158 ANIMAL LIFE 
them to their own nest. Indeed, they go even further ; they 
may make slaves of the conquered ants. There are numer- 
ous species of the so-called slave-making ants. The slave- 
makers carry into their own nest the eggs and larve and 
pupe of the conquered community, and when these come 
to maturity they act as slaves of the victors—that is, they 
collect food, build additions to the nests, and care for the 
young of the slave-makers. This specialization goes so far 
in the case of some kinds of ants, like the robber-ant of 
South America (Zciton), that all of the Heiton workers have 
become soldiers, which no longer do any work for them- 
selves. The whole community lives, therefore, wholly by 
pillage or by making slaves of other kinds of ants. There 
are four kinds of individuals in a robber-ant community— 
winged males, winged females, and small and large wing- 
less soldiers. There are many more of the small soldiers 
than of the large, and some naturalists believe that the few 
latter, which are distinguished by heads and jaws of great 
size, act as officers. On the march the small soldiers are 
arranged in a long, narrow column, while the large soldiers 
are scattered along on either side of the column and appear 
to act as sentinels and directors of the army. The obser- 
vations made by the famous Swiss students of ants, Huber 
and Forel, and by other naturalists, read like fairy tales, 
and yet are the well-attested and often reobserved actual 
phenomena of the extremely specialized communal and 
social life of these animals. 
86. Other communal insects—The termites or white ants 
(not true ants) are communal insects. Some species of 
termites in Africa live in great mounds of earth, often 
fifteen feet high. The community comprises hundreds of 
thousands of individuals, which are of eight kinds (Fig 93), 
viz., sexually active winged males, sexually active winged’ 
females, other fertile males and females which are wingless, 
wingless workers of both sexes not capable of reproduc- 
tion, and wingless soldiers of both sexes also incapable of 
