Wars and Slaverv in the Animal Kingdom. 67 



A dog biting the stone thrown at him, in his blind 

 rage acts just as "automatically" as a sanguinea which 

 vents her fury on the edges of a glass tube, so that you 

 can hear the grating noise made by her jaws. And if 

 certain individuals of an ant colony acquire through 

 their sense-experience special dispositions and char- 

 acteristics, which distinguish them from other individ- 

 uals of the same colony, then they act "automatically' 

 as little as dogs or apes, or other higher mammals do. 

 Some remarkable instances of this may find a place 

 here. 



In the observation nest of F. sanguinea described 

 on page 23, some beetles called Dinarda dentata, which 

 I introduced, had at first been received as usual without 

 difficulty as indifferently tolerated guests, and had 

 even propagated in the nest. But several times I put in 

 a little larger Dinarda species {D. Maerkelii), whose 

 usual host is F. rufa, and when finally some small 

 sanguineas and their slaves had succeeded in seizing 

 and killing this beetle, which, as a rule, is unassailable 

 owing to its wedge-shaped body offering scarcely any 

 point of attack,^ then a number of ants of this colony 

 gradually took a liking to catching Dinardas, which 

 liking proved disastrous also to the smaller Dinarda 

 dentata. Not all the individuals -of the different ant 

 species of that colony have acquired this strange 

 passion. Among twelve workers of F. sanguinea 

 which I put from this observation nest into a smaller 

 experimenting nest together with seven Dinarda 



*) See Wasmann, " D in ard a- Arten oder -Rassen," in Wien. Entom. 

 Ztg., 1896, 4th and 5th issue, and "Die Myrmekophilen und Termi- 

 tophilen," p. 435 (Extr. du Compte rendu du troisieme CongrSs intern, 

 de Zool. Leyden, 1896). 



