638 Wheeler, Some Remarks on Temporary Social Parasitism. 



same subject is largely an American confirmation of his own. The 

 bulk of the paper is increased by numerous observations on myrme- 

 cophiles, observations which are quite irrelevant and serve to befog 

 the whole matter at issue, so that future students may find the 

 historical development of our ideas obscured if not completely 

 falsified. This has led me to offer the following comments on 

 W a s m a n ITS pap er . 



My own contribution's to the subject of temporary social 

 parasitism and the development of slavery among ants are con- 

 tained in three short papers published in the Bulletin of the 

 American Museum of Natural History", a periodical of somewhat 

 limited circulation even in America, and perhaps one of the last 

 in which the student would look for ethological work. In the 

 first paper of the series, published Nov. 21, 1903 *), I called attention 

 to the fact that the females of some of our North American species 

 of Formica belonging to the rufa group are aberrant in color and 

 pilosity or in being of diminutive stature. I was unable to explain 

 these aberrations, but decided to study the habits of some one of 

 the species at the earliest opportunity. This presented itself during 

 the summer of 1904 when I found among the Litchfield Hills of 

 Connecticut a number of colonies in all stages of growth of 

 F. d'ifficilis var. consocians, a new variety of a form in which 

 Emery had previously noted the occurrence of diminutive fulvous 

 queens. I was able to establish the fact that the female of this 

 variety, after her nuptial flight, regularly enters a depauperate and 

 probably queenless colony of F. schaufussi var. incerta Emery, an ant 

 belonging to the palUde-fulva group, for the purpose of starting 

 her own family. A series of mixed colonies of the two species 

 demonstrated to my satisfaction that the incerta workers, after- 

 adopting and caring for the consocians queen and nursing her 

 offspring to maturity, eventually die and leave the consocians, now 

 able to provide for themselves, to increase apace till they form a 

 populous and pugnacious colony, which shows no traces of its 

 lowly parasitic origin. The tiny stature of the queen is thus seen 

 to be correlated, in all probability, with deficient or very tardy 

 fertility and an inability on the part of the insect to establish a 

 colony by herself alone like the females of the vast majority of 

 ants. This singular phenomenon I designated as temporary social 

 parasitism in order to distinguish it from the permanent social 

 parasitism of the slave-holding or dulotic species and of such ab- 

 jectly inquilinous forms as Anergates atratulus. In glancing over 

 the known mixed colonies among European and American ants I 



1) Extraordinary Females in Three Species of Formica, with Remarks on Mu- 

 tation in the Formicidae. Bull. Am. Mus. Nat. Hist., Vol. 19, Nov. 21, 1903, 

 pp. 045649, 3 Fig. 



