ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY 

 BULLETIN 



Published by the New York Zoological Society 



Vol. XXI. 



JANUARY. 1918 



Number 1 



A SILKY EATER OF ANTS 



By William Beebe. 



THHKK million years ago a perfectly good 

 white ant lived on the earth. His fossil- 

 ized remains have been so well preserved 

 that there is no doubt of his presence and activ- 

 ity in that dim, distant past. Together with 

 many of his fellows, he left the impression of 

 his body in the mud of that far off time, and 

 since then the mud has hardened to stone, been 

 buried under thousands of centuries of other 

 mud and stone, and at last split open by inquis- 

 itive scientists and the ant impressions recog- 

 nized from their striking resemblance to their 

 rather distant relatives living on the topmost 

 stratum of the earth today. Hence my right to 

 the adjective "white" in referring to fossils, an 

 adjective of considerable importance, as it in- 

 dicates that these insects are not really ants at 

 all, and removes them from Soloman's entomo- 

 logical advice, in identity although not in un- 

 worthiness. For white ants or termites are re- 

 lated much more closely to dragonflies than to 

 ordinary ants. Though today they have devel- 

 oped a marvellously intricate social life, yet they 

 and their relatives trace their lineage back with 

 almost no change in structure an unthinkably 

 longer time than man and his immediate fore- 

 bears have taken to evolve. 



1 have devoted this whole paragraph to the 

 white ant because of the importance of his re- 

 lation to my subject from quite another view- 

 point — a rather unkind one — that of the food 

 which he, and his billions of brethren, scattered 

 over all the face of the world, furnish to hosts 

 of animals, birds, reptiles and ant-eaters in par- 

 ticular. True ants. Soloman's kind, which make 

 slaves and wage wars, arc devoured by many 



creatures, but these insects are all flavored more 

 or less strongly with formic acid, and must be 

 an acquired taste. White ants or termites, on 

 the other hand, are. by all insect-eaters and 

 some others, considered a universal panacea for 

 hunger, and I have seen fishes leaping for them, 

 lizards risking dangers from hawk and man, 

 dogs, cats and Bornean squirrels snapping up 

 the winged hosts, while they furnish by far the 

 larger proportion of food of pheasants and 

 many other birds. The little Malayan bear has 

 been recorded several times as clawing apart 

 their nests and feeding upon these insects, al- 

 though the amount of debris which must be in- 

 cluded, makes this an exceedingly adulterated 

 diet. 



Termites are today so important an article of 

 diet on the earth, that certain animals have been 

 developed with this sole means of nourishment 

 in view. I have already related something of 

 the scalv ant-eater of Borneo.* In South Amer- 

 ica, where these insects are exceedingly abun- 

 dant, there are three animals set apart from all 

 others in structure and mode of life, to which 

 the ants are actually la raison d'etre. They 

 would probably become extinct or at least hard 

 pressed for food were the supply of termites 

 and ants to fail for a few weeks. 



Some of the white ants build their nests in 

 trees, others are content with lowlier positions; 

 some of the nests are large and extremely hard. 

 some are smaller and less cement-like, while 

 still lesser structures are not lacking which offer 

 but little resistance to outside force. Like the 

 various sizes of big and little bears, we rind 



*Zool. Soe. Bull. XVII. No. 3, p. 1,141. 



1561 



