Fig. 80—Body of male of Dorylus sp. Delagoa Bay. a, pronotum; b, c, divisions of mesonotum; d, metanotum; e, propodeum; f, first abdominal segment; g, h, points of insertion of anterior and posterior wings.
The females of the Dorylides are amongst the rarest of Insects, and are also amongst the greatest of natural curiosities. Although worker ants and female ants are merely forms of one sex—the female—yet in this sub-family of ants they have become so totally different from one another in size, form, structure, and habits that it is difficult to persuade oneself they can possibly issue from similar eggs. In the Insect world there are but few cases in which males differ from females so greatly as the workers of Dorylides do from the females, the phenomena finding their only parallel in the soldiers and females of Termites; the mode in which this difference is introduced into the life of the individuals of one sex is unknown. The largest of all the Dorylides are the African Insects of the genus Rhogmus. Only the male is known.
The specimens of female Dorylides that have been detected may, after fifty or sixty years of research, be still counted on the fingers. As the greatest confusion exists in entomological literature owing to the forms of a single species having been described as two or three genera, the following summary of the principal names of genera of Dorylides may be useful:—
Eciton = the workers, Labidus = male: ♀ unknown.
Pseudodicthadia: female only known, possibly that of Eciton.
Cheliomyrmex: workers and soldiers only known.
Aenictus = the male, Typhlatta = worker: ♀ unknown.
Rhogmus: male; female unknown. (According to Emery the worker is very small and like Alaopone.)
Anomma: only worker known; male probably a Dorylus.