Velvet Ant

Description:

A rust-orange colored Velvet Ant female about 1 cm in length. The abdomen is black with 4 rust-orange spots. The femora of all legs are banded black and orange. The thorax has an unusual shape and is toothed along the lateral margins (first picture). The mandibles are large and toothed (4th picture). Most of the hair is silver colored. Family Mutillidae. Velvet Ant females are parasites mostly of other Hymenoptera. Males have wings and are often very difficult to pair to the appropriate female of the species due to the great differences in appearance and size. This wasp has now been identified as a species of Pseudomethoca by Kevin Williams, a Mutillid specialist with the California Department of Food and Agriculture, who wrote "That specimen definitely belongs to the genus Pseudomethoca. It looks like P. hecate to me, but the genus is poorly understood, especially in tropical regions of Mexico."

Habitat:

She was climbing a wall in the garden. San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, 2,200 meters.

Notes:

This is the first Velvet Ant I've seen in San Cristobal and it is unusual in that it is a montane, almost cloud forest, usually wet environment at a high altitude. Even the dry season has high overall humidity. While Velvet ants like warm rocky areas, I've never found one climbing a wall before. The coloring is similar to Dasymutilla quadriguttata, which is not yet reported from Chiapas and is a species usually found along the East Coast of the US down into Florida. The thorax of this one is odd and toothed while that of D. quadriguttata is rounded and without teeth. http://bugguide.net/node/view/221139/bgi... http://bugguide.net/node/view/35454 http://bugguide.net/node/view/52151/bgim... https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pdffiles/IN/IN... http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/misc... http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/...