MORE ABOUT INSECTS 75 



related forms live ever>nvhere in water. The large white mag- 

 gots are the young of a large blow-fly which never "blows"; 

 there are half a dozen kinds of these occurring only in the leaves 

 of pitcher-plants. There are also various other less conspicuous 

 things within these pitchers. 



Another plant we have which feeds on insects, the elegant 

 httle Drosera or sun-dew so common in our northern bogs and 

 woods and often associated with the pitcher-plants. The sun- 

 dew and its alhes exhale a fungus-like odor which appears to be 

 especially attractive, and therefore fatal, to the fungus gnats. 

 In Australia, the headquarters of the sun-dews, there is a very 

 large one with an enormous appetite. On this kind and no- 

 where else there lives a long legged bug which walks up and 

 down the leaves sucking the juices from the insects which the 

 plant has caught. 



Agriculture is practiced by different ants in various highly 

 specialized forms. The so-called leaf-cutting ants gather 

 great masses of green leaves which they chew up and place in 

 their nests. These ants are large and powerful and very busi- 

 ness-like, and at Carriacou a party of them once in a single 

 night cut out all the cabbages from the garden of a friend of 

 mine with whom I lived. The cabbages were growing finely, 

 and we had hoped the ants had overlooked them. Upon the 

 wilted leaves within the nest there grows a fungus, and upon 

 this only do the ants subsist. This fungus is never allowed 

 to fruit, the fruiting heads being bitten off as soon as they ap- 

 pear. A female ant, starting out to form a new colony, carries 

 some of this fungus in a depression underneath her tongue; 

 of her first batch of eggs she crushes a few and on them 

 plants the fungus which lives upon the eggs until enough 

 workers have appeared to form a new garden. 



Most of the food we eat has been cooked and more or less 

 altered, though we can, if necessary, live on uncooked sub- 

 stances. But the white ants or termites are quite unable to 

 live upon the food they eat. They consume cellulose, a sub- 

 stance they are unable to digest; their alimentary tract. 



