. Collected papers on ants. Ants. 1906.] Wheeler, Relations of Ants to Plants. 417 bility because Vosseler ^ has recently seen some African ants which actually accomplish a similar feat. These insects were very fond of entering the immature flowers of Cohcea scandens and cutting away the woolly accumulation of hairs at the base of the bell-shaped corolla in order to reach the nectaries. When Vosseler plugged the opening of the corolla with cotton, the ants gnawed holes in the base of the flower and thus attained their end in the directest manner possible. 3. MYRMICA AND THE SUN-FLOWER. Profess
. Collected papers on ants. Ants. 1906.] Wheeler, Relations of Ants to Plants. 417 bility because Vosseler ^ has recently seen some African ants which actually accomplish a similar feat. These insects were very fond of entering the immature flowers of Cohcea scandens and cutting away the woolly accumulation of hairs at the base of the bell-shaped corolla in order to reach the nectaries. When Vosseler plugged the opening of the corolla with cotton, the ants gnawed holes in the base of the flower and thus attained their end in the directest manner possible. 3. MYRMICA AND THE SUN-FLOWER. Professor T. D. A. Cockerell has recently called my attention to a third case of maladjustment in the relations of ants to plants. In the neighborhood of Boulder, Colorado, he has repeatedly seen masses of ants {Myrmica rubra hrevinodis var.) attracted and killed by the sap that exudes from broken stems and petioles of the sun-flower (Helianthus annuus). This plant is very abundant in the lower ground about Boulder, and its sap, as I can testify from personal observation, becomes excessively sticky on exposure to the air, so that an ant that has once touched it with its legs or antennge is held fast until it perishes. In this case it is difficult to see how the plant can profit by destroying the insects, for the catastrophe is purely accidental, depending on an occasional injury to the plant. A typical specimen showing a number of dead ants partially embedded in the inspissated sap, was kindly forwarded to me by Professor Cockerell and is represented in the accompanying figure. It is interesting as showing on a small scale the way in which ants and other insects became embedded in such substances as amber and copal. Professor Cockerell surmises that this fatal condition, in which, as in the preceding instances, the ants succumb, may be due to the meeting of two organisms originally belonging to widely separated biogeographical environments; the Mynnica being essentially a northern or
Size: 1044px × 2393px
Photo credit: © The Book Worm / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bo, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, booksubjectants, bookyear1905
