@alexwild Hello, if I may ask: when you see an isolated winged ant and you don't know its species, is there a way to know, on the spot, if it's a queen or a male?

I do alright with the species I'm familiar with (I just observe them around, I'm not trained), but when I have nothing to compare them to, I can't be sure. Maybe there's an anatomical feature that could help? Anything that looks similar on males but not queens from a wide range of species?

And thanks for all your posts!

@futurebird @alexwild Curious, I usually get the feeling that an individual is a male or a queen but, after reading you, I realize that the features you mention are the exact ones I notice. I guess I developed an intuition over the years.
Still, this works as a good rule of thumb but it'd be nice to have a fool-proof way to be sure without having to become a Myrmecologist 😅

Thank you so much!

@enriquericos yeah, what @futurebird said.

Here’s a gallery of male ants:

https://www.alexanderwild.com/Ants/Natural-History/Male-Ants/

@alexwild @enriquericos This gallery always makes me feel bad for the queens imagine you only get to go on one date in your whole life and he shows up like this 🫤

(more seriously one other thing I notice with males are their bigger eyes— they are made for flying and looking)

@futurebird @alexwild @enriquericos

Male ants are weird, if anything for how unusual they are, relatively speaking. Took me some years to start recognizing them as such rather than taking them for some sort of solitary wasp.

Male ant, Stigmatomma sp., about 3 mm long standing on my fingertip http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/88809662

#iNaturalist #entomology #Hymenoptera #ants #Formicidae #insects