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Velvet ants (Mutillidae) are a family of more than 7,000 species of wasps whose wingless females resemble large, hairy ants. Their common name velvet ant refers to their resemblance to an ant , and their dense pile of hair, which most often is bright scarlet or orange, but may also be black, white, silver, or gold.
Some female bands share the same summer range, and bachelor male bands form between spring and fall. Females form dominance hierarchies with few circular relationships. [45] Dominant females aggressively displace other females from feeding sites. Adult males either defend a fixed territory that females may enter, or defend a harem of females.
Ants vary in colour; most ants are yellow to red or brown to black, but a few species are green and some tropical species have a metallic lustre. More than 13,800 species are currently known [ 37 ] (with upper estimates of the potential existence of about 22,000; see the article List of ant genera ), with the greatest diversity in the tropics.
Like most wasp species, velvet ants live solitary lives. Males take to the air to detect pheromones released by females. Males will fly towards female stridulation sounds as well. [12] Once a receptive female is located, the male will carry the female in his mandibles and move her to a place he deems "safe" to mate.
The mating flights occur simultaneously in all ant nests of the particular species. The female "queen" ants will fly a long distance, during which they will mate with at least one winged male from another nest. He transfers sperm to the seminal receptacle of the queen and then dies. Once mated, the "queen" will attempt to find a suitable area ...
Ergatandromorph (an ant that exhibits both male and worker characteristics) males are known; in 1985, a male M. gulosa was collected before it hatched from its cocoon, and it had a long but excessively curved left mandible while the other mandible was small. On the right side of its body, it was structurally male, but the left side appeared female.
Carpenter ants are generally large ants: workers are 4–7 mm long in small species and 7–13 mm in large species, queens are 9–20 mm long and males are 5–13 mm long. The bases of the antennae are separated from the clypeal border by a distance of at least the antennal scape's maximum diameter.
In these species, haploids are male and diploids heterozygous at the sex locus are female, but occasionally a diploid will be homozygous at the sex locus and develop as a male, instead. This is especially likely to occur in an individual whose parents were siblings or other close relatives. Diploid males are known to be produced by inbreeding ...