Oddities

The latter few months of 2007 seemed bring encounters with an unusual number of freak ant specimens, unfortunately none of which were collected by me.

First, an ant with a third eye, a Myrmica as I recall, was brought to the BWARS workshops in September. At least, it appeared to be like a third eye. It was a black area that was partially buried in the cuticle of the head, but where it came to the surface it did have a bobbly appearance like that of a compound eye.

The ant presumably used the eye for seeing into the future.

Then before Christmas I looked properly at a specimen lent to me by Cedric Collingwood some months ago. He knew that I was working on the ants of The Gambia and had a few specimens in his collection. This specimen had been collected by Nicolas Blacker and identified by Cedric as Camponotus vividus, but it was unlike any of the specimens I had collected. I finally got around to identifying all the Camponotus I collected in the Gambia and discovered that I did have C. vividus, so needed to check why Cedric's were different. To my surprise I discovered that the specimen is actually a pseudogyne (between a queen and a worker). It is larger, paler and more matt, with a more developed mesosoma and one pair of barely developed tiny 'wings'. It may be the only pseudogyne of that species in any collection.

Finally, right at the end of 2007, C-G Magnusson posted some photos of an ant for ID to the BWARS discussion group. It was agreed that it looked most like a queen of a Camponotus... or a Lasius, but it had a very unusual shaped petiole, being so deeply emarginate that it had two erect blunt spines there instead.