ANT COMMUNITIES 



members of their community. The pleased sensation 

 of falling upon food is apt to start an ant a-stridulating, 

 and thus other foragers abroad in the vicinage are 

 attracted by the food-call. This also explains, in part, 

 the rapid spread of the heroic rage to defend their home 

 which runs through a populous ant city and calls out a 

 legion of eager sentinels and workers. 



Stridulation also accounts for the ease with which 

 members of such species as the agricultural ant of Texas 

 are trapped by sinking a glass jar or bottle on or near their 

 formicary. One ant falls in, and begins to stridulate. 

 The sound attracts passing comrades, who throw them- 

 selves over the rim to the rescue, and in turn, finding 

 themselves imprisoned, begin to stridulate, until at last 

 so many are sounding the alarm that the chorus is 

 audible even to the human ear. 



If, now, the jar be corked and shaken to further excite 

 the inmates, and then held over another Pogonomyr- 

 mex commune, whose members are peacefully sauntering 

 about, the wildest excitement suddenly seizes them, as 

 though there had been a call to arms. The writer has 

 collected these Texas ants by this method, but such a 

 reasonable explanation for the clatter within the bottle 

 did not occur to him until suggested by Professor 

 Wheeler. 



More decisive than the above, and it is conclusive, is 

 the description of the remarkable stridulation practised 

 by the leaf-cutting ants ( A tta fervens) of Texas. Herein 

 the different forms from the huge females, through 

 males, the large-headed soldiers, and the diminishing 

 castes of workers, down to the tiny minims present a 

 sliding scale of audibility. The rasping stridulation of 

 the queen can be heard when she is held a foot or more 



146 



