OBSERVATIONS ON GIGANTIOPS DESTRUCTOR. 189 



On rare occasions Gigantiops may be seen carrying a termite 

 worker or other small insect in its jaws, but even such individuals 

 are not easily followed to their nests. Forel's placing of this ant 

 in his tribe (Ecophyllini. i.e., with (Ecophylla sinaragdina Fabr., 

 the well-known tree-ant of the Old \Yorld tropics, naturally led 

 me to suppose that the nest must be in the trees, but this supposi- 

 tion, which has probably been shared by other myrmecologists, 

 proves to be erroneous. On July 14, after much careful search 

 and persistent following of single workers, my son Ralph suc- 

 ceeded in finding a nest in a partly decayed log only three or four 

 inches in diameter lying on the ground at the edge of the Puruni 

 trail and brought the portion inhabited by the ants into the labo- 

 ratory. As soon as I began to dig into their nest the workers 

 leaped out and made off, holding their larvse in their mandibles. 

 The colony comprised only fifty or sixty workers, which had been 

 living in some large cavities made by Passalus or other wood- 

 inhabiting beetles. In one of the chambers there were empty 

 cocoons, showing that the pupse of Gigantiops are not nude as in 

 GicopJiylla, its supposed nearest ally among the Formicinae. I 

 failed to secure the queen and believe she must have escaped un- 

 observed among the workers. From these she differs merely in 

 her somewhat larger size and slightly more voluminous thorax. 



Notwithstanding careful search by my son and myself, ten days 

 elapsed before I could again observe a Gigantiops nest. I found 

 the second nest in a similar situation, in a partly decayed piece of 

 a Cccropia trunk about a foot and a half long and three inches in 

 diameter, lying loosely on the dead leaves in the shade of a bush. 

 I noticed one of the workers timidly guarding a small hole and 

 hastily retreating into it on my approach. The hole was plugged 

 with cotton and the log carried back to the laboratory. In order 

 that the ants might not elude me as on the previous occasion, I 

 opened the log over a pail of water, but notwithstanding these 

 precautions a few of the workers managed to escape. The entire 

 colony, which was inhabiting one of the large internodal cavities 

 so peculiar to Cccropia, was scarcely larger than the former colony, 

 but contained more larvae and several freshly spun worker cocoons. 



