Word: ants
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...Julio Dantas left Brazil. Although it was ostensibly a cultural mission, it had conferred with the Foreign Office, with the War Ministry and with President Vargas. Of more than cultural significance was a parting statement by Deputy João do Amaral, especially designated by Portugal's Dictator António de Oliveira Salazar to be a member of the mission. Said he, in effect...
...ant colonies draft their soldier armies and maintain balance in their incredible caste systems was cleared up last week by a Chicago zoologist. The secret: a "social hormone" exuded by some of the ants to inhibit the others...
...social insects,* ants are the most highly developed. As many as eleven castes stratify some ant species: even the simplest colonies contain queens, drones, workers, soldiers. The drone caste contains all the colony's few males, whose sole function is sexual. So is the queen's. But the workers and soldiers are all sterile...
...confirm the last theory Zoologist Robert E. Gregg of the University of Chicago made 33 experiments with 9,537 ants of the species Pheidole morrisi. He arranged for ant larvae to be reared to maturity under the care of soldiers only and of workers only, and found: "Where the soldier caste is present in large numbers, there is a decrease in the number of soldiers that are produced. Conversely, in pure colonies of workers an excess of soldiers tends to appear over the number which normally develop in a control colony...
...October 1920 the Rev. J. A. L. Singh, an Anglican missionary, was hunting among the pagan jungle tribes of northwest India. At a remote village he heard of a "man-ghost" who lived seven miles away under an old ant hill. Wary of tigers, Singh built a blind near the ant hill, settled down at dusk to watch...