Remembering individual identities is part of our own everyday social life. Surprisingly, this ability has recently been shown in two social insects. While paper wasps recognize each other individually through their facial markings, the ant, Pachycondyla villosa, uses chemical cues. In both species, individual recognition is adaptive since it facilitates the maintenance of stable dominance hiera...

The tribal and generic classification of the diverse ant subfamily Ponerinae (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) is revised to reflect recent molecular phylogenetic information and a reappraisal of ponerine morphological diversity. The monogeneric tribe Thaumatomyrmecini (Thaumatomyrmex) is newly synonymized under Ponerini (syn. nov.), and the diverse genus Pachycondyla is fragmented into 19 genera, larg...

A new distinctive species of the rare Oriental goniacerine genus Awas Löbl, Awas gigas sp. n., is described and illustrated, based on three males and fourteen females taken at the Daoyao Shan Natural Reserve in the southern Chinese province of Guangxi. All specimens were collected from colonies of the ant genus Pachycondyla F. Smith nesting in decomposing woods.

Unsupervised classification is one of the tasks of data-mining. In this paper, a method named AntPart for the resolution of exclusive unsupervised classification is introduced. It is inspired by the behavior of a particular species of ants called Pachycondyla apicalis. The performances of this method are compared with those of three other ones, also inspired by the social behavior of ants: AntC...

We present in this paper a new model of artiicial ants foraging behavior based on a population of primitive ants (Pachycondyla apicalis) and its application to the general problem of optimization. These ants are characterized by a relatively simple but eecient strategy of prey search where individuals hunt alone and try to cover uniformly a given area around their nest. This is performed by par...

We revise the genus Mecistostethus Marseul, sinking the monotypic genus Tarsilister Bruch as a junior synonym. Mecistostethus contains six valid species: Mecistostethus pilifer Marseul, Mecistostethus loretoensis (Bruch), comb. n., Mecistostethus seagorumsp. n., Mecistostethus carltonisp. n., Mecistostethus marseulisp. n., and Mecistostethus flechtmannisp. n. The few existing records show the g...