1933 ] 
A Second Parasitic Crematog aster 
83 
A SECOND PARASITIC CREMATOGASTER 
By William Morton Wheeler 
Harvard University 
In 1930 I described in this journal a diminutive, presum- 
ably parasitic, female ant, Crematogaster ( Acrocodia ) 
kennedyi, taken by Professor C. H. Kennedy in Indiana 
from a colony of our common acrobat ant, C. lineolata Say. 
Now Dr. W. S. Creighton has sent me winged females of 
another closely related form which he collected recently at 
Roanoke, Virginia, in a colony of C. pilosa Pergande. Since 
the colony also contained many females of the host, the al- 
ternatives discussed in my previous paper, seem to be ap- 
plicable to this case. We may suppose that we are dealing 
either with a workerless parasite or with a remarkable 
dimorphism and dichromatism of the females of lineolata 
and pilosa. The latter supposition seems to be improbable 
because the occurrence of two forms of females cannot be a 
normal peculiarity of lineolata , since in hundreds of colon- 
ies of this ant examined by myself and others during the 
past 40 years only females of the large type have been en- 
countered. And though smaller females occasionally oc- 
cur in colonies of certain tropical species of Crematogaster, 
they are always few in number, wingless and ergatomor- 
phic, and therefore quite unlike the perfect, winged micro- 
gynes taken by Prof. Kennedy and Dr. Creighton. Never- 
theless, a rather serious objection to the interpretation of 
these insects is the presence of virgin females of the host 
species in the same nest. This has never been observed in 
any of the numerous recorded cases of ant parasitism. In 
the European Strong ylognathus testaceus, however, the 
mother queen of the host colony ( Tetramorium cxspitum) 
is not eliminated after the intrusion of the parasitic fe- 
male, and Wasmann described a flourishing mixed colony of 
these ants in which a few male pupae of the host species 
