Ch. XVII.] IMITATIVE RESEMBLANCES. 315 



they prey. I am convinced that this explanation is 

 incorrect so far as the Central America species are con- 

 cerned. Ants, and especially the stinging species are, so 

 far as my experience goes, not preyed upon by any other 

 insects. ~No disguise need be adopted to approach them, 

 as they are so bold that they are more likely to attack 

 the spider than a spider them. Neither have they wings 

 to escape by flying, and generally go in large bodies 

 easily found and approached. The real use is, I doubt 

 not, the protection the disguise affords against small in- 

 sectivorous birds. I have found the crops of some hum- 

 ming birds full of small soft-bodied spiders, and many 

 other birds feed on them. Stinging ants, like bees and 

 wasps, are closely resembled by a host of other insects ; 

 indeed, whenever I found any insect provided with special 

 means of defence I looked for imitative forms, and was 

 never disappointed in finding them. 



Stinging ants are not only closely copied in form and 

 movements by spiders but by species of Hemiptera and 

 Coleoptera, and the resemblance is often wonderfully 

 close.* All over the world wasps are imitated in form 

 and movements by other insects, and in the tropics these 

 mimetic forms are endless. In many cases the insect 

 imitating is so widely removed, in the normal form of the 

 order to which it belongs, from that of the insect imitated, 

 that it is difficult to imagine how the first steps in the 

 process of imitation took place. Looking however at the 

 immense variety of insect life in the tropics, and remem- 

 bering that in early tertiary times, nearly the whole 



* Amongst the longicorn beetles of Chontales, Mallocera spinicol- 

 lis, Neodutus CEsopu*, and Diphyrama sinyularis, Bates, all closely 

 resemble stinging- ants when moving about on fallen logs. 



