THE ANT PEOPLE

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 120, 18 February 1928, Page 22

THE ANT PEOPLE

ALMOST HUMAN

To be poking one’s nose into ant nests in every land does not seem an attractive occupation or pastime, but this looks very like what Dr. Hanns Heinz Ewers has been doing for years. Naturally lie feels he lias something to say about ants that has never been said befoie, and he has the faculty for saying it in the most entertaining style, for lie is a novelist and has written plays and books of travel. It is perhaps an additional recommendation that lie lias not only touglit lire ants in Texas, but has been bitten bv bull ants in Australia. He is that rare thing, a naturalist with a keen sense of humour, and it seems a pleasure to him to explode many of our preconceived ideas about ants. He calls his book, “The Ant People,” and to make sure of getting our attention and keeping it he heads his first chapter, The Wedding of the Ants. Every line of the description gives a new thrill. The ants select a lucky day and hour for their wedding, and are guided entirely bv some special sense of wind and weather. Every ant is a meteorologist of the highest skill For days beforehand there is a visible restlessness. Excitement is intense. The workers appear to be bidding good-bye to those about to marry. They pat them, fuss about them, feed them from their crops. When the happy moment comes the winged ants rise into the air, one pursuing the other, the males being generally in the lead. Each seizes another on what seems the catch-as-catch-can principle, and the wedding may take place in the air or on the ground. After tois life's serious business begins. “Hie males, brainless, without weapons or poison, incapable ever of feeding themsilves, soon die.” The females do not fare much better. Those that escape death bv the onslaught of birds and insects and human beings begin to tear off their oridal finery, that is, their wings, svnibol of virginity. -Aly lady's pressing task is to build a refuge for the ants as vet unborn, so she digs in the earth, under a stoiie, or in the bark of a tree, and is careful to stop up all openings. For months, perhaps a year, she works on and then begins to lay eggs. Ail that time she has kept the fertiliser seed in her little sac, and when the eggs are laid she licks them, cleans them, helps the larvae to spin their cocoons, and attends to all the ’ater developmerits. Some ants take out tlieii }oung curing warnr nights just as human nurses and governesses do with their children in the parks. Some ants nurse their young at the breast with a sweet honev-dew milk. The maiden ants may be thought of as laughing at the idea of a husband being necessarv in order that they may have children. Every female may have as many children as she desires A worker is only half a female, and even she can have children, lhe rule in antdom is that from maiden eggs only males come, and no females, but even these clever people have not solved completely the problem of parthenogenesis. There are five thousand species of ants. They are useful to man by stirring up the soil and destroying enormous numbers of insects. It has been estimated that a colony of ants will take will take as manv as a hundred thousand other insects to their nest in a single day.. In the tropics ants sometimes run into a human habitation, and even if it is filled with lice, fleas, or cockroaches not a trace will be left when the al jt s have done their work. They are equally effective with rats and mice. In China, Java, Italy and America they are valued as enemies of orchard pests. Their vitality is extraordinary. They have more lives than a cat. An American ladv investigator froze some ants and

kept them for 24 hours at ‘23 deg.. Fahrenheit, thawed them out, and all survived. She starved ants, and young queens survived for fifteen months without any food whatever, and managed to rear their brood. She kept some under water for eight days and they survived. She cut off the head of an ant—it lived for 21 days, and ran about until two davs before its death. Ants seem to be keen on conferences and conventions, and assemble in the open or in the nest and sit still and quiet for many hours at a time. They do not talk, not even bv touching one another with their feelers. The hinder part of the body moves very slowly. What are they doing? Praying, worshipping, meditating? No mortal man can tell us. Among ants, as among men, a complete series of artistic powers is found. There are spinners, carpenters, paper makers, roofers, hunters, agriculturists, bakers, miners, herders, coopers, plasterers, "mushroom growers, tapestrymakers, gardeners, cutlers, nurses, governesses, sick nurses, soldiers, scouts, guards; there are also profession slaveholders, thieves", robbers, loafers. The list makes one hold his breath, but the wonder grows on hearing of ants that are doors or casks. Grain-gathering ants know how to prevent grain fr? 1 ™ sprouting. Ants have gardens in which they sow seeds, and leaf lice which they milk like cows. ' . Terriffic battles for slaves or territory are fought with the help of shock troops. The Amazons catch hold of their enemy’s head, throat or breast, and bore it through with their sickles. Each warrior carries home some booty, gives, it at the citv gate to a slave, end hurries back to the plundered city to get more booty. Most singularly, the warriors when at home seem to do nothing but beautify themselves, brushing, combing, anointing. They need no beauty parlours or massage specialists to make them up; every Amazon is an expert. They take care also to give “beauty lessons to the little Amazons just cut ot their cocoons. On the other hand, they have iport and games, and their wrestling and boxing matches are serious affairs, which sometimes end in wounding or killing. , . Having told us in a supieraely fascinating wav the unbelievable story of the ants. Dr.' Ewers, like a true phillcsopher cannot refrain from asking whether ants have souls. He thinks there is endless confusion when men begin to discuss instinct. Is this the same as reflex or intelligence, or some curious blend called plasticity. The different schools of sages irritate our author, and lie is especially severe upon Forel,, this “plastic nuerones” .Dr. Ewers admits it is clear that ants do not possess the highest intelligence attained by man, and it is difficult to say whether they can make abstractions. “The chasm which separates the Amoeba primitive from the ordinary business man is no. nearly so deep and wide as that which parts’ this worthy from Dante.” There are indications which lead us bevond mere instinct. An ant can explain to her friends a difficulty she .las encountered, and secure her help. This is done by a very highly developed feeler language, a kind of Morse system o telegraphing—short, long, short, dot, dash, dot, dash. The ants are teachable and the memory is generally touch-odor pictures. . , . .... Dr. Ewers savs he has kept pigs with the Monists, and ploughed the hard soil with Darwin and Haeckel, but the soul is still an eternal puzzle. The. Something which is the urge of all life is the same in the buttercup as in the infusorium, m man as in the ant.