Pheidole

A pheidologist and his exploration of a hyperdiverse myrmicine clade

  • Pheidole megacephala: An Opportunity to Observe Territorial Behavior

    Over the past 2 weeks or so, I have been delineating the borders of a small Pheidole megacephala cluster at a fine level of detail. The overall area covered by the species is around 1.1 ha, and I had been paying particular attention to the periphery of their control, where the density of P. megacephala…

  • Remnants of Predation or Scavenging Loot?

    A colony of the tiny ant Cardiocondyla minutior showed up near a colony of Pheidole that I had been photographing. Over the course of days and weeks, the Pheidole colony, which had been fairly constant when it came to showing up at baits, started to disappear. The few foragers still around discovered the baits, but…

  • Pheidole dentata: Coping with Fire Ants

    Thanks to Doug Booher for help in identification. I had been trudging along a white sand scrub trail here in Central Florida, and noticed a small mound close to the shade of two trees. Thinking that it was a possible nest for another Pheidole colony (I had been seeing quite a few Pheidole adrianoi during…

  • Mapping Pheidole megacephala cluster boundaries

    I discovered a Pheidole megacephala cluster in a gated community here in Central Florida. It’s centered around the community’s town center, and I have been busy the last few days figuring out the boundaries of the colony. The species is unicolonial, and unlike most other ant species, it can therefore persist in a single location…

  • Pheidole adrianoi: Cute and Tiny Two-toned ants

    Most newcomers who like ants tend to gravitate towards those species that are flashy and larger in size. My own experience also involved ants that I could readily see, whether Oecophylla smaragdina, or Solenopsis geminata, or the solitary Odontomachus spp that I sometimes saw wandering around our porch (I once called them “Black Wanderers” when…

  • The Road to Pheidole

    I’ve always been interested in polymorphic ants, whether it was the mass raiding Carebara diversa and its ilk in the Philippines, or the weird top heavy Acanthomyrmex species in the tropics. So an attraction to the mostly dimorphic Pheidole genus would have been natural. I remember when I was still a teen in the Philippines,…