Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 July 1884 — THE INDUSTRIOUS ANT. [ARTICLE]

THE INDUSTRIOUS ANT.

He Is Only Eqneled by the Industrious Her. Sir John Lubbock, who has started a dog school in London, says ants stand next to man in point of intelligence, and I reckon they do. For instance: I have lived nearly all my life in the South, where the ants tackle everything. Beds, tables, cupboards—in fact, every article you wanted to keep ants out of had to be stood in water —that is, in peach cans cut off and filled. But evten this wouldn’t do; the ants would find some floating matter on the surface, and bridge the moat with their bodies, and so get over. Then we tried tar-water, and suspended sugar in pails from the ceiling. For a while this nonplused them; but attracted by the smell, they gathered on the safe under it, and after a while we found them coming down the rope. They had gone up the ceiling, and so on down. A friend of mine in the African fruit trade told me that one night, when up a river, near the Congo country, he was awakened by a yell, and tumbling out of his hammock, found himself standing a foot deep in solid ants. He ran for his life, covered with them, and finally got beyond their line of march and stayed in a tree all night. The next mornmg, when he returned, the whole house had been cleaned out. A dog that was tied to a tree was represented by a lot of clean-picked bones. It was the raider ant, and when they come there is no way to do but to surround the place with fire. Animals run from them. “This sounds like a yarn,” said the ant authority, “but the story told by Jaeger, the naturalist, is a bigger one. He states that a Catholic missionary was sick in Congo, when one of the armies came along, and it was by sheer luck that the natives got him Up. As they carried him out of the house, the floor was over a foot deep with the insects, and of a cow that in the stable the bones alone told the story next morning. “The most remarkable thing about ants is the method with which they work. The different families are divided off into different kinds of workers—soldiers who do the fighting, workers that do the manurl labor, and kings and queens who do nothing. When the great Sauba ants start out on an expedition, if it is hot weather, you see the laborers ahead forming a covered tunnel through which the entire body passes. Now, if you break this in, out rush, not the laborers, but the bigheaded, big-jawed soldiers, who dart about to find the intruder, and if noth-, ing is to be seen they go in and inform the laborers, who~ then appear and repair damages. When they come to streams they climb the trees on the bank, form themselves into chains, and swing gradually over until the end ant catches bold of a tree on the other side. On this bridge pass over the rest.

“In Brazil the workers of certain ants form burrows under ground acres in extent, and those called the leaf cutters do incalculable damage. They climb the lemon and other trees in vast numbers, and by a scissors-like motion of the jaws, cut out a piece of oval leaf and start off, holding it erect over their heads like a parasol. These they carry to their underground and use them as thatching or wall paper, and for another purpose still more singular. Upon the leaves, as soon as they are put in place, grows a delicate fungus, which is used as food for the young ants. So, you see, the -insects may actually be said to be agriculturists. The Texas agricultural ants go to work in a more methodical manner. They :make a nest beneath the ground, and raised several inches above it, and clear away a space on either side of several feet, from which branch through the grass several roads. Curiously enough this grass about the nest is all of one kind. All the other weeds are cleared away. Some people say the ants actually plant the grass seed However, they do gather it and feed it to the young, and store the grain houses under ground. Here you see another evidence of intelligence. The seeds stowed away would naturally sprout after a rain, but in some cases, ■wjhen they become damp, the ants take them to the surface and dry them in the sun; in other cases, they poison the seed by biting it, so that it does not sprout. “Some years ago, a discussion was raised in Brazil over the work of ants, a naturalist claiming that he could show a place where they had tunneled under a river. Such a statement would hardly be believed true, but it was proved, and marked ants passed into the tunnel on one side and were observed to come out on the other, a quarter of a mile distant. More than this smoke was forced through the tunnel.— Interview. in the New York Sun.