1978] 
Haskins — Highly Primitive Ants 
411 
Table 1 ( continued ) 
Date of 
Time of 
Number of 
Colony no. 
Observation 
Observation 
Workers Involved 
4 
4/ 8/75 
7:45 a.m. 
3 
8:45 a.m. 
2 
8:55 a.m. 
3 
4/12/75 
7:25 a.m. 
3 
4/29/75 
7:05 a.m. 
1 
4/30/75 
7:05 a.m. 
3 
5/ 6/75 
7:10 a.m. 
4 
5/ 8/75 
6:35 a.m. 
2 
5/13/75 
7:40 a.m. 
2 
5/14/75 
5:50 a.m. 
1 
5/15/75 
6:40 a.m. 
5 
6/ 3/75 
6:45 a.m. 
3 
New Guinea, to neighboring regions of Melanesia, and to Timor, 
the Moluccas, the Solomon Islands, and the Philippines (Brown, 
1958; Wilson, 1958; 1959). The genus is a large one, and ranges from 
tropical rain-forest environments at one latitudinal extreme of its 
range to temperate and relatively wet habitats in southern Victoria 
and Tasmania and the extreme Australian southwest, while one 
group within the genus has invaded highly xerophytic environments 
i n the Australian inland. A large number of species are particularly 
interesting in that normal alate females are either absent or rare and 
apparently do not take a normal part in colony functions. Instead a 
proportion of workers, externally morphologically indistinguish- 
able from their fellows, possess functional spermathecae, are 
fertilized by the active, low-flying males, and serve as multiple 
worker-producing reproductives in the colony (Whelden, 1957; 
1960; Haskins and Whelden, 1965). 
Rhytidoponera is a fairly dominant genus where it occurs, and, as 
Brown (1958) has pointed out, its more abundant members appear 
to occupy in 'Australia the ecological niche of such relatively 
primitive general-feeding Myrmicines as the genus Myrmica in 
palearctic and nearctic environments. Indeed, it has been suggested 
that the primitive Ectatommines may be fairly close to the ancestral 
stirp of the Myrmicinae. 
The commonest and best-known member of the genus Rhytido- 
ponera is R. metallica, the Australian “greenhead” ant. It is fairly 
