WHITE ANTS AND THEIR ARCHITECTURE—VERY WONDERFUL NESTS—“A
PRISON AND A PALACE”—THE AARD VARK AND THE ANT-EATER—HOW ANTS
ARE TRAPPED.
In the white ants, or termites—to use their more scientific name—we have
insects greatly resembling ants in their general plan and mode of life,
and also much like them in general appearance, but which really are not
ants at all, but belong to another order, widely distinct from them.
They are Neuroptera, and thus allied to the dragon-flies, may-flies,
grasshoppers, etc., whereas the real ants belong to the Hymenoptera, in
which the bees and wasps are included. Like the ants, the termites are
divided into males, females, and undeveloped females, or workers, which
last form two castes that work in different ways, the one in building the
nest, the other in defending it from attack—the former are the masons or
architects, the latter the soldiers. In the matter of the nest, these
white or false ants surpass all real ones, and therefore all other
insects; it is built above, instead of below, the ground, and attains
such a size, and rises to such a height, that these termite nests become
a marked feature of any landscape, and may almost be said to turn a flat
country into a hilly one. Rising in huge conical or beehive-shaped
mounds, of a red colour and with lesser mounds dotted about them, they
often support a more or less dense vegetation, upon which, in South
Africa, where they are the largest, antelopes, or even buffaloes, may be
sometimes seen browsing. The base of such a structure may be twenty yards
in circumference, the height from ten to twenty feet, or even more. The
masonry composing it is a sort of red clay, and seems, to the touch, as
hard and solid as brick; though that it is not really so, is shown by its
yielding to the stout curved claws and muscular fore limbs of the aard
vark, a creature who lives almost wholly on the termites.
Outwardly, the termite-mound is dotted with little round holes, which are
the orifices of so many passages leading into the interior, whilst the
interior itself presents the most wonderful arrangement of galleries,
halls, nurseries, cells, and chambers that exists in the insect world.
First, comes a well-aired, empty attic, situated in the crown of the
dome, or, rather, the peak of the sugar-loaf, to take the more typical
shape. Beneath it, with a passage between them, is a nursery where, on
shelves round the walls, the young termites are hatched. Beneath this,
again, is a wide hall supported by lofty pillars, and, lastly, upon
the ground floor, a royal chamber, shaped like a beehive, in which the
king and queen—being respectively the father and mother of the entire
colony—are confined. Around this palace-prison, as it may be called, are
clustered the much smaller cells of the workers, from which, as from the
other compartments, a number of tunnels, or galleries, lead to the outer
circumference of the mound. From the floor[7] of the termitary—as the
nest is sometimes called—holes perforate the earth, becoming larger as
they descend; but these do not represent any addition to the architecture
of the building, being merely the pits from which the materials that have
gone to make it, have been extracted. Except the royal cell, the whole
of this great edifice—equally remarkable in regard to its size and its
architecture—is reared by the worker termites: but this, as being the
foundation-stone of the whole, must necessarily, it would seem, be the
work of the two founders, there being no one else to help them till after
the hatching of the eggs.
Both the male and female are at first winged—as is the case with the real
ants—but after the marriage flight they voluntarily break them off, as do
these, and then set to work to found a colony. Whether the two entirely
immure themselves in the cell, or chamber, referred to, or whether they
only partially do so, and are assisted afterwards by the workers yet
unborn, I cannot state, inasmuch as I have not watched the founding of a
nest myself, and such authorities as I have been able to turn to, though
writing as observers, say nothing on this head. Evidently they don’t
know, but they don’t tell you that, either. However, be this as it may,
the royal pair are, at some point in the earlier part of their career,
enclosed in a compartment which may, at first, be roomy, but which, in
this case, rapidly becomes, by the swelling of the queen’s body, now
stored with thousands of eggs, only just able to contain them. The queen
herself, in fact, whose abdomen has now become a long, white cylindrical
object, like the blown-out finger-stall of a white kid glove, almost
fills the space with this alone, her head and thorax being, in comparison
with it, of as contemptible dimensions as are those of a bean-stalk,
compared with its bean. Yet, besides herself, there is room not only for
the male, but for some of the workers, which are very small, and enter
the cell through a line of small holes, running round it, longitudinally,
in the centre. Through these holes the king and queen are fed by the
workers, which have probably bored them, since they but just admit their
own bodies.
This, however, is the least part of their duties. Very soon the queen
begins to lay her eggs, and continues to do so day and night, without
intermission, at the astonishing rate of from sixty to eighty thousand in
the twenty-four hours. All are carried out by the workers, and deposited,
eventually, in the nursery which they themselves have prepared for them.
Since, however, the very workers which do this have first to be born, it
seems evident that the earlier eggs must for some time lie where they
fall, and perhaps be afterwards stored somewhere else, whilst the nursery
is a-making. The great size that the nest becomes seems to suggest that
it is the gradual work of many generations of termites, brought forth by
successive queens. It must, however, have had a beginning, and it is
this beginning, as made by a single royal pair, that I have here been
considering. It is quite possible that nobody may yet have watched it, or
both watched and written about it. Probably it is most difficult—perhaps
impossible—to do so; but it is irritating to read that the nest is
founded in this way, and find not so much as an allusion to these obvious
difficulties. It is quite as incumbent, I think, on those who watch
creatures, to say what they have not been able to find out, as what they
have.
The worker termite is about the size of a house-fly, the soldier much
larger, with a flat head, enormously large in proportion to the size
of his body, and long, curved jaws. These, and the thorax, are of a
yellowish brown colour, and have a smooth, polished appearance, whereas
the abdomen is a good deal lighter, and soft-looking. Only the soldiers
fight. “They stand,” says Professor Drummond, “or promenade about, as
sentries, at the mouths of the tunnels. When danger threatens, in shape
of true ants, the soldier termite advances to the fight. With a few
sweeps of its scythe-like jaws, it clears the ground, and whilst the
attacking party is carrying off its dead, the builders, unconscious of
the fray, quietly continue their work.” The latter, besides building the
wonderful colossal nest, feeding the king and queen, and storing the
eggs, as described, bring food to the nest, and feed and attend to the
young, in all their stages. Besides the king and queen that have founded
the termitary, other males and females are kept and attended to in it,
by the workers, and these, should anything happen to the sovereigns, are
ready to reign and lay eggs in their stead.
White ants are enormously destructive, and a great pest to civilised
man, wherever the two come in contact. Their food is, for the most
part, vegetable, but they are ready to destroy, if not to eat, almost
anything. Their habit is to bore into any solid substance, and eat out
its interior, leaving it hollow, with its outer surface, represented
by a thin shell, intact. Such an object may be a chair, perhaps, or a
table that was once, and still continues to look, of massive build. Now,
however, should it be sat upon, or laid as usual, it collapses as though
made of tinder. White ants have established themselves, to some extent,
in Southern Europe, even in Southern France, where they have done great
mischief. The navy-yard in Rochefort was, in part, destroyed by them,
and their ravages at the Prefecture of La Rochelle have been minutely
described by M. de Quatrefages. They extended even to the archives. “One
day it was discovered that the archives of the Department were almost
totally destroyed, and that without the slightest external trace of any
damage. The termites had reached the boxes in which these documents were
preserved, by mining the wainscoting; and they had then leisurely set to
work to devour these administrative records, carefully respecting the
upper sheets and the margin of each leaf, so that a box which was only a
mass of rubbish, seemed to contain a pile of papers in perfect order.”
I do not know if a similar misfortune has ever occurred at any of the
French schools. A sudden discovery that all the class-books were in the
condition described must have caused great lamentations amongst _les
élèves_.[8]
Like ants, the termites, or white ants, have many enemies, but all of
these, save one (at least in Africa) are content to seek them after they
have issued from their stronghold. Innumerable birds make prey of the
males and females, during their marriage flight, fowls leap into the air
to catch them, when flying low, whilst toads, frogs, lizards, and some
of the smaller insect-eating mammals show their appreciation of their
soft, succulent bodies, whenever they alight on the ground. But one
large, strange creature there is that, specialised for their destruction,
assaults them in their fortress, and lives almost wholly upon them. This
is the aard vark, or earth-hog, as the Boers of South Africa call him, an
uncouth, naked-looking animal about the size of a pig, with tremendous
claws, great, muscular, bowed fore legs, a proboscis-like snout, and
long, narrow ears like a donkey’s. This gargoyle-like creature lies
hidden during the day, as though shunning, then, to reveal itself; but
when semi-darkness, by giving new, weird shapes to familiar objects, has
made earth more in harmony with its portentous appearance, it issues
forth and proceeds, in course of time, to an inhabited termite mound.
Jumping up against this—now, perhaps, in the pale moonlight—it digs
its curved claws into the hard, baked crust, and bowing in its strong
forearms with a mighty effort, tears a hole in the nest’s side, and lays
bare its interior. The indignant and ever-valiant soldiers rush out
through the ruins, prepared to grapple with any foe of any shape. But
the gristly snout and thick, hard skin, though but scantily clothed with
coarse hair, are impervious to all their attacks, whilst from the tubular
mouth is shot forth constantly, and withdrawn again, a long, thin,
worm-like object, which, licking amidst the wreck of halls and galleries,
sweeps thousands back with it, in each retreat. By morning the once proud
edifice may be a mere shell, from which the destroyer, filled to satiety
with its whilom inhabitants, now walks slowly away, to lie asleep and
digesting them, till the following evening calls him to another meal.
The part which the aard vark plays in South Africa is taken in South
America by the great ant-eater, or ant-bear, a creature about the same
size, or even larger, and, if possible, of still more extraordinary
appearance. It is something of the same general shape, but thinner and
narrower, the fore legs are even more bowed, enormously powerful, and are
armed with four curved claws so extremely long that the animal has to
walk on them, for they turn inwards, instead of outwards like a dog’s.
The snout is like a very long tube—next to the elephant’s, perhaps, it
is the most elongated of any in the animal kingdom—and out of it a
tongue of corresponding length is projected, which is always moist with a
glutinous liquid, emitted from two large glands situated just below its
root. Its body is covered with long, coarse hair, which is especially
thick on the back, and becomes longer towards the hindquarters, till on
the tail, which is immense, it is like a great flowing mane. This huge
tail, which is not only long, but broad, can be turned right over the
animal’s back, so as to make a great umbrella, or canopy, under which it
is said sometimes to walk. Whether it really walks with it held in this
way, I do not know. I have not seen it do so at the Zoological Gardens;
but there it is under cover, and the ant-eater is said to put its tail
to the use of a real umbrella. When it sleeps, however, it, as it were,
curls itself up in it, and is thus concealed, or perhaps protected from a
sudden assault.
Waterton says of the ant-eater: “Without swiftness to enable him to
escape from his enemies, without teeth, the possession of which would
assist him in self-defence, and without the power of burrowing in the
ground, by which he might conceal himself from his pursuers, he still
is capable of ranging through these wilds in perfect safety, nor does
he fear the fatal pressure of the serpent’s fold, or the teeth of the
famished jaguar. Nature has formed his fore legs wonderfully thick and
strong and muscular, and armed his feet with three tremendous, sharp
and crooked claws. Whenever he seizes an animal with these formidable
weapons, he hugs it close to his body and keeps it there till it dies
through pressure or through want of food. Nor does the ant-bear, in the
meantime, suffer much from loss of aliment, as it is a well-known fact
that he can go longer without food than, perhaps, any other animal,
except the land-tortoise.”[9]
Waterton also tells us that “the Indians have a great dread of coming in
contact with the ant-bear; and after disabling him in the chase” (for
they esteem his flesh a dainty) “never think of approaching him till he
be quite dead.” It is with good reason that they are thus cautious, for
were they not so, their life might pay the penalty, as the following
account will show: “An Indian, living near Rorainea, was hunting in the
forest to the north of that mountain, with some others, armed with his
long blow-pipe. In returning home, considerably in advance of the rest
of the party, it is supposed that he saw a young ant-eater, and taking
it up in his arms, was carrying it home, when its mother gave chase,
overtook and killed him; for when his companions came up, they found him
lying dead on his face, in the embrace of the ant-bear, one of its large
claws having entered his heart. In the struggle he had managed to stick
his knife behind his back into the animal, which bled to death, but not
before the poor fellow had succumbed to its terrible hug. It was evident
that he had only heard the ant-eater coming when it was close upon him,
and, in turning round to look, his blow-pipe got caught across the path
in front of him, then, as he turned to run, it formed a bar to his
progress, and he fell over it as the animal seized him. So firmly had the
animal grappled him, that to separate it from the corpse, the Indians had
to cut off its fore legs.”[10] Such a mishap as this, however, must be of
extremely rare occurrence.
A very different creature to the ant-bear or the ant-hog (aard vark)
is the ant-lion. In its mature state it is like a dragon-fly, to which
order of insects (for it is an insect) it belongs, but whilst still in
the larval or caterpillar condition it looks something like a fat spider
with six, instead of eight, very feeble legs, with the last pair of
which, only, it is able to move, but only slowly, and backwards instead
of forwards. It is, therefore, quite unable to chase and catch an ant,
and yet on ants and other equally active insects it manages to prey. To
do so it employs a stratagem which has long been known and marvelled at.
“Depressing,” says Wood, “the end of its abdomen, and crawling backwards
in a circular direction, it traces a shallow trench, the circle varying
from one to three inches in diameter. It then makes another round,
starting just within the first circle, and so it proceeds, continually
scooping up the sand with its head, and jerking it outside the limits
of its trench. By continuing this process, and always tracing smaller
and smaller circles, the grub at last completes a conical pit, and then
buries itself in the sand, holding the mandibles widely extended. Should
an insect, an ant, for example, happen to pass near the pitfall, it will
be sure to go and look into the cavity, partly out of the insatiable
curiosity which distinguishes ants, cats, monkeys, and children, and
partly out of a desire to obtain food. No sooner has the ant approached
the margin of the pitfall than the treacherous soil gives way, the poor
insect goes tumbling and rolling down the yielding sides of the pit, and
falls into the extended jaws that are waiting for it at the bottom. A
smart bite kills the ant, the juices are extracted, the empty carcase is
jerked out of the pit, and the ant-lion settles itself in readiness for
another victim.”