Karavaievia

This is currently a subgenus of Camponotus. Please see Camponotus for further information.

Dumpert et al. (2006) - Natural preformed nesting sites are rather limited in the canopy region of the tropical rainforest. By constructing free-hanging nests in this habitat, weaver ants get access to the leaf and crown region. In these ants silk of the larval labial glands is not only used by the mature larvae themselves for spinning their pupal cocoon but also for nest construction. Like weaver shuttles worker ants take large larvae with their mandibles and use the silk secreted by them to spin together leaves or to form flexible and firm carton nest walls out of particles with help of the fresh sticky silk.

Until recently four independent groups of weaver ants were known worldwide, all of them belonging to the subfamily Formicinae. Two are found in the Old World tropics (the famous genus Oecophylla Smith, 1860 and many species of the genus Polyrhachis Smith, 1857) and two in the New World tropics (species of the subgenera Dendromyrmex Emery, 1895 and Myrmobrachys Forel, 1912 of Camponotus Mayr, 1861) (Hölldobler & Wilson 1977, Schremmer 1979).

In 1984 we discovered in Peninsular Malaysia near the Ulu Gombak Field Studies Centre of the University of Malaya an Old World silk-weaving Camponotus species which produces silk carton nests mainly beneath leaves of trees containing brood as well as trophobiotic hemipteran symbionts. This hitherto unknown species turned out to belong to the subgenus Karavaievia.

Nomenclature

 *  KARAVAIEVIA [subgenus of Camponotus]
 * Karavaievia Emery, 1925b: 115 [as subgenus of Camponotus]. Type-species: Camponotus exsectus, by original designation.