708 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XXII. No. 570. 



the Ponerin^. But this is not all. Because 

 he has never seen a nuptial flight of male and 

 female keleps, he jumps to the further con- 

 clusion that it never occurs and that colonies 

 of this ant can not be founded by solitary- 

 females. He says at p. 34, ' there is no 

 provision in nature for a solitary kelep.' His 

 whole description of the nesting habits of the 

 kelep discloses nothing to warrant such a 

 gratuitous assumption. As the colonies are 

 small, their nuptial flights would hardly be 

 noticed by the Indians of Guatemala and may, 

 moreover, occur only during certain years or 

 in the twilight or after dark. That they have 

 not been seen in the colonies brought to Texas 

 is even less surprising, as such flights among 

 other species are celebrated only by flourish- 

 ing colonies, and everything goes to show that 

 Dr. Cook's importations are not in that condi- 

 tion. The large niunber of males which he 

 finds suggests a high degree of fertility on the 

 part of the workers. It does not, however, 

 indicate colonial prosperity in these ants, but 

 a scarcity of females. Very similar condi- 

 tions have been observed by Miss Holliday^ 

 and myself in another ponerine ant, Pachy- 

 condyla harpax of Texas,, which does not form 

 polydomous colonies. 



It is, of course, possible that the nuptial 

 flight may not occur in the kelep, that the 

 males may wander about and fertilize the 

 females within the nests, and that new colonies 

 may be formed exclusively by a process of 

 budding or subdivision of preexisting colonies. 

 But if this is true, we should be led to infer- 

 ences very different from those announced by 

 Dr. Cook. Far from having ' complete so- 

 cialization ' and representing a higher and 

 more economical form of social life, the kelep 

 would seem to be a retrograde, degenerate or, 

 at any rate, highly specialized ant for the 

 reason that just such conditions, at least so 

 far as the suppression of the nuptial flight 

 and intranidal raating are concerned, occur, 

 in all probability, among the parasitic ants 

 like Anergates, Symmyrmica, Formicoxenus, 

 etc., and in highly specialized ants like the 

 Dorylinse and Leptogenys, which are either 



- ' A Study of Some Ergatogynic Ants,' Zool. 

 Jahrh. Ahth. f. Syst., XIX., 4, 1903, p. 2,97, 298. 



rare or have an unusual mode of life. And 

 far from being a promising trait in an ant 

 introduced for economic purposes, the very 

 opposite would be the case, as seems to be indi- 

 cated by the flat failure of Dr. Cook's propa- 

 ganda. It may be best, however, to refrain 

 from all speculation on this matter till we 

 know more about the colonizing habits of the 

 kelep than can be learned from Dr. Cook's 

 desultory statements. There can be no doubt 

 about the fact that isolated fertile females of 

 certain Ponerinse are able to establish colonies. 

 In the Bahamas I found satisfactory evidence 

 of this both in Pseudoponera stigma and in 

 Odontomachus insularis, and Dr. Cook is still 

 a long way from having proved that the same 

 method is never adopted by Eciatomma. 



Additional confusion is introduced by Dr. 

 Cook with a set of new terms. He calls ' an 

 insect colony in which all the eggs are fur- 

 nished by a single laying queen ' a ' strictly 

 determinate organization, that is, it reaches a 

 natural limit after the mother insect dies or 

 ceases to reproduce,' and ' colonies may be 

 called indeterminate when the social economy 

 of the insect is such that a lost queen can be 

 replaced.' " Colonies with more than one 

 egg-producing queen may be called compound 

 indeterminate." All of these distinctions are 

 at the present time not only superfluous, but 

 misleading. According to prevailing theory, 

 all ant, wasp and honey-bee colonies would be 

 determinate, since it is supposed that they 

 can not produce females after the reproductive 

 exhaustion or death of the queen. And, for 

 aught we know to the contrary, the same may 

 be true of the termites. Until we are sure 

 that this is not the case, we gain nothing but 

 confusion by adopting such a classification. 



Equally futile is his distinction between the 

 ' social principle of matriarchy ' and ' ergat- 

 archy ' among the social insects. As a mem- 

 ber of a colony, the female ant, wasp or 

 humble-bee is no more a ruler or dominating 

 factor in social life than the queen honey-bee. 

 If the female ant, wasp and humble-bee dis- 

 play great initiative in founding their respect- 

 ive colonies, the female honey-bee displays it 

 by killing riv,al queens, returning to the hive 

 after the nuptial flight, etc. 



