CHAPTER XXII

PLANTS AND ANTS

Meaning of Plant Life--Captive and domesticated germs--Solomon's observations denied by Buffon but confirmed by recent writers--Ants as keepers and germinators of corn--Ant fields--Ants growing mushrooms--Leaf-cutting ants--Plants which are guarded by insects--The African bush--Ants boarded by Acacias and by Imbauba trees--Ants kept in China and Italy--Cockchafer _v._ ant--Scale insects--A fungus which catches worms.

The world of plants supports all animal life, from the mite to the elephant. There are most intricate relations between one form of life and another. Thus a Rose tree attacked by an aphis or green-fly may be succoured by the slim ichneumon, or other thin-waisted fly, which lays its egg in that of the aphis. Another insect, say a spider, catches the ichneumon. A starling may eat the spider, and be itself eaten by an owl.

So that ichneumon and starling are friends to the Rose, whilst the other insect, the spider, and the owl are enemies. Yet both the starling and the spider are probably, almost certainly on the whole, friends of the Rose, although they are unfriendly in this special case.

With all other similar series or changes the final term is either a bird or animal of prey or mankind.

Until we introduce the idea of man as the culminating point of the series, the whole of it seems to be without any special meaning or advantage.

But when we think of how man utilizes the work of plants and animals, then the whole scheme becomes intelligible and complete; it is like a well-rounded story with a worthy and adequate end.

Moreover, what man has done so far is only an instalment of what he will probably succeed in doing. All who have brought up caterpillars or bees know that their greatest difficulty arises from certain minute insects or fungus enemies. We already know enough about these latter to fight them with some chance of success, but there are hundreds of other spores and germs floating in the atmosphere, and coming to rest on animals, on clothing, or on the leaves or petals of plants. These germs are now just as wild as, and infinitely more dangerous than the furious aurochs, the disdainful wild asses, or the ferocious wolves that our forefathers succeeded in domesticating.

Those bacteria, or germs, for instance, which are only one-thousandth of a millimetre long, are only visible by the help of a microscope. A row of three hundred thousand of them would be required to make an inch in length! Yet one of these germs can be mature and divide into two new germs in twenty minutes. In forty minutes there would be four, in an hour eight, and so on. The number after twenty-four hours is almost incredible.

These little germs stick to our clothes, fingers, lips, money, newspapers, and anything that is often handled. They hover in the air we breathe, permeate the food we eat, and inhabit water, and especially milk, in enormous numbers. Some of them are deadly. One might easily decimate a whole population, as indeed happened in the South Sea Islands when smallpox was introduced. Others are harmless and even necessary.

But to-day if you go into a bacteriological laboratory you will find hundreds and thousands of little glass tubes all neatly labelled and stoppered with cotton wool. If you read those labels you will see that the bacteria of all sorts of horrible and loathsome diseases have been captured and imprisoned. There is the deadly anthrax bacillus peacefully discolouring gelatine; in another, possibly the germs of hydrophobia may be undergoing a process of taming or treatment.

Each of these colonies of germs is under perfect control, and in many of them their natural wickedness has been so much alleviated that they are now useful aids to the doctor, who gives his patient a mild dose of the disease in order to accustom his system to resist accidental infection by the original type.

Yet what has been done already is only an earnest of what will no doubt be accomplished. Every farmer and ploughboy will in time sow his own bacteria; every dairymaid will make all sorts of cheese, from Camembert, Rochfort, to Gorgonzola, by sowing the right kind of germ upon it.

Man will no doubt cultivate the whole earth in the way that he now cultivates Europe and Great Britain, and will obtain mastery not only over his domesticated plants and animals, but over fungi, bacteria, and insects also.

Even if man had never risen above the state of the Banderlog of Mr. Kipling, there are other animals which cultivate and even combine together for warfare and conquest. In some respects they are better disciplined even than man himself, and they can defy all sorts of mankind except civilized man.

Possibly if man had not arisen on the scene, these insects might have developed some sort of civilization like that imagined by Mr. Wells in his story of the moon. We are only concerned with the relations of these ants to plants. Those who are interested in their conquests and civilization must consult the excellent account by Mr. Selous in his _Romance of the Insect World_.

The most interesting points about them are as follows. They gather a harvest and store it up for the winter. This habit of the ant was well known to the ancients, and is mentioned by Solomon. At the time of the French Encyclopædists, when the fashion of the times was all for destruction and disbelief, the fact that ants do so was ridiculed and flatly contradicted, and especially by the great naturalist Buffon. They pointed out that ants hibernated during the cold weather, and therefore required no food for the winter, so that Solomon's story was absolutely ridiculous.

For nearly a hundred years people forgot that Palestine and those other countries where the habits of ants had been reverently observed possessed a climate much too warm and mild to make the ants hibernate.

After careful study it has been discovered that the ants thoroughly understand the first stages of brewing!

The corn which they gather is not eaten by them in its hard winter condition. When taken into the winter nest of the ants this corn would very soon germinate and grow into a plant, but the ants manage to prevent this by some method which is not yet understood. If such a nest is left alone by the ants, the corn immediately begins to grow, but it is not allowed to do so till it is required for food. Should the store of corn get damp by heavy rain, or mould appear upon it, then the careful ants bring up their store into the sunlight and dry it there.

When it is required for food germination is permitted, but is soon stopped: the ants nibble off the growing rootlet of the seed. Then when the grain absorbs water and begins to change its starch into sugar, the ants suck in the sugar and reap the reward of all this labour and skill.

In the conduct of this germination of the grain they are, of course, far in advance of all the savage races of mankind.

There are certain South American species which go at least one step farther. They have their own fields--spaces three or four feet in diameter--which are entirely occupied by one single grass, the so-called Ant-rice (_Aristida stricta_). Dr. Lincecum states that the ants "work" these plantations very carefully, removing every weed or other plant that comes up, and sowing every year the new seed at the proper season.[129]

[129] _Proceedings Linnean Society_, 1861. Dr. MacCook adds nothing essential, and in no way disproves Dr. Lincecum's statements.

These facts are sufficiently strange and startling, but there are even, apparently, species still more intelligent, who not only sow and reap, but actually prepare a soil and reap a crop of mushrooms, or at least, if not of mushrooms, of fungi. These wonderful little insects gather leaves and cut them into fragments of an appropriate size; they are then collected together so as to form a bed, and the fungus is introduced to this. The fungus is kept at a certain stage of growth by very careful treatment; the fruit-bearing ends are nibbled off, so that the young shoots come up indefinitely. The ants feed upon these fungus shoots, and get a crop indefinitely prolonged.

This is, of course, a system of agriculture far beyond that employed by any tribe of savages. Only man in a relatively advanced stage of agriculture grows mushrooms for himself. These facts, startling as they may seem, are apparently quite well authenticated and have not been seriously questioned.

There are a great number of leaf-cutting ants who are, indeed, amongst the most dangerous of the many insect pests in South America and elsewhere. Wallace (_Revue Scientifique_, 179, p. 29), in speaking of the Saauba or leaf-cutters, describes how he placed a large heavy branch across the route of one of their columns.

The long line of laden ants was checked, and the greatest confusion set in at the head of the column. Each ant, for several feet down the column, then laid down its leaf, and all set to work to tunnel under the obstacle. This was managed in about half an hour's time, and the column then proceeded on its way.

Amongst other interesting and curious facts connected with these extraordinary insects is that some kinds are actually kept up by certain plants as a sort of standing army or police.

There are no less than 3030 species of plant which keep these standing armies of ferocious ants, or if they do not keep them, at any rate lay themselves out to attract them. The kinds which are attracted live upon sugar, and are strong, active, and extremely good fighters. When travelling through the bush in Africa, it is not unusual in some places to touch inadvertently one of these protected trees. In a moment one's hand and arm are covered by ants whose heads are dug deep down into the skin, biting with all their strength.

It is of course impossible to describe all the plants which protect themselves against injurious insects and even large animals in this way, but two of them must be mentioned.

There are certain Acacias which are particularly interesting. Like most of this order, they have large hollow spines instead of stipules at the base of the leaf. It is inside these spines that the troops of the police-insects live. These Acacias (Oxhorn Acacia, as well as _A. sphærocephala_ and _A. spadicigera_) also produce _sugar_, which is secreted by peculiar gland-like organs on the stalks of the leaves, and even _albuminoids_, for at the tips of the leaflets there are peculiar little bodies which contain albuminous matter.

The Imbauba tree (_Cecropia spp._) also possesses a standing army of these ants. It puts them up in the hollow pith in the centre of the tree, which is divided into large roomy spaces and makes a convenient nest. There is a minute opening by which they run in and out. On one occasion a naturalist found that the ants had been benumbed by a period of very cold weather, and in consequence had neglected their duty, and the trees had been stripped of their leaves by leaf-cutting kinds.[130]

[130] Belt, _Naturalist in Nicaragua_.

These last mentioned, the leaf-cutting ants, are especially dreaded by owners of plantations. Foreign or introduced plants are not specially guarded against their ravages by special secretions, as is the case with the native flora, so that the coffee and cocoa plantations are often severely injured. In some places man has copied those Acacias and Imbaubas, for in the orange plantations of the province of Canton, in China, ants' nests are collected and placed on the trees. Moreover, the different trees are connected together by bamboos, so that the ants can easily pass, as on a bridge, from one tree to another.

Near Mantua, in Italy, the same system seems to be adopted, and ants' nests are carefully placed ne