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Project Noah Nature School
Mutilla Basiornata
Found this strange ant in Lonavala, India. I think it is a queen ant but dont know what species. EDIT: Thanks to Simon Stock for species ID suggestion.
Dry grass lands and rocky hills.
Velvet Ant might be one of the non-social species of ants. I'm not totally sure but I think this is the case.
Great ID work Simon.... Many Indian Arthropods are not properly documented and published...
I've ID'd your great spotting. I'm an ant lover and in my search for more species I seem to come across more wasps. If you have any Ant spottings I have a mission called Ant Empire http://www.projectnoah.org/missions/1255... but it looks like I'll be starting a wasp/bee mission very soon.
They sure are hard to click this one just wouldn't take a break, i just upped a video its slowed down to 25% to give a better look at her. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faf-82Dmn...
Female of Cow killer (timulla), i dont know which species exactly is ? :)
we have many here in Morocco :) !
Did you find her incredibly hard to photograph? Every velvet ant I've followed would not stop for a rest. :-)
Beautiful!
It helped me a lot to look for "Mutillidae" on a local group of nature enthusiasts, that's how I identified the one I found.
These are beautiful creatures.
Great find!! Hope to see more species from Lonavala! Beautiful , Beautiful Hill station!
Ants, bees and wasps are all in the order Hymenoptera and a group of (sometimes) wingless wasps are called (possibly confusingly) velvet ants. I have spotted a wingless wasp with winged male here http://www.projectnoah.org/spottings/847... .
Yoiur velvet ant is a wasp. http://www.biosurvey.ou.edu/okwild/misc/...
hey thanks for the warm welcome, thanks for pointing me in the right direction this definitely is a subspecies of the velvet ant ( http://www.beetlesofafrica.com/beetle_de... )
This particular one has a striped abdomen which initially led me to believe that it was some kind of a wasp with broken wings.
I'm not finding anything on the Internet. I'm finding the same pages over and over again and I may need to give it a rest and try it again.
I still think it is a velvet ant, but can't find any more information on this particular wasp.
Welcome to Project Noah.
I'm wondering if this is not an ant, but a wingless wasp. Did you see others in the area? This looks very much like a member of the Mutillidae--the so called velvet ants, but which are actually wingless wasps.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutillidae for more information, but I'll do some research as well.
Spotted on Jan 25, 2012
Submitted on Jan 25, 2012
