Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/303

Rh Many ants manufactured a sort of dirty paper from which they built hanging nests in trees. Others excavated logs like termites. One of these Mr. Gaige, our ant man, called the “spread-eagle nipper.” This was a big black ant which opened its mandibles so wide that they stood out straight at the sides of the head, and then brought them together with a snap that could be distinctly heard at a distance of several feet. Woe to the unwary finger that was between those mandibles when they came together!

At Fundacion, a village in the forest beyond the banana country, we discovered two curious species of ants living in trees. One of these built little paper sheds over aphids which it put out to “graze” in the acacia trees. The aphids sucked the juice from the trees and gave out a sweet secretion which was taken from their bodies by the ants. The other species mentioned lived in little hollow thorns on the branches of an acacia. This tree was a true ant plant for it grew the hollow thorns in pairs with a little doorway leading into the cavity within them. The doorways were present in young thorns even before the ants had occupied them.

We can not pass the forest without mentioning the bromeliads. These plants are members of the pineapple family and are much like pineapple plant without the “apple” at the bottom. High up in the mountains they grow on the ground, but as the altitude grows less they begin to climb upward, and in the lowlands live as epiphytes in the trees. The bases of the leaves interlock in such a way that they make tight cups which act as reservoirs for the water that runs down from the tips of the leaves. The water contained in one of these plants frequently totals to two or three quarts, and the thirsty traveler is often glad to make use of it. Many small animals pass their lives in the shelter of bromeliads. We found tree frogs with their eggs, dragon fly larvae, rat-tail (fly) larvæ, beetles, cockroaches, spiders, salamanders, and many other small animals. We tore open logs for two weeks and found only two salamanders, but got twenty from the bromeliads in a single morning.

The strip of sandy country near the shore of the Caribbean Sea grows cactus and various xerophytic shrubs. Many of the cacti are thirty feet tall. Here the most characteristic animals are the ground lizards which swarm over the sand everywhere. Many of these are brightly colored with yellow or blue.

We were surprised to find land snails quite abundant in the desert. At the time of our visit they were activating in the crevices of curiously twisted trunks of the small acacia trees. Here also we occasionally found a land tortoise (Testudo labulata) wandering about among the cactus. Several streams ran through the desert. Near these the little