Subfamily Aenictinae Emery, 1901

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Introduction

The subfamily Aenictinae contains a single genus (Aenictus) with 140 described species and subspecies. They occur throughout Africa and east to China and Australia, with single species known from Greece and Armenia. The most notable aspect of the subfamily is that they are "army ants". That is, they conduct raids using large numbers of workers, primarily attacking other ants, social wasps and termites, but also other arthropods. These raids occur both day and night, usually across the ground surface but occasionally also arboreally. During raids, many workers attack a single nest or small area, with several workers coordinating their efforts to carry large food items back to the nest or bivouac. They also have a nomadic life style, alternating between a migratory phase in which nests are temporary bivouacs in sheltered places above the ground and the stationary phase when semi-permanent underground nests are formed. During the nomadic phase bivouacs move regularly and can move more than once a day when larvae require large amounts of food. Individual nests usually contain up to several thousand workers, although nest fragments containing only a few hundred workers are often encountered. Queens are highly specialised and look less like workers than in most ant species. They have greatly enlarged gasters and are termed dichthadiform. New colonies are formed by the division of existing nests rather than by individual queens as in most ant species. The relationship of Aenictus to other ants has been investigated by Bolton (1990) while the species-level taxonomy of the Australian fauna was examined by Shattuck (2008).

General References

Bolton, B. 1990. Army ants reassessed: the phylogeny and classification of the doryline section (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Journal of Natural History 24: 1339-1364

Shattuck, S.O. 2008. Review of the ant genus Aenictus (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) in Australia with notes on A. ceylonicus (Mayr). Zootaxa 1926: 1-19