The Naturalist on the River Amazons

by Henry Walter Bates

When the pedestrian falls in with a train of these ants, the first signal given him is a twittering and restless movement of small flocks of plain-coloured birds (ant-thrushes) in the jungle. If this be disregarded until he advances a few steps farther, he is sure to fall into trouble, and find himself suddenly attacked by numbers of the ferocious little creatures. They swarm up his legs with incredible rapidity, each one driving his pincer-like jaws into his skin, and with the purchase thus obtained, doubling in its tail, and stinging with all its might. There is no course left but to run for it; if he is accompanied by natives they will be sure to give the alarm, crying “Tauóca!” and scampering at full speed to the other end of the column of ants. The tenacious insects who have secured themselves to his legs then have to be plucked off one by one, a task which is generally not accomplished without pulling them in twain, and leaving heads and jaws sticking in the wounds.

The errand of the vast ant-armies is plunder, as in the case of Eciton legionis; but from their moving always amongst dense thickets, their proceedings are not so easy to observe as in that species. Wherever they move, the whole animal world is set in commotion, and every creature tries to get out of their way. But it is especially the various tribes of wingless insects that have cause for fear, such as heavy-bodied spiders, ants of other species, maggots, caterpillars, larvæ of cockroaches and so forth, all of which live under fallen leaves, or in decaying wood. The Ecitons do not mount very high on trees, and therefore the nestlings of birds are not much incommoded by them. The mode of operation of these armies, which I ascertained only after long-continued observation, is as follows: the main column, from four to six deep, moves forward in a given direction, clearing the ground of all animal matter dead or alive, and throwing off here and there a thinner column to forage for a short time on the flanks of the main army, and re-enter it again after their task is accomplished. If some very rich place be encountered anywhere near the line of march, for example, a mass of rotten wood abounding in insect larvæ, a delay takes place, and a very strong force of ants is concentrated upon it. The excited creatures search every cranny and tear in pieces all the large grubs they drag to light. It is curious to see them attack wasps’ nests, which are sometimes built on low shrubs. They gnaw away the papery covering to get at the larvæ, pupæ, and newly-hatched wasps, and cut everything to tatters, regardless of the infuriated owners which are flying about them. In bearing off their spoil in fragments, the pieces are apportioned to the carriers with some degree of regard to fairness of load: the dwarfs taking the smallest pieces, and the strongest fellows with small heads the heaviest portions. Sometimes two ants join together in carrying one piece, but the worker-majors, with their unwieldy and distorted jaws, are incapacitated from taking any part in the labour. The armies never march far on a beaten path, but seem to prefer the entangled thickets where it is seldom possible to follow them. I have traced an army sometimes for half a mile or more, but was never able to find one that had finished its day’s course and returned to its hive. Indeed, I never met with a hive; whenever the Ecitons were seen, they were always on the march.

I thought one day, at Villa Nova, that I had come upon a migratory horde of this indefatigable ant. The place was a tract of open ground near the river side, just outside the edge of the forest, and surrounded by rocks and shrubbery. A dense column of Ecitons was seen extending from the rocks on one side of the little haven, traversing the open space, and ascending the opposite declivity. The length of the procession was from sixty to seventy yards, and yet neither van nor rear was visible. All were moving in one and the same direction, except a few individuals on the outside of the column, which were running rearward, trotting along for a short distance, and then turning again to follow the same course as the main body. But these rearward movements were going on continually from one end to the other of the line, and there was every appearance of there being a means of keeping up a common understanding amongst all the members of the army, for the retrograding ants stopped very often for a moment to touch one or other of their onward-moving comrades with their antennæ; a proceeding which has been noticed in other ants, and supposed to be their mode of conveying intelligence. When I interfered with the column or abstracted an individual from it, news of the disturbance was very quickly communicated to a distance of several yards towards the rear, and the column at that point commenced retreating. All the small-headed workers carried in their jaws a little cluster of white maggots, which I thought at the time, might be young larvæ of their own colony, but afterwards found reason to conclude were the grubs of some other species whose nests they had been plundering, the procession being most likely not a migration, but a column on a marauding expedition.

The position of the large-headed individuals in the marching column was rather curious. There was one of these extraordinary fellows to about a score of the smaller class. None of them carried anything in their mouths, but all trotted along empty-handed and outside the column, at pretty regular intervals from each other, like subaltern officers in a marching regiment of soldiers. It was easy to be tolerably exact in this observation, for their shining white heads made them very conspicuous amongst the rest, bobbing up and down as the column passed over the inequalities of the road. I did not see them change their position, or take any notice of their small-headed comrades marching in the column, and when I disturbed the line, they did not prance forth or show fight so eagerly as the others. These large-headed members of the community have been considered by some authors as a soldier class, like the similarly-armed caste in Termites; but I found no proof of this, at least in the present species, as they always seemed to be rather less pugnacious than the worker-minors, and their distorted jaws disabled them from fastening on a plane surface like the skin of an attacking animal. I am inclined, however, to think that they may act, in a less direct way, as protectors of the community, namely, as indigestible morsels to the flocks of ant-thrushes which follow the marching columns of these Ecitons, and are the most formidable enemies of the species. It is possible that the hooked and twisted jaws of the large-headed class may be effective weapons of annoyance when in the gizzards or stomachs of these birds, but I unfortunately omitted to ascertain whether this was really the fact.

The life of these Ecitons is not all work, for I frequently saw them very leisurely employed in a way that looked like recreation. When this happened, the place was always a sunny nook in the forest. The main column of the army and the branch columns, at these times, were in their ordinary relative positions; but, instead of pressing forward eagerly, and plundering right and left, they seemed to have been all smitten with a sudden fit of laziness. Some were walking slowly about, others were brushing their antennæ with their forefeet; but the drollest sight was their cleaning one another. Here and there an ant was seen stretching forth first one leg and then another, to be brushed or washed by one or more of its comrades, who performed the task by passing the limb between the jaws and the tongue, and finishing by giving the antennæ a friendly wipe. It was a curious spectacle, and one well calculated to increase one’s amazement at the similarity between the instinctive actions of ants and the acts of rational beings, a similarity which must have been brought about by two different processes of development of the primary qualities of mind. The actions of these ants looked like simple indulgence in idle amusement. Have these little creatures, then, an excess of energy beyond what is required for labours absolutely necessary to the welfare of their species, and do they thus expend it in mere sportiveness, like young lambs or kittens, or in idle whims like rational beings? It is probable that these hours of relaxation and cleaning may be indispensable to the effective performance of their harder labours, but whilst looking at them, the conclusion that the ants were engaged merely in play was irresistible.

Eciton prædator.—This is a small dark-reddish species, very similar to the common red stinging-ant of England. It differs from all other Ecitons in its habit of hunting, not in columns, but in dense phalanxes consisting of myriads of individuals, and was first met with at Ega, where it is very common. Nothing in insect movements is more striking than the rapid march of these large and compact bodies. Wherever they pass all the rest of the animal world is thrown into a state of alarm. They stream along the ground and climb to the summits of all the lower trees, searching every leaf to its apex, and whenever they encounter a mass of decaying vegetable matter, where booty is plentiful, they concentrate, like other Ecitons, all their forces upon it, the dense phalanx of shining and quickly-moving bodies, as it spreads over the surface, looking like a flood of dark-red liquid. They soon penetrate every part of the confused heap, and then, gathering together again in marching order, onward they move. All soft-bodied and inactive insects fall an easy prey to them, and, like other Ecitons, they tear their victims in pieces for facility of carriage. A phalanx of this species, when passing over a tract of smooth ground, occupies a space of from four to six square yards; on examining the ants closely they are seen to move, not altogether in one straightforward direction, but in variously spreading contiguous columns, now separating a little from the general mass, now re-uniting with it. The margins of the phalanx spread out at times like a cloud of skirmishers from the flanks of an army. I was never able to find the hive of this species.

Blind Ecitons.—I will now give a short account of the blind species of Eciton. None of the foregoing kinds have eyes of the facetted or compound structure such as are usual in insects, and which ordinary ants (Formica) are furnished with, but all are provided with organs of vision composed each of a single lens. Connecting them with the utterly blind species of the genus, is a very stout-limbed Eciton, the E. crassicornis, whose eyes are sunk in rather deep sockets. This ant goes on foraging expeditions like the rest of its tribe, and attacks even the nests of other stinging species (Myrmica), but it avoids the light, moving always in concealment under leaves and fallen branches. When its columns have to cross a cleared space, the ants construct a temporary covered way with granules of earth, arched over, and holding together mechanically; under this, the procession passes in secret, the indefatigable creatures repairing their arcade as fast as breaches are made in it.

Next in order comes the Eciton vastator, which has no eyes, although the collapsed sockets are plainly visible; and, lastly, the Eciton erratica, in which both sockets and eyes have disappeared, leaving only a faint ring to mark the place where they are usually situated. The armies of E. vastator and E. erratica move, as far as I could learn, wholly under covered roads, the ants constructing them gradually but rapidly as they advance. The column of foragers pushes forward step by step under the protection of these covered passages, through the thickets, and upon reaching a rotting log, or other promising hunting-ground, pour into the crevices in search of booty. I have traced their arcades, occasionally, for a distance of one or two hundred yards; the grains of earth are taken from the soil over which the column is passing, and are fitted together without cement. It is this last-mentioned feature that distinguishes them from the similar covered roads made by Termites, who use their glutinous saliva to cement the grains together. The blind Ecitons, working in numbers, build up simultaneously the sides of their convex arcades, and contrive, in a surprising manner, to approximate them and fit in the key-stones without letting the loose uncemented structure fall to pieces. There was a very clear division of labour between the two classes of neuters in these blind species. The large-headed class, although not possessing monstrously-lengthened jaws like the worker-majors in E. hamata and E. drepanophora, are rigidly defined in structure from the small-headed class, and act as soldiers, defending the working community (like soldier Termites) against all comers. Whenever I made a breach in one of their covered ways, all the ants underneath were set in commotion, but the worker-minors remained behind to repair the damage, whilst the large-heads issued forth in a most menacing manner, rearing their heads and snapping their jaws with an expression of the fiercest rage and defiance.