Compact Carpenter Ant

This handsome large, red ant is native to Central America but has been, like so many other species, introduced to Florida and is slowly making its way into Texas. There are a lot of pages purporting to be about the compact carpenter ant, Campnotus planatus, but despite this it still suffers from Wikipedia Stub Syndrome,…

Buren’s Pyramid Ant

Another lovely insect whose descriptions online are just stubs of articles. The “remarks” on the Dorymyrmex bureni page on bugguide mention that this ant is not considered a nuisance species as it happens not to shoot formic acid (as do some formicine ants). What a ringing recommendation. They’re brown, they like sandy areas, and they…

Graceful Twig Ant

I’d been sitting on the above photo for a while, because the insect in it was winged; I seriously thought it was a wasp, but couldn’t find an exact match for species no matter how hard I tried. There was always something just not quite right. A couple days later, I was looking up some…