THE ANT PEOPLE

Evening Star, Issue 19804, 1 March 1928, Page 9

THE ANT PEOPLE

ALMOST HUMAN To be poking one’s nose into «nt nests in every land does not seem an attractive occupation or pastime, but Uiis looks very like what Dr Haims Heinz Ewers has been doing for years. Naturally he feels he has something to say about ants that has never been said before, and he has the faculty for saying it m the most entertaining style, for he is a novelist and has written plays and books of travel. It is perhaps an additional recommendation that he- has not only fought fire ants in Texas, but has been bitten by bull ants in Australia. He is that rare thing, a naturalist with a keen sense of humor, 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 ‘ 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 by some special sense of wind and weather. Every ant is a meteoroligist of the highest skill. For days beforehand there is a visible restlessness. Excitement is intense. The workers appear to ho bidding goodbye 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 load. Eeach seizes another on what seems the catcli-as-catch-can principle, and the wedding may take place in the air or on the ground. After this life’s serious business begins. “The males, brainless, without weapons or poison, incapable ever of feeding themselves, soon die.” The females do not fare much better. Those that escape death by the onslaught of birds and insects and human beings begin to tear off their oridal finery, tl at is, their wings, symbol of originity. My lady’s pressing task is to build a refuge for the ants as yet unborn, so she digs in the earth, under a stone, 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. All that time she has kept the fertilised 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 later developments. Some ants take out their young during warm 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 honov-dow milk.

Tho maiden ants may be thought of as laughing at the idea of a husband being necessary 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. The rule in nntdom 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 tiro useful to man by Stirring up the soil and destroying enormous numbers of insects, ft has been estimated that a colony of ants will take as many as a hundred-thou-sand other insects to their nest in a single day. In the tropics ants sometimes run into a human habitation, and oven if it is filled with lice, fleas, or cockroaches not a trace will be left when tho ants 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 lady investigator, froze some ants and kept them for twenty-four 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 twentyone days, and ran about until two day? before its death. Ants seem to bo keen on conferences and conventions, and assemble in Urn open or in the nest and sit stilt and auiet for many hours at a time. They do not talk, not even by touching one another with their feelers. The hinder part of the body moves very slowly. What are they doing? Praying, worshiping, meditating P No mortal man can tell ns. Among ants, as among men, a comnleto senes'of artistic powers is found. There are spinners, carpenters, paper makers, roofers, hunters, agriculturists, bakers, miners, herders, coopers, plasterers, mushroom growers, tapestry makers, gardeners, cutlers, nurses, governesses, sick nurses, soldiers, scouts, guards; there are also professional slave holders, thieves, robbers, loafers. The list makes one hold bis breath, but the wonder grows on bearing of ants that arc doors or casks. Grain gathering ants know bow to prevent grain from sprouting. Ants have gardens in which they sow seeds, and leaf lice which they milk like cows. Terri {He battles for slaves or territory are fought with the help of shock troops. TTio Amazons catch bold of their enemy’s head, throat, or hrc.ats, ami bore it through with their sickles. Each warnor carries homo some booty, gives it at the city gate to a slave, and hurries back to the plundered city to get more booty. Most singularly, the warriors when at home seem to do nothing hut beautify themselves, brushing, coinhing, anointing. They need no beauty parlors 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 out of their cocoons. On the oilier hand, they have sport and games, and their wrestling and boxing matches are serious affairs, which sometimes end in wounding or killing. ' Having told ns in a supremely fascinating way the unbelievable story of the ants. Dr Furors, like a true philosopher, cannot refrain from asking whether ants have souls. He thinks there is endless confusion when men begin to discuss instinct. Is this th® same as rollex or intelligence, or some curious blend (.'ailed plasticity? The different schools of sages irritate our author,,ami lie is especially severe upon Ford, this “ plastic nucroncs.” Hr 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 llJ: Amoeba primitive from the ordinary business man is not nearly so deep and wide as that which parts this worthy from Dante.” There afe indications which lead us beyond mere instinct. An ant can.esphiin to her friends a difficulty she has encountered, and .secure her help. This is done, by a very highly developed feeler language, a kind of Morse system of telegraphing—short, long, short, dot, dash, dot, dash. The ants are teachable and the memory is generally touch-odor pictures. Dr Ewerr says he lias kept pigs with the Monists, and ploughed the Ivard 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 .n ilie buttercup as in the infusorium, in man as in the ant.