DISPERSAL BY MALE DORYLINE ANTS IN 
WEST AFRICA* 
By Dennis Leston 
Agricultural Research and Education Center 
University of Florida 
Homestead, FL 33031 
Introduction 
Sausage-flies, the giant males of Old World doryline ants, are 
among the more conspicuous forms of tropical insect life, never 
failing to intrigue the observer by their numbers, size and bumbling 
flight. If we follow the conventional classification and include the 
New World Ecitonini within Dorylinae {cf Brown, 1973; Gotwald, 
1977) there is a large literature—on the group’s systematics, bioge¬ 
ography, and behaviour—but little of it quantitative. 
At Legon, Ghana, 5° 40' N, a 125 watt ultraviolet light-trap was 
run,- the aim primarily to extend an investigation of seasonality in 
insects commenced earlier at Tafo, a little to the north (Gibbs and 
Leston, 1970). However, the facts collected on doryline flights fill a 
gap in our knowledge and can be viewed in several ecological 
contexts. 
Legon was once forested and lies within the ’southern marginal’ 
forest category of the scheme of Hall and Swaine (1976). It is today 
an area of derived savanna interspersed with gardens and small 
plots of food crops but some secondary forest survives about six 
miles distant. Climatological data for Accra, taken for over 30 years 
three miles south of Legon, are given in the form of a Leston-Gibbs 
climograph (Fig. 1) (Leston and Gibbs, 1971). 
The original data and summary sheets are deposited, together 
with examples of the species collected, in the British Museum (Nat. 
Hist.), London. 
Sudden heavy rain led to the breakdown of the trap on a few 
occasions: the missing samples were corrected for by dividing the 
numbers trapped in each 20-day period by the actual total of sam¬ 
pling days and adding this mean (or a multiple of it) to the total. The 
*Florida Agricultural Experiment Stations Journal Series No. 1702 
Manuscript received by the editor May 15, 1979. 
63 
