The structure of this reptile, insofar as it could be realized from fragmentary fossil bones, was studied carefully by Dr. Samuel P. Langley while he was at work on early models of his airplane. Did the pterodactyl, Dr. Langley asked in a somewhat pessimistic progress report, represent the best Nature could do in the way of flight? Could man hope to do better than Nature?
Vicious Fire Ants
One of the most vicious of insects is the fire ant of South America—a small red ant whose sting burns like the point of a red hot pin pushed into the skin. Hordes of these creatures have forced the populace to abandon Brazilian towns. The soil of a village can be completely undermined by the ants. The ground is thoroughly perforated by the entrances to their subterranean galleries.
“The houses are overrun by them,” says Edward Bates in A Naturalist on the Amazon. “They dispute every fragment of food with the inhabitants and destroy clothing for the sake of the starch. All eatables must be suspended from rafters in baskets, with the cords well soaked in balsam, the only known means of preventing the ants from climbing. They seem to attack persons out of sheer malice. If we stood for a few hours in the street, even at a distance from their nests, we were sure to be overrun and severely punished. The moment an ant touched the flesh he secured himself with his jaws, doubled his tail, and stung with all his might.”
The Architectural Genius of Birds
Birds rival ants and termites as architects. One species builds nests as big as small human dwellings—as much as 25 feet long, 15 feet wide and ten feet high. This is the sociable weaver bird of the desert western areas of South Africa. Such an apartment house, woven out of sticks and straw, may contain as many as 95 individual nests. It is the community product of a flock of from 75 to 100 pairs. The sheer bulk of the nesting material gathered is striking evidence of the impelling year-round urge of the building instinct.
This bird, says Dr. Herbert Friedmann, Curator of Birds at the Smithsonian Institution, “is about as sociable as any bird could possibly be. It is always found in flocks, feeds in flocks, and breeds in the large, many-apartmented compound nests. With this extreme socialibility and sedentary habit of life the territorial relations of the species have been modified in a way that is quite remarkable, perhaps unique, among birds. Instead of each pair having its own breeding territory, each flock seems to have a definite territory whose boundaries are seldom crossed by individuals of other flocks.
“In an area of approximately 1,000 square miles I found only 26 nests. The flocks ordinarily do not live in very close juxtaposition to each other. The nests are so large, so conspicuous at great distances, and the trees so relatively few in number that I am quite certain I found practically every nest in the area.”
In spite of the highly developed communal life, Dr. Friedmann notes, there appears to have been no break-down of the family. Whether each male has one or several mates, however, is unknown. In the construction of the apartments there is some evidence that each family builds its own individual nest, while the whole flock cooperates in constructing a roof over the whole. The structures often become so heavy eventually that they crash to the ground and all the work must be done over.
Woodpeckers that carve “apartment houses” out of hardwood tree trunks have been observed by Dr. Alexander Wetmore in the dark, rain-drenched forests of the La Hotte mountains in Haiti. On one occasion he was astonished to find a dozen pairs going in and out of nests in a single dead tree trunk standing in an open space, the holes being from three to ten meters from the ground and in some cases less than a meter apart. There was no question that the woodpeckers were colonizing, as the trunk was a veritable apartment house with the birds climbing actively over its surface and flying back and forth to the nearby woodland.