Subfamily Dorylinae Leach, 1815

Museums

Regional Maps

• Dorylinae Leach, W.E. 1815. Entomology. pp. 57-172 in Brewster (ed.). The Edinburgh Encyclopedia. Edinburgh : William Blackburn Vol. 9(1) 764 pp. [reprint 1830].

  Type genus:

   Dorylus Fabricius, 1793.
• Cerapachynae Forel, 1893.
• Aenictinae Emery, 1901.

  Secondary source:

   Bolton, B. 1990. Army ants reassessed: the phylogeny and classification of the doryline section (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Journal of Natural History 24: 1339-1364.

Taxonomic Decision for Synonymy

• Borowiec, M.L. 2016. Generic revision of the ant subfamily Dorylinae (Hymenoptera, Formicidae). ZooKeys 608: 1–280

Introduction

Following the molecular phylogenetic analysis by Brady et al. and the revision by Borowiec (2016), the subfamily Dorylinae has been subject to major taxonomic changes with a number of genera reinstated from synonymies and several species reallocated. In particular, it emerged that the genus Cerapachys is paraphyletic and consequently many of its species have been moved elsewhere, especially to the resurrected genus Lioponera. Similarly, species previously treated under the genus Sphinctomyrmex have been moved to Zasphinctus.
As a consequence, Cerapachys and Sphinctomyrmex no longer belong to the Australian fauna.

The most notable aspect of the subfamily is that they are "army ants". That is, they conduct raids using large numbers of workers, primarily attacking other ants, social wasps and termites, but also other arthropods. These raids occur both day and night, usually across the ground surface but occasionally also arboreally. During raids, many workers attack a single nest or small area, with several workers coordinating their efforts to carry large food items back to the nest or bivouac. They also have a nomadic life style, alternating between a migratory phase in which nests are temporary bivouacs in sheltered places above the ground and the stationary phase when semi-permanent underground nests are formed. During the nomadic phase bivouacs move regularly and can move more than once a day when larvae require large amounts of food. Individual nests usually contain up to several thousand workers, although nest fragments containing only a few hundred workers are often encountered. Queens are highly specialised and look less like workers than in most ant species. They have greatly enlarged gasters and are termed dichthadiform. New colonies are formed by the division of existing nests rather than by individual queens as in most ant species.

General References

Borowiec, M.L. 2016. Generic revision of the ant subfamily Dorylinae (Hymenoptera, Formicidae). ZooKeys 608: 1–280

Brady, S.G., Fisher, B.L., Schultz, T.R., Ward, P.S. 2014. The rise of army ants and their relatives: diversification of specialized predatory doryline ants. BMC Evolutionary Biology 14: 93

History of changes