One night in July of 2004, I was visiting my favorite colony of Odontomachus clarus, and I came across a single Odontomachus clarus standing still on a rock. As I looked more closely, I saw that this was actually a queen ant.
There were a couple of ways I could tell. For one thing, she had a cluster of three ocelli – simple eyes – in the center of her forehead. In Odontomachus, workers don’t have ocelli – only reproductives do.
From what I’ve read, ocelli are typically used in ants for navigation and for maintaining the correct flight attitude.
And speaking of flight, this ant also still had one of her wings. After mating, the queens land and break off their wings prior to beginning their life underground. This one had already broken off one wing.
Additionally, she was in an awkward pose in which she had her right front leg wrapped most of the way around her body. I’m not sure why she was tangled up like this. Was she using that front leg to remove her wing? It seems like a strange and ineffective way to do it…so maybe she had just gotten herself into an awkward pose somehow?
Her behavior was also strange. She was very passive, not attempting to run away, not struggling when I picked her up. I actually wondered if she was okay, if perhaps she had been injured? I was very concerned that the Odontomachus clarus workers living at this location might find and attack her.
I only lived a couple of hundred yards away from where I found her, so I put her in a vial and took her back to my house. When I got home, I released her into the rocks of our garden, near our back porch. She calmly walked into the rocks, and I didn’t see her again.
I’d wonder about her from time to time. Did she make it?
Then, a few months later, I noticed a handful of Odontomachus clarus workers walking around on our back porch. They were coming from underneath one of the rocks in the garden.
They were almost certainly the offspring from the queen! This was very cool. It was like a very fun form of gardening – plant a seed into the earth, then watch what grows from that patch of earth. In this case – it’s Trap-jawed Ants!
Looking back on the experience, I wonder if it was just sheer happenstance that I had found the queen near an existing Odontomachus clarus nest. According to AntWiki.org, Odontomachus clarus is at times polygynous – they can have more than one queen simultaneously. Sometimes there is a dominant queen, that supresses reproduction in the other queens. These other queens will sometimes act as regular workers.
Other times, there may be more than one reproductive in the nest at once.
So…what I wonder: Was it just chance that the queen I found was very close to an existing Odontomachus clarus nest? How likely is it that she was removing her wings preparatory to entering the existing nest, to see if the Odontomachus in the nest would accept her as an additional queen?
There are more things in heaven and earth…
Sources:
The AntWiki.org Odontomachus clarus page contains information on polygyny in Odontomachus clarus.
