Myrmecol. News 12: 51-65; printable
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.25849/myrmecol.news_012:051
- Open Access: CC BY 4.0
- Year: 2009
- Title: Recent advances in army ant biology (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)
- Journal: Myrmecological News
- Volume: 12
- Pages: 51-65
- Type of contribution: Review Article
- Supplementary material: No
- Abstract: Army ants are dominant social hunters of invertebrates and thereby play an integral role in tropical ecosystems. They are defined by a suite of evolutionarily interrelated physiological, behavioural and morphological traits, the army ant adaptive syndrome: they are obligate group predators, they frequently relocate their nests, and their permanently wingless queens found new colonies accompanied by workers. If this functional definition is applied rather than a taxonomic one, army ants have evolved repeatedly in distantly related groups of ants. In addition, army ants typically have extremely male-biased numerical sex-ratios, and the queens of the studied species are inseminated by many males. The aim of this review is to provide a synthesis of the most recent work on army ant biology, to outline an evolutionary scenario that connects the different aspects of army ant life-history, and to give some directions for future research.
- Key words: Aenictinae, colony fission, Dorylinae, dorylomorph section, Ecitoninae, group predation, nomadism, review.
- Publisher: The Austrian Society of Entomofaunistics
- ISSN: Print: 1994-4136 - Online: 1997-3500