The rich food in the water forest makes the ants almost happy to eat. Although the food is completely different from what they ate on the south bank of the river in their homeland, the delicious insect meat and the sweet brown wax scale honeydew still make them suffer from the bumps. The ants temporarily forgot about their hard work and were able to enjoy their meal.
The inspection and overhaul of the Walnut ship also progressed smoothly. By the evening of that day, nearly half of the ship had been inspected, repaired, and cleaned.
The next day, May 25, the ants continued to forage and repair the ship. According to this progress, they will be able to set sail again tomorrow morning.
But the days in the cork pine forest were not completely peaceful. In the morning, when the protagonist, accompanied by the guard team, was sunbathing in the bark crevices of the cork pine tree, he received an alarm - a small unit that was out foraging for food was attacked. Attack by indigenous ants.
The protagonist immediately sent a messenger to call for the Spade Elephant. In such a hurry, there was no time to mobilize troops from various ships. The protagonist and the Spade Elephant hurriedly led the squad of guards and about a hundred other soldiers who came after hearing the news, and rushed to the location of the attack. go.
Following the guidance of the pheromones, the troops climbed up to the height of the cork pine, followed a branch extending eastward, climbed to the intersecting branches of an adjacent ash tree, passed another cork pine, and climbed After climbing down and circling around, we finally arrived at our target location - a metasequoia.
The attack occurred on one of the lower branches of the metasequoia tree.
By the time the protagonist and the stag elephant arrived with reinforcements, the battle was over. A foraging force of eleven soldier ants and worker ants were waiting in place. There were still six corpses of attackers lying on the branches under their feet.
According to reports, there were eight indigenous ants that launched the attack. Two of the indigenous ants fell off branches and fell into the water during the fight. There was also a soldier ant in the foraging team that fell into the water with the enemy during the fight.
The protagonist looked down and found that the soldier ant that had fallen into the water was floating motionless on the water. It was probably drowned. Of the two native ants, I only saw the body of one, and I don't know whether the other was washed away or sank.
The protagonist then looked at the body of the indigenous ant on the tree. It was a brown-red ant. If you didn't look closely, you would think it looked a bit like a big-headed ant. However, the first section of its abdomen was very wide and its surface was smooth and wrinkle-free.
What’s strange is that unlike Big-headed ants, which only have two types of worker ants: smaller worker ants and larger soldier ants, the corpses of these six indigenous ants can be divided into three types according to their body size. Let’s call them large ants, Medium ants and small ants.
The large ants are 1.5cm long, their heads are as huge as the big-headed soldier ants, and their large jaws are well developed. They look like they are good fighters at first glance.
Medium-sized ants are only about 7mm long, and their head ratio is much smaller than that of large-headed ants, which is close to the proportion of worker ants of big-headed ants.
Small ants are only about 5mm in size, and their body proportions are similar to the worker ants of big-headed ants.
According to the report of the big-headed ant that was attacked, among the three types of ants, the small ants are the most ferocious and fearless of death. It is true that ants have no appearance.
The protagonist didn't recognize what kind of ant it was. After all, there are too many types of ants, and many of them look similar. If a professional entomologist sees this kind of ant, he will definitely recognize it, and even the protagonist will know it by its name.
This is a type of leaf-cutter ant, to be precise, the giant-headed leaf-cutter ant in the genus Bacchia.
Leafcutter ants are known for collecting leaves and growing fungi for food, but in fact most species in the leafcutter ant subfamily do not grow fungi. For example, the big-headed ants to which the protagonist belongs and the pavement ants also belong to the leafcutter ant subfamily.
Only some leafcutter ants cultivate fungi, and the patterns vary widely. These leaf-cutting ant races have a total of 5 "agricultural modes":
The first type is "low-level agriculture". A total of 76 species of leaf-cutting ants have this pattern. Their "agricultural activities" have many primitive characteristics. They cultivate many agaric mushrooms (that is, fungi with caps, and mushrooms are also classified as toadstools). ). Their cultivation method is relatively old, and there is no exclusive strain. The strains are all derived from fungi that can grow independently in the environment. Moreover, ants can also be infected with mold during the process of cultivating mushrooms, but these ants do not seem to have any good health. Coping means.
The second type is "coral fungus agriculture". The so-called coral fungi are fungi that have no caps and look like corals. For example, Hericium erinaceus belongs to the coral fungi. The ants that do this farming are part of the genus Pterocarpus, which lacks the conspicuous spines of most fungitrophic ants. Interestingly, a total of 34 species of leafcutter ants feed on coral fungi, while the remaining members cultivate fungi similar to other fungitrophic ants. It seems that cultivating coral fungi is a newly evolved behavior of this ant family.
The third type is "yeast agriculture", which is a special situation. What is cultivated is no longer large fungi, but single-cell "yeast". There are 18 species of ants engaged in this industry, and they are camel leaf-cutting ants. This "yeast" can restore the growth of hyphae on artificial culture media. It is very similar to the hyphae morphology of multicellular fungi. It is actually a variant of the traditional strain of leaf-cutter ants.
The above three types of "fungal agriculture" are sometimes collectively referred to as "low-level agriculture". What they use are not living plants, but fallen leaves, petals, etc., and they also use insect feces and corpses as culture media. Generally, the number of groups There are less than 100 of them, and their lives are relatively low-key and hidden, making them a relatively vulnerable group.
The fourth type is "near-advanced agriculture", which is a group very similar to the most advanced leaf-cutter ants. The difference is that they do not harvest the leaves of plants. They are mainly composed of wrinkled leaf-cutter ants, soft leaf-cutter ants, and leaf-cutting ants. Ants are composed of 3 types of ants.
The last model is "advanced agriculture", which is also the most advanced form of fungal culture. It not only has exclusive strains, but also harvests fresh leaves and flowers to cultivate fungi. These ants are Bach Leaf Cutter Ants and Top Leaf Cutter Ants. They can form huge colonies, numbering more than 10,000 individuals. They are very different from those "low-level farmers" who are doing miserable business.
The protagonist did not recognize this type of ant. If he had known about it, he might not be so calm. After all, the giant-headed Bachieye ants are not an indigenous tribe, but a large clan with a population of tens of thousands. They are not something that the God Envoy King's army with few soldiers and generals can easily provoke.
The protagonist understands the whole story of the attack. It turns out that both the warriors of the Angel King and the opponent discovered a large piece of honeydew from the brown-helmeted wax scale, and then were attacked by the other party. The warriors of the Angel King used their numerical and weapon advantages to annihilate the opponent. .
The protagonist asks the soldiers to throw all the corpses into the water and then return the same way, trying not to attract the revenge of the "indigenous tribe".
After all, they are just passers-by and will leave tomorrow, so they don’t want to cause any more trouble!
