ant's nest, without asking whether there are any checks to their increase, and if so, what these checks are. I know very little of what foreign enemies they may have, though I have occasionally seen them captured by lizards, Cicindela beetles, and spiders,[1] and it is well known that the females are eagerly sought for by birds at the season when they are above ground, and about to found new colonies; but I believe that ants are the ants' worst enemies, for fearful slaughter and mutilation often result from the encounter of armies of the same race, but belonging to different nests.
Harvesting ants have nothing to do, as far as I have been able to discover, with aphides, cocci, and the like, nor do they seek for any of those sweet secretions which are the staple food of the generality of ants; they live, however, on very friendly terms with certain yellowish-white and satiny-coated "silver-fish" (Lepisma), which are found in the passages and chambers of the nests; but what their relations are to these creatures and to certain beetles which have been found in the nests of Atta barbara in Spain and Syria is unknown. It is possible that by carefully watching captive ants in company with these creatures under very favourable conditions, something further might be learned on this head. My captive ants constructed all their
- ↑ I have seen the remains of ants at the bottom of the tube of trap-door spider nests, and watched a hunting spider, Lycosa, capture a large black ant (Formica pubescens), by entangling it in threads, which it deftly spun about its limbs, while running rapidly round the struggling victim in a circle, and dodging out of the way of the ant's mandibles. In England one may frequently see ants caught in the spiders' webs among the rose-*bushes, and Mr. Blackwall says, in his Spiders of Great Britain and Ireland, that Theridion riparium lives principally on ants.
