THE COMMUNITY OF THE ANTS 



The spongy lumps are usually a greyish-white in colour, but some 

 are green, and from these one can readily understand what the ants 

 do with the fragments of leaves which they carry into the nest. One 

 sees, too, that numbers of very small ants are always busily occupied 

 with these lumps. These are not, however, young ants ; for the ants 

 belong to the Hymenoptera, and these, like the beetles, butterflies, 

 moths and flies, grow only while they are larvae — that is, grubs or 

 caterpillars. In this stage they moult, and each time they burst 

 their old skin they emerge rather larger than before. The period 

 of growth is terminated by the last skin but one, which is discarded 

 by the pupa. During pupation all the organs are, as it were, dissolved 

 and transmuted, and when the pupa splits open in the last moult 

 of all the perfect and sexually mature insect emerges, which is dis- 

 tinguished from all the stages of its youth by the possession of wings, 

 and a wholly different shape, and a different way of life. 



Even among the ants the males and females have wings ; only the 

 workers, who are really females in whom the sexual organs are 

 stunted, have renounced their wings, as they would hamper them 

 in their subterranean activities. Among the Sauvas we find a whole 

 series of workers of different sizes, whose physical form is determined 

 by the work which they perform in the community. The large 

 Sauvas are the formidable soldiers; the medium-sized workers 

 procure leaves and divide them ; the smallest work in the sponges. 



When the medium-sized workers have brought the leaves into the 

 nest, they are divided as finely as possible, and gathered into heaps. 

 But this is only a preliminary, for these heaps do not represent the 

 food of the Sauvas; they are merely beds of compost for their 

 vegetables. For these remarkable insects are gardeners, and cultivate 

 fungi of a species which no longer exists in the natural state. 



Consequently, the ants have always to fetch their fungi from other 

 chambers. These reveal the fact that they have been long established 

 by the grey colour of their spongy contents. They are completely 

 filled with the mycelium of the fungus ; and the ants pull out a little 

 bunch of this mycelium, carry it to the heap of green compost, and 

 plant it there. Presently the fungus begins to grow on the new heap, 

 and pierces it through and through with its filaments of mycelium. 

 Gradually little globular nodules form on this mycelium; to my 

 naked eye they were barely visible as tiny white dots. The discoverer 

 of this curious fungus, Moller, called these nodules "kohlrabis" ; 

 another name for them is "ambrosia." The extraordinary thing is 

 that the "kohlrabi" is as truly a product of myrmecine fungiculture 



u 305 



