Mystery Ants

What are the top ten mystery ants that myrecologists would like to find and know more about? This page is a place to list those enigmatic species that we only have some tantalizing clue or clues about and need to know more.

This is just getting started so there are not ten on this list just yet. A real ordering awaits more entries and someone deciding they want to sort this out. Perhaps ordering such a list is just an invitation to start a wiki war.....


 * Aenictogiton - Only known from males, this African genus is surely a top mystery. Garcia, Wiesel and Fischer (2013) provide a good synopsis of the problem. "The biology of this enigmatic genus remains an almost complete mystery. Brown (1975) mentioned the possibility that these ants are subterranean or otherwise strongly cryptobiotic; we fully agree since no foraging worker nor any trace of a colony could ever be found. Phylogenetic and morphological affinities to the army ant genus Dorylus suggest an army-ant-like lifestyle, although there is no current evidence for this. However, most males were collected from light traps close to forest localities, indicating that Aenictogiton might prefer forested habitats."


 * Asphinctopone - This genus, with three described species, is one of the most rarely collected and least known small ponerine genera of the Afrotropical region. Specimens are seldom found and most samples recovered consist of only one or two workers.


 * Aulacopone relicta - Collected from forested areas of Azerbijan more than 80 years ago, this rare ant remains a phylogenetic and behavioral mystery.


 * Martialis heureka - Christian Rabeling, following up on Manfred Verhaagh's earlier discovery of a specimen that was lost after being collected but before it could be described, struck myrmecological gold when he was able to find an individual of what became the monotypic species of a new genus and subfamily. Finding a colony of this ant, and gaining some insight into its biology, would prove quite interesting.