In social insects, the typical mode of colony foundation occurs when a single queen is inseminated by a male and establishes a new colony, although we can find interspecific and intraspecific variations in queen number and queen-mating frequencies in a single colony. This study aimed to verify the queen number in Pachycondyla striata (Smith) colonies and to evaluate the level of aggressiveness ...

Most cases of anaphylaxis caused by ants are attributed to ants from the Solenopsis genus [1] but there are many ant species of different genera and their distribution around the world varies. In Brazil, where there are over 2000 catalogued species of ants, all the cases of ant-induced anaphylaxis reported to date have been attributed to Solenopsis species [2,3]. We describe the fi rst case of ...

Recent molecular phylogenetic studies of ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) have revolutionized our understanding of how these ecologically dominant organisms diversified, but detailed phylogenies are lacking for most major ant subfamilies. I report the results of the first detailed phylogenetic study of the ant subfamily Ponerinae, a diverse cosmopolitan lineage whose properties make it an attract...

Continuing surveys on the pselaphine fauna in China have revealed four undescribed species of the genus Batrisodes: Batrisodes angustelytratus sp. n. (with Pachycondyla ant) and B. longwangshanus sp. n. from Zhejiang, B. bamian sp. n. (with Pseudolasius ant) from Hunan, and B. songxiaobini sp. n. (with Formica ant) from Yunnan. The genus Batrisodellus is placed as a junior synonym of Batrisodes...

This paper presents a work inspired by the Pachycondyla apicalis ants behavior for the clustering problem. These ants have a simple but efficient prey search strategy: when they capture their prey, they return straight to their nest, drop off the prey and systematically return back to their original position. This behavior has already been applied to optimization, as the API meta-heuristic. API...

Myrmecophilous arthropods and their manifold relations to host ants are interesting from an evolutionary perspective. Rickia wasmannii is an ectoparasitic fungus belonging to the Laboulbeniales order. Here, we show that inquiline mites can become infected by R. wasmannii, which was thought to be restricted to the genus Myrmica (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). This is the first report of R. wasmannii ...