Unknown Ant from Egypt

bugman

August 21st, 2010 at 10:35 am

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Ant in Luxor Egypt
Location: Luxor Egypt
August 19, 2010 6:24 pm
My wife and I were walking around the Karnak temple in Luxor Egypt and kept running into these vicious looking ants. They seemed to have rather long legs and liked to keep their abdomen up in the air, looking more like a little scorpion than an ant at first sight. Couldn’t get a really good look at what it was trying to pull up from the ground there, but it was engaged in a mighty struggle to wrestle it from the ground. Please let us know what species of ant this might. Many thanks!
p.s. we saw the same ant near the pyramids in Giza as well.
horizon hunters

Unknown Ant

Dear horizon hunters,
We are posting your image prior to securing an identification and we are hoping our readership may be able to assist. Though we are running late and cannot browse at the moment, we suspect the Ants of Egypt website may contain the answer.

Comments 4

lttlechkn wrote:
Possibly Crematogaster scutellaris… The head in the photo looks vaguely red though I could be mistaken. http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~plzfg/ants/ants_of_egypt_2007/crematogaster_scutellaris/crematogaster_scutellaris.htm The link shows depictions of the posture that is shown in the picture here.
Posted 21 Aug 2010 at 3:59 pm ¶
bugman wrote:
The head in the photo we posted does look vaguely reddish. Perhaps it is the camera exposure and lighting that makes it look different.
Posted 22 Aug 2010 at 5:44 pm ¶
sbewick wrote:
I don’t think that it’s a Crematogaster… if I had to guess I would say it was a Cataglyphis species. Cataglyphis are heat tolerant ants that have exceptionally long legs and tend to hold their abdomens in the air in order to deal with hot ground temperatures.
Posted 03 Apr 2011 at 10:33 pm ¶
bugman wrote:
Thanks for the comment. We have located several images online that picture Cataglyphis Ants in a similar posture including Professor Ken Chang’s Ant Research webpage.
Posted 04 Apr 2011 at 8:06 am ¶