Community Life in the Animal Kingdom. 13 



Species/ living in the colony as "auxiliaries" or 

 "slaves"; partly they are members of altogether dif- 

 ferent orders of insects, especially of certain beetles, 

 as the genera Atemeles and Lomechusa, which are 

 accorded a friendly reception by the ants, are licked 

 and fedj their larvae being reared by the ants as if 

 they were the latters' own.^ This is a special form 

 of community life (symbiosis), found nowhere else 

 throughout the animal kingdom. Symbiosis is only 

 equal to real community life, when the members 

 engage in mutual psychic intercourse. Between a 

 hermit crab and a sea anemone that settles on the 

 former's back, between a small fish ( Trachichfhys tuni- 

 catiis) and a large sea nettle harboring it within the 

 circle of its tentacles,^ there is a mutual relation (mutu- 

 alism) useful to both of them, without, however, 

 approaching any psychic intercourse, although the one 

 instinctively looks for the other. There is a similar 

 relation between ants and many of their tolerated 

 guests, whilst their relation to their slaves and to their 

 genuine guests attains a higher degree of psycho- 

 logical intercourse and becomes real community life. 

 Moreover, parasites, hostile intruders and indifferently 



^) See Wasmann, "Die zusammengesetzten Nester und gemischten 

 Kolonien der Ameisen," part II. 



2) See the "Autobiography of a Lomechusa," in "Stimmen aus 

 Maria Laach," LII (1897), 69, where the literature of the subject is 

 enumerated. Tlie number of the regular nestmates of ants and 

 termites is rather considerable. Our "Kritisches Verzeichnis der 

 myrmekophilen und termitophilen Arthropoden," published in 1894, 

 already contains 1,246 ant guests and 109 termite guests, having the 

 most various biological relations to their hosts. Since then many new 

 species from all quarters of the world have been discovered and 

 described. 



3) See *'Zool. Anzeiger," Vol. XI (1888), n. 278, p. 240. 



