TROPICAL NATURE IN COLOMBIA 299 



Many ants manufactured a sort of dirty paper from which they built 

 hanging nests in trees. Others excavated logs like termites. One of 

 these Mr. Gaige, our ant man, called the " spread-eagle nipper." This 

 was a big black ant which opened its mandibles so wide that they stood 

 out straight at the sides of the head, and then brought them together 

 with a snap that could be distinctly heard at a distance of several feet. 

 Woe to the unwary finger that was between those mandibles when they 

 came together ! 



At Fundacion, a village in the forest beyond the banana country, we 

 discovered two curious species of ants living in trees. One of these built 

 little paper sheds over aphids which it put out to "graze''' in the acacia 

 trees. The aphids sucked the juice from the trees and gave out a sweet 

 secretion which was taken from their bodies by the ants. The other 

 species mentioned lived in little hollow thorns on the branches of an 

 acacia. This tree was a true ant plant for it grew the hollow thorns in 

 pairs with a little doorway leading into the cavity within them. The 

 doorways were present in young thorns even before the ants had occupied 

 them. 



We can not pass the forest without mentioning the bromeliads. 

 These plants are members of the pineapple family and are much like 

 pineapple plant without the "apple" at the bottom. High up in the 

 mountains they grow on the ground, but as the altitude grows less they 

 begin to climb upward, and in the lowlands live as epiphytes in the trees. 

 The bases of the leaves interlock in such a way that they make tight cups 

 which act as reservoirs for the water that runs down from the tips of the 

 leaves. The water contained in one of these plants frequently totals to 

 two or three quarts, and the thirsty traveler is often glad to make use of 

 it. Many small animals pass their lives in the shelter of bromeliads. 

 We found tree frogs with their eggs, dragon fly larvae, rat-tail (fly) 

 larva?, beetles, cockroaches, spiders, salamanders, and many other small 

 animals. We tore open logs for two weeks and found only two sala- 

 manders, but got twenty from the bromeliads in a single morning. 



The Desert 



The strip of sandy country near the shore of the Caribbean Sea grows 

 cactus and various xerophytic shrubs. Many of the cacti are thirty feet 

 tall. Here the most characteristic animals are the ground lizards which 

 swarm over the sand everywhere. Many of these are brightly colored 

 with yellow or blue. 



We were surprised to find land snails quite abundant in the desert. 

 At the time of our visit they were activating in the crevices of curiously 

 twisted trunks of the small acacia trees. Here also we occasionally 

 found a land tortoise (Testudo labulata) wandering about among the 

 cactus. Several streams ran through the desert. Near these the little 



