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White Ants

(Order Isoptera.)

Although from their peculiarities of structure the insects of this group form a distinct order, there are not many genera or species, and there is in fact but a single family, namely, the Termitidae (unless the curious family Embiidae be included here, which would not seem to be justified). All isopterous insects are known popularly as white ants. As the late Dr. George Marx once remarked jocularly to the writer, "they are called white ants because they are not ants and because they are not white."

At this late date it is almost hopeless to attempt to change a popular term so thoroughly grafted upon the literature and upon the popular mind, but if people would only call them termites, a short and easy word to pronounce, instead of keeping up the bald misnomer--white ants--the cause of accuracy and truth would gain. Perhaps there is a slight superficial resemblance between these insects and ants, but they are structurally radically different. They belong at the opposite end of the insect series and are more closely allied to the stone-flies, the May-flies and even the dragon-flies, than they are to ants. Perhaps, after all, it is not so much the resemblance of the individual termite to an ant which gave it this name as it was the fact that all termites live together in communities containing different castes and that thus their social economy is in a way ant-like.

The Isoptera undergo practically no transformation, that is to say, they have very incomplete metamorphoses. The young termite, when it hatches from the egg is an active, crawling, sixlegged creature. It much resembles the adult, except in size, whereas with the ants, it will be remembered, the larva is a footless grub which looks no more like an adult than a garter snake resembles a chipmunk. All species, as just stated, are social and the communities consist of both wingless and winged individuals.

The four wings are very long and when in repose are laid flat along the back, extending far beyond the tip of the abdomen. They are membranous and most of the veins are longitudinal. The hind wings are of almost precisely the same shape and size as the front wings, and across near the base of each wing is a line of weakness along which the wing breaks off after the so-called nuptial flight. The wingless individuals in each colony are, with most species, excessively numerous and as a rule they are divided into two castes, namely, the ordinary workers and the soldiers. The so-called soldiers also exist with the true ants but they have not in these creatures become such a structurally well differentiated caste as with the termites. In the latter the jaws have become enormously developed and in some cases the soldier is five times the size of a worker. Then, in some species a certain portion of the workers have become changed in form particularly by the elongation of the head into a long, nose-like process at the tip of which is a hole through which is exuded a fluid which is used in making or mending the walls of the habitation. This caste is known as the nasuti, or nosed ones, a term which must at once remind the admirers of Sienkiewicz of the Polish warrior, Kharlamp.

The order Isoptera reaches its highest development in tropical regions, and the reading world has been familiar with the main details of the economy of the extraordinary species which build the great ant-mounds in Africa since the days when Smeathman the English traveler, described them in print more than a hundred years ago. The females, or queens, of some of these African species grow to be of enormous size. The abdomen, swollen with eggs, sometimes becomes as big as a potato, or 20,000 or 30,000 times the bulk of a worker. The rate at which the eggs are laid is extraordinary and it is stated at sixty a minute, or 80,000 and upwards in a day. Listening to an account of this extraordinary egg-laying, which was given before the Biological Society of Washington by Mr. O. F. Cook, a friend remarked to the writer in a whisper, "What a fortune that would mean with eggs at twenty-five cents a dozen!"