NOTES ON NECROPHORIC BEHAVIOR IN THE 
ARCHAIC ANT MYRMECIA VINDEX 
(FORMICIDAE: MYRMECIINAE)* 
By Caryl P. Haskins and Edna F. Haskins 
2100 M Street, N.W. 
Washington, D.C. 
Introduction 
Ants of the Australian and New Caledonian genus Myrmecia 
apparently include the most archaic living Formicidae. Brown 
(1954) suggested that the genus may represent a relatively late 
evolutionary offshoot, specialized but fundamentally conservative, 
from a line of extremely generalized archaic forms represented as 
fossils by the genus Prionomyrmex of the Baltic amber and by the 
living Australian Nothomyr/necia macrops , of which only two workers 
have ever been found. Species of Myrmecia , therefore, may well 
illustrate the earliest patterns of Formicid social organization, and 
embody the most archaic patterns of Formicid social behavior, that 
we are likely to be able to study in detail in the laboratory or the 
field. 
The bodily habitus of Prionomyrmex and Nothomyrmecia — not 
to mention of the far more archaic Mesozoic fossil genus Spheco- 
myrma first described by Wilson, Carpenter, and Brown (1967) 
which may well represent, as Wilson (1971) suggests, an antecedent 
of the Myrmecioid complex of ants — all suggest active, epigeicallv 
foraging insects: a characteristic virtually universal in contemporary 
species of Myrmecia. This, combined with the fairly large size of 
the communities of many species of Myrmecia — specific counts of 
1586 workers and over 2000 in total colony personnel have been 
made from larger colonies of M. gulosa (Haskins and Haskins, 
1950) — raise the interesting question of how far these archaic forms 
may have evolved any pheromone-mediated patterns of community- 
integrating behavior so conspicuous in many higher ants. This is an 
interesting and complex area of inquiry, the answers to which are 
far from obvious, as the recent investigations of Robertson suggest. 
A prior question may be significant in this context. Do ants of 
the genus Myrmecia exhibit characteristic behavioral responses to 
particular chemical substances normally encountered in the external 
* Manuscript received by the editor March 28, 1974. 
258 
