The Nature LibraryEN·ES
iNat·472214SpeciesInsecta225 field observations
  1. Animals
  2. ›Arthropods
  3. ›Hexapods
  4. ›Insects
  5. ›Winged and Once-winged Insects
  6. ›Ants, Bees, Wasps, and Sawflies
  7. ›Narrow-waisted Wasps, Ants, and Bees
  8. ›Ants, Bees, and Stinging Wasps
  9. ›Formicoidea
  10. ›Ants
  11. ›Formicine Ants
  12. ›Formicini
  13. ›Polyergus
  14. ›Polyergus rufescens
Western Amazon Ant
Plate 1 of 7. (c) Thomas Barbin, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC), uploaded by Thomas Barbin · via iNaturalist

Western Amazon Ant

Polyergus mexicanus

Polyergus mexicanus is a species of slave-making ant in the subfamily Formicinae. It is the most widely distributed species of Polyergus in North America. It is an obligatory social parasite, unable to feed itself or look after the colony and reliant on ants of another species, Formica, to undertake these tasks. The parasitic ants are known as "dulotics" (from the Greek "dulos" meaning a slave) and the ants they parasitise are the "hosts".

Continue reading on Wikipedia
§·

Listen

Looking for field recordings…

§·

Where it lives

Recorded sightings

—

geo-referenced records in GBIF, from museums, herbaria and field observers.

Drag the globe to turn it. Dots are where records exist, not a range map; darker means more records.

§·

In the stacks

Searching the stacks…

Every page naming Polyergus mexicanus in the Biodiversity Heritage Library →

This page is assembled live from iNaturalist, GBIF, Wikipedia, the Source Library and the Internet Archive. It is not yet part of the hand-edited codex. iNaturalist taxon 472214.