HOW ANTS COMMUNICATE 



the grove issues the cicada's rolling call, swelling in 

 volume and dying away, and not well ended till an 

 answering or another trill is heard. And so, on and on- 

 beech-tree responding to maple and chestnut to w^hite 

 oak, with hardly an interval of silence. When night 

 falls "the katvdid works her chromatic reed," not 



* 



indeed "on the walnut-tree over the well/ 3 but on the 

 beeches and oaks, beneath whose branches wind the wood- 

 drive and the ramble. All these and others, with organs 

 varying in structure, as is the wont of versatile nature, are 

 the product of insect stridulation. 1 And could one tune 

 his ear to the finer sounds with which the occult spheres 

 of cosmos are full, he would hear many like sounds. 



Ants, for instance, are supplied with stridulating 

 organs, which, reasoning from analogy, they must use 

 as means of expressing certain feelings. Yet one of the 

 rarest events in insect ethology is the record of an emmet 

 stridulation unless, indeed, the rasping noise one 

 hears issuing from the excited hordes of a disturbed 

 ant-hill may be the aggregate of many stridulators 

 instead (as conjectured) of the clatter of numerous 

 mandibles and the grating of chitinous body shells as 

 they rub against one another. The writer was long in- 

 clined to the latter view, although more than a quarter 

 of a century ago, in his studies of the honey-ants of the 

 Garden of the Gods, he showed that ants possess organs 

 well fitted to produce stridulatory sounds, and cited 

 at least one case that seemed to prove such use thereof. 

 [McC. 4, p. 07.] But the evidence now in hand puts 

 beyond doubt the existence of the habit. 



1 Rubbing the femora or the wing-covers together, and rubbing 

 the bases of the two wing-covers (tegmina) together, are the chief 

 modes of stridulating among locusts, grasshoppers, and crickets. 



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