One of Josh King’s lab ants at the University of Central Florida. The blunt head serves as a living door to this species’ twig nests.
photo details:
Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 7D
ISO 200 f/13 1/250 sec
diffuse twin flash
MYRMECOS
Little Things Matter
very cool! I recently came across what appeared to be this species but didn’t have a good guess until now.
I don’t see these often, but we have them around here. One warm June night, at the venue of last year’s BugShot, I got female alates of this and C. mississipiensis, arriving within a couple of minutes of each other at a black light.
These are the finest Crematogaster mimics I’ve ever seen! I wish more was known about ant mimicry when I see these in the field and lab.
How do we know it mimics Crematogaster?
Well, three things strongly suggest it…
First, if you ever see the workers in the field, their behavior and shape is a very close match for Crematogaster. Second, Crematogaster tend to have large colonies, aggressive recruitment, and effective venom chemistry. Third, both are arboreal. Colobopsis tend to have small colonies and be very timid. Who knows what the selection pressure is here (spiders? bugs? birds? all of the above and other things?).
Because I mentioned it during my visit to your lab, Josh, here’s the Cephalotes that mimics Crematogaster:
http://www.antweb.org/description.do?name=quadratus&genus=cephalotes&rank=species&project=paraguayants
Very cool, thanks!
Very very cool 🙂
In Europe we can find Camponotus truncatus (Spinola, 1808) which look very similar. I have taken a picture of this specie : http://www.flickr.com/photos/mr-dmx/6440702149/in/photostream
Symplesiomorphy or convergent evolution ?