks the tip
of one jaw, hook-like, into the surface, and brings the other up to
it, slicing through the tissue with surprising ease. He stands upon
the leaf, and I always expect to see him cut himself and his load
free, Irishman-wise. But one or two of his feet have invariably
secured a grip on the plant, sufficient to hold him safely. Even if
one or two of his fellows are at work farther down the leaf, he has
power enough in his slight grip to suspend all until they have
finished and clambered up over him with their loads.
Holding his bit of leaf edge-wise, he bends his head down as far as
possible, and secures a strong purchase along the very rim. Then, as
he raises his head, the leaf rises with it, suspended high over his
back, out of the way. Down the stem or tree-trunk he trudges, head
first, fighting with gravitation, until he reaches the ground. After a
few feet, or, measured by his stature, several hundred yards, his
infallible instinct guides him around pebble boulders, mossy orchards,
and grass jungles to a specially prepared path.
Thus in words, in sentences, we may describe the cutting of a single
leaf; but only in the imagination can we visualize the cell-like or
crystal-like duplication of this throughout all the great forests of
Guiana and of South America. As I write, a million jaws snip through
their stint; as you read, ten million Attas begin on new bits of leaf.
And all in silence and in dim light, legions passing along the little
jungle roads, unending lines of trembling banners, a political parade
of ultra socialism, a procession of chlorophyll floats illustrating
unreasoning unmorality, a fairy replica of "Birnam Forest come to
Dunsinane."
In their leaf-cutting, Attas have mastered mass, but not form. I have
never seen one cut off a piece too heavy to carry, but many a
hard-sliced bit has had to be deserted because of the configuration
of the upper edge. On almost any trail, an ant can be found with a
two-inch stem of grass, attempting to pass under a twig an inch
overhead. After five or ten minutes of pushing, backing, and pulling,
he may accidentally march off to one side, or reach up and climb over;
but usually he drops his burden. His little works have been wound up,
and set at the mark "home"; and though he has now dropped the prize
for which he walked a dozen ant-miles, yet any idea of cutting another
stem, or of picking up a slice of leaf from those lying along the
trail, never occurs to him. He sets off homeward, and if any emotion
of sorrow, regret, disappointment, or secret relief troubles his
ganglia, no trace of it appears in antennæ, carriage, or speed. I can
very readily conceive of his trudging sturdily all the way back to the
nest, entering it, and going to the place where he would have dumped
his load, having fulfilled his duty in the spirit at least. Then, if
there comes a click in his internal time-clock, he may set out upon
another quest--more cabined, cribbed, and confined than any member of
a Cook's tourist party.
I once watched an ant with a piece of leaf which had a regular
shepherd's crook at the top, and if his adventures of fifty feet could
have been caught on a moving-picture film, Charlie Chaplin would have
had an arthropod rival. It hooked on stems and pulled its bearer off
his feet, it careened and ensnared the leaves of other ants, at one
place mixing up with half a dozen. A big thistledown became tangled in
it, and well-nigh blew away with leaf and all; hardly a foot of his
path was smooth-going. But he persisted, and I watched him reach the
nest, after two hours of tugging and falling and interference with
traffic.
Occasionally an ant will slip in crossing a twiggy crevasse, and his
leaf become tightly wedged. After sprawling on his back and vainly
clawing at the air for a while, he gets up, brushes off his antennæ,
and sets to work. For fifteen minutes I have watched an Atta in this
predicament, stodgily endeavoring to lift his leaf while standing on
it at the same time. The equation of push equaling pull is fourth
dimensional to the Attas.
With all this terrible expenditure of energy, the activities of these
ants are functional within very narrow limits. The blazing sun causes
them to drop their burdens and flee for home; a heavy wind frustrates
them, for they cannot reef. When a gale arises and sweeps an exposed
portion of the trail, their only resource is to cut away all sail and
heave it overboard. A sudden downpour reduces a thousand banners and
waving, bright-colored petals to débris, to be trodden under foot.
Sometimes, after a ten-minute storm, the trails will be carpeted with
thousands of bits of green mosaic, which the outgoing hordes will
trample in their search for more leaves. On a dark night little seems
to be done; but at dawn and dusk, and in the moonlight or clear
starlight, the greatest activity is manifest.
Attas are such unpalatable creatures that they are singularly free
from dangers. There is a tacit armistice between them and the other
labor-unions. The army ants occasionally make use of their trails when
they are deserted; but when the two great races of ants meet, each
antennæs the aura of the other, and turns respectfully aside. When
termites wish to traverse an Atta trail, they burrow beneath it, or
build a covered causeway across, through which they pass and repass at
will, and over which the Attas trudge, uncaring and unconscious of its
significance.
Only creatures with the toughest of digestions would dare to include
these prickly, strong-jawed, meatless insects in a bill of fare. Now
and then I have found an ani, or black cuckoo, with a few in its
stomach: but an ani can swallow a stinging-haired caterpillar and
enjoy it. The most consistent feeder upon Attas is the giant marine
toad. Two hundred Attas in a night is not an uncommon meal, the exact
number being verifiable by a count of the undigested remains of heads
and abdomens. _Bufo marinus_ is the gardener's best friend in this
tropic land, and besides, he is a gentleman and a philosopher, if ever
an amphibian was one.
While the cutting of living foliage is the chief aim in life of these
ants, yet they take advantage of the flotsam and jetsam along the
shore, and each low tide finds a column from some nearby nest
salvaging flowerets, leaves, and even tiny berries. A sudden wash of
tide lifts a hundred ants with their burdens and then sets them down
again, when they start off as if nothing had happened.
The paths or trails of the Attas represent very remarkable feats of
engineering, and wind about through jungle and glade for surprising
distances. I once traced a very old and wide trail for well over two
hundred yards. Taking little Third-of-an-inch for a type (although he
would rank as a rather large Atta), and comparing him with a six-foot
man, we reckon this trail, ant-ratio, as a full twenty-five miles.
Belt records a leaf-cutter's trail half a mile long, which would mean
that every ant that went out, cut his tiny bit of leaf, and returned,
would traverse a distance of a hundred and sixteen miles. This was an
extreme; but our Atta may take it for granted, speaking antly, that
once on the home trail, he has, at the least, four or five miles ahead
of him.
The Atta roads are clean swept, as straight as possible, and very
conspicuous in the jungle. The chief high-roads leading from very
large nests are a good foot across, and the white sand of their beds
is visible a long distance away. I once knew a family of opossums
living in a stump in the center of a dense thicket. When they left at
evening, they always climbed along as far as an Atta trail, dropped
down to it, and followed it for twenty or thirty yards. During the
rains I have occasionally found tracks of agoutis and deer in these
roads. So it would be very possible for the Attas to lay the
foundation for an animal trail, and this, _à la_ calf-path, for the
street of a future city.
The part that scent plays in the trails is evidenced if we scatter an
inch or two of fresh sand across the road. A mass of ants banks
against the strange obstruction on both sides, on the one hand a solid
phalanx of waving green banners, and on the other a mob of empty-jawed
workers with wildly waving antennæ. Scouts from both sides slowly
wander forward, and finally reach one another and pass across. But not
for ten minutes does anything like regular traffic begin again.
When carrying a large piece of leaf, and traveling at a fair rate of
speed, the ants average about a foot in ten seconds, although many go
the same distance in five. I tested the speed of an Atta, and then I
saw that its leaf seemed to have a peculiar-shaped bug upon it, and
picked it up with its bearer. Finding the blemish to be only a bit of
fungus, I replaced it. Half an hour later I was seated by a trail far
away, when suddenly my ant with the blemished spot appeared. It was
unmistakable, for I had noticed that the spot was exactly that of the
Egyptian symbol of life. I paced the trail, and found that seventy
yards away it joined the spot where I had first seen my friend. So,
with occasional spurts, he had done two hundred and ten feet in thirty
minutes, and this in spite of the fact that he had picked up a
supercargo.
Two parts of hydrogen and one of oxygen, under the proper stimulus,
invariably result in water; two and two, considered calmly and without
passion, combine into four; the workings of instinct, especially in
social insects, is so mechanical that its results can almost be
demonstrated in formula; and yet here was my Atta leaf-carrier
burdened with a minim. The worker Attas vary greatly in size, as a
glance at a populous trail will show. They have been christened
_macrergates, desmergates_ and _micrergates_; or we may call the
largest Maxims, the average middle class Mediums, and the tiny chaps
Minims, and all have more or less separate functions in the ecology of
the colony. The Minims are replicas in miniature of the big chaps,
except that their armor is pale cinnamon rather than chestnut.
Although they can bite ferociously, they are too small to cut through
leaves, and they have very definite duties in the nest; yet they are
found with every leaf-cutting gang, hastening along with their larger
brethren, but never doing anything, that I could detect, at their
journey's end. I have a suspicion that the little Minims, who are very
numerous, function as light cavalry; for in case of danger they are as
eager at attack as the great soldiers, and the leaf-cutters, absorbed
in their arduous labor, would benefit greatly from the immunity
ensured by a flying corps of their little bulldog comrades.
I can readily imagine that these nestling Minims become weary and
foot-sore (like bank-clerks guarding a reservoir), and if instinct
allows such abominable individuality, they must often wish themselves
back at the nest, for every mile of a Medium is three miles to them.
Here is where our mechanical formula breaks down; for, often, as many
as one in every five leaves that pass bears aloft a Minim or two,
clinging desperately to the waving leaf and getting a free ride at the
expense of the already overburdened Medium. Ten is the extreme number
seen, but six to eight Minims collected on a single leaf is not
uncommon. Several times I have seen one of these little banner-riders
shift deftly from leaf to leaf, when a swifter carrier passed by, as
a circus bareback rider changes steeds at full gallop.