Daniel Kronauer

The workers of the giant forest ant (Dinomyrmex gigas) are polymorphic, i.e., they come in two sizes and shapes: The minors (first two pictures) and the majors (last two pictures). Both are huge though - minors just over two centimeters and majors up to three centimeters in body length.

Portrait of a giant forest ant (Dinomyrmex gigas). What an absolute puppy! 🐜 🐶 🐜 Danum Valley, Sabah.

Stictoponera menadensis are not particularly small ants. However, they are completely dwarfed by their neighbors, the giant forest ants (Dinomyrmex gigas), whose large workers measure almost 3 cm in body size. Here, the two are foraging next to each other on a buttress root in Danum Valley, Sabah.

A Stictoponera menadensis (subfamily Ectatomminae) worker foraging in the leaf litter at Danum Valley, Sabah, plus another specimen on white background.

Colonies of this species often lack queens. Instead, unlike in most ants, workers can mate and take over egg laying as so-called “gamergates”.

Great to know that someone is bringing some order to this! 🙏👍 🐜

There’s pre and post molecular phylogenetics. DNA sequence data completely changed how we think about ant evolutionary relationships over the past 23 years or so.

Feel free to shoot me an email.

Nice, thanks @formicula.bsky.social! I found the situation w D. thoracicus confusing and wasn’t sure what’s what. Are you working on the group?

New York City snow day weather update @rockefeller.edu. It’s purty! ❄️ ⛄️

Portraits of the Dolichoderus colony members inhabiting the epiphytic myrmecophyte (ant plant) in Danum Valley, Borneo:
A queen, a worker, and a male.

In middle of a graceful, fibonacci-curved spring tomato leaf sits a large green caterpillar in side view, its front curled as if in prayer, in an ethereal soft light, slightly backlit.

My best photographs of 2025, a short thread.

A tobacco hornworm on one of its favorite foods, a garden tomato plant (Texas, May 2025). This one makes the cut because it is more aesthetically pleasing than I was aiming for, somehow.

Beautiful!🤩

A section through the tuber reveals the galleries inhabited by the ants. This is where they keep their brood, along with several winged males. In one of the chambers, I also found two dealate, mature queens (I’ll post portraits of the individual colony members separately).

The species kinda keys out to Dolichoderus thoracicus, the cocoa black ant. However, that species seems to be a “bucket taxon” containing several distinct species. Your normal D. thoracicus are black and nest in the soil. Clearly, this is something different.

This miniature world, a part of an epiphytic plant, was inhabited by a species of aggressive Dolichoderus ant. The ants were guarding and entering/exiting various entrances into the inside of the tuber.

After a night of heavy rains at Danum Valley, I found this alien meteorite that had fallen onto a trail.

One notable thing about Borneo is that there are sooo many leeches. They wait around on leaves and, when the unsuspecting myrmecologist lies down on the floor to watch ants, they jump off and crawl towards him. By the dozens. Ant hunting in Borneo is a bloody business. The leeches are pretty though.

Here’s something else for a change: a baby snail exploring a fairy fungus forest. Danum Valley, Sabah.

This is…not an ant. It’s the ant-mimicking nymph of a true bug (Heteroptera). Check out the long proboscis, which the bug has inserted into a leaf to suck phloem sap. Proof once again that everything wants to be an ant. Sabah, Borneo.

These spiders hold the first pair of legs up and forward, creating the impression of a six-legged insect with elbowed ant antennae. Remarkably, the coxa of the front leg in this specimen is white, while the rest of the leg is black. This enhances the appearance of an antenna attached to the head.

Here is another ant-mimicking spider from Sabah, this time from Danum Valley. This is a jumping spider in the subtribe Myrmarachnina, literally meaning “ant spiders”. Constrictions of the cephalothorax and opisthosoma give it the appearance of an ant with a separate head and “wasp waist”.

In the Myrmicaria ant garden, I made a serendipitous discovery: an ant-mimicking spider in the genus Serendib (possibly S. volans?), which I hadn’t seen before. The first image shows a Myrmicaria worker on the carton nest for comparison. The second image shows the spider. Tambunan, Sabah.

However, I was surprised that, upon closer inspection, the garden seemed to be inhabited and maintained by this species in the genus Myrmicaria. I didn’t know that these ants build ant gardens - most species seem to nest in the soil, and some build small carton nests on the underside of leaves.

In Asian rainforests, several ant species in the genera Camponotus, Crematogaster, Diacamma, Pheidole and Philidris construct ant gardens by cultivating epiphytic plants in arboreal carton nests. This image shows such an ant garden in Tambunan, Sabah.

I didn’t say that. I might have gotten stung a few times…🤓

OK, one more Leptogenys from Danum Valley before we move on to other ants, just to show off the diversity of this genus. These ants are from a large (many hundred if not thousands of workers) colony I found in and under a rotting log. I don’t know which species this is - suggestions are welcome.

Leptogenys diminuta is another species with army ant-like behavior. Colonies are smaller though, measuring only a few hundred workers. The ants are nomadic and hunt in columns. Sabah, Borneo.

Like their doryline counterparts, Leptogenys army ants host diverse communities of guest insects. Here are two of these myrmecophiles, a silverfish (possibly Malayatelura ponerophila) and a featherwing beetle (ptiliidae), both hitching a ride on pupae that the ants carry. Danum Valley, Sabah.

Another swarm-raiding Leptogenys from Danum Valley. Like any proper army ant, these guys are nomadic, and here they are during a colony relocation. Unlike in phasic army ants, the colony contains offspring at widely different developmental stages, from larvae and pupae to young adults.

A razorjaw ant (genus Leptogenys) from Danum Valley, Sabah. Same species I posted yesterday. Leptogenys is the most species-rich ponerine genus. Most species have small colonies and are specialist predators, but some, like this one, have evolved massive colonies and a generalist diet.