128 NATURAL HISTORY READER. 



PLANT-EATING AND OMNIVOROUS ANTS. 



1. Ant communities everywhere have the same genera] 

 characteristics in regard to orderly government, to the con- 

 struction of communal habitations, to the care of the young, 

 to industry, and to the division of labor ; but it is in trop- 

 ical regions only that they exhibit some of their most re- 

 markable peculiarities. The plant-eating ant is the pest of 

 the agriculturist, but the omnivorous ants are such fearful 

 scourges that they frequently render large sections of coun- 

 try entirely uninhabitable by man. In Africa the owners 

 of large and flourishing plantations have been driven away 

 by these ants, and upon the banks of the Parana, in Brazil, 

 a large territory has been almost transformed into a desert. 



2. In South America, the sauba, or leaf-cutting ants, 

 are among the pests which make regular farming almost 

 impossible. These ants build nests about two feet high and 

 often forty feet in diameter. The interiors are divided into 

 galleries, some of which extend deep into the ground. It 

 is said that these ants always build where they can have di- 

 rect access to water, and in one instance it was found that 

 they had constructed a well twelve inches in diameter and 

 thirty feet deep. These ants ascend trees and plants in 

 immense swarms, taking possession of the entire plant. 

 Then each ant cuts a circular piece from a leaf, and, de- 

 scending, bears it away to the nest. In this way the tree is 

 soon denuded of its leaves, and the vast army of ants, follow- 

 ing the same route, form regular beaten paths. While en- 

 gaged in this work their columns are said to look like a 

 multitude of animated leaves on a march. 



3. The leaves are stored up in chambers constructed for 

 that purpose, and for a long time the object of this accumu- 

 lation was a matter of conjecture. Late investigations, how- 

 ever, have shown that in the moist and warm atmosphere 



