Talk:Dorylus

Untitled

Note that comments below prior to February 9, 2007, were originally on different talk pages, and were moved here when the army ant pages were reorganized

Since there were no objections after a month and a half and only one supporting comment, I merged the non-duplicated content from Driver ant into this article and placed a redirect. siafu 23:20, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

Interesting, I didn't know the swahili word for ant (Siafu) has been adopted in English. What happen to the swahili article for the ant, since siafu redirect here?

The article siafu has always been a redirect. Driver ant (now a redirect, but you can see the old content in the article history) did not have any interwiki links, so if there is or was a siafu article on a swahili wikipedia (though I can't find such a project listed on the front page) it was never connected to here. siafu 09:16, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

Picture

Could someone with a legit picture of the siafu post it in this article. It is hard to understand exactly how mean looking these ants are without a picture. Jdufresne 17:04, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

There's no reference to the sizes of the driver ants in this article

I suspect that a substantial proportion of the readers who look up this article would like some indication of how big the driver ants are. I prefer not to directly edit a Wikipedia article without being sure of the accuracy of my input, but, according to a fact file on the website http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature, driver ants known as "workers" are about half a centimeter in length, "soldier" driver ants are almost 3 times this "size" (I believe they're referring to length here), the males ("sausage flies") are about 3cm long, and the queens are up to 5cm long.

Pictures

I have some pictures of army ants under attribution license. Don't know if it is Dorylinae so I prefer not to put it myself.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/evdaimon/228546529/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/evdaimon/228545707/in/set-72157594258396072/ and some others

Hope it can help.

Video Link

The video link on this page contained a trojan downloader (Downloader.MisleadApp) on http://www.educatedearth.net/video.php?id=3661 as of 8/5/2007 Should it be removed?

Speed

Really only 20 meters per hour? That seems a little slow. Captain Pedant 11:09, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes, really. The advancing front of the column is in the act of exploration and conquest - it takes time to subdue prey, so the column moves in spurts; fast when there is nothing encountered, slower when there is a target to be attacked. The net movement is about 20 meters per hour. Dyanega 21:51, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

How fast do they move when attacking? How close do they need to get to prey before entering attack mode? -- Milo —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.171.2.42 (talk) 22:30, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Close enough. Easy, if you see them coming - Don' think, run! Zeldakitten (talk) 14:44, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Merge

As part of the reorganization of the army ant articles, this page now contains most of the text from the former pages for safari ant and Dorylinae; Dorylinae is no longer a subfamily, and safari ant is NOT the most common name for this group - since there are so many names used, it is simpler to use the scientific name, as is done for Eciton. Dyanega 21:51, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Dorylus/Dorylini?

What's the difference between Dorylus and Dorylini? —Ben FrantzDale 07:31, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Image of male

I think there is a need for an image of a male Driver ant. It would be necessary to put one into the article.--Chykka207 (talk) 16:28, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

pull a soldier ant in two without its releasing its hold

"Removal is difficult, however, as their jaws are extremely strong, and one can pull a soldier ant in two without its releasing its hold." Something sounds strange about this sentence. "Various East African indigenous tribal peoples, e.g. Maasai moran), when they suffer a gash in the bush," something wrong here too (might be missing the word "For" in the beggining and a "(" aswell) Evrythn1outof8infity (talk) 03:48, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

Numbers

"Each colony can contain over 20 million individuals. "

"Seasonally, when food supplies become short, they leave the hill and form marching columns of up to 50,000,000 ants..."

These two sets of numbers seem to disagree....unless the columns are formed from multiple colonies, which, if so, should be stated. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.97.157.242 (talk) 23:17, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Size of the queens vis a vis the males

"The drones are larger than the soldiers and the queens are much larger."

Male driver ants, sometimes known as "sausage flies" (a term also applied to males of New World ecitonines) due to their bloated, sausage-like abdomens, are the largest known ants,

The second paragraph seems to imply that the males are larger than the queens (by virtue of being larger than all other ants) while the first paragraph seems to imply that the queens are larger. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.99.156.114 (talk) 22:20, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

Mate on the wing?

I'm pretty sure they don't and the next sentence contradicts this. It says encountered males are immediately de winged and taken to mate with a virgin queen. Plus, I'm not sure, but I don't think the males can even fly in the first place.24.136.136.42 (talk) 14:19, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

External links modified

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I have just modified 2 external links on Dorylus. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

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• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20090124103627/http://www1.bio.ku.dk:80/forskning/oe/cse/media/schoening2007_biotropica.pdf to http://www1.bio.ku.dk/forskning/oe/cse/media/schoening2007_biotropica.pdf

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Use in indiana jones?

Pherhaps add a section to compare there behavior to the scene in Indiana Jones: Kindom Of The Crystal skull Bossburns (talk) 20:01, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

Various inaccuracies etc.

I arrived on this page in a more-or-less random fashion and got very intrigued because these ants are quite interesting. I've been reading the literature on Dorylus since then and have come to realize that this page somewhat mischaracterizes the genus. Although the "driver ant" species in it are some of the best-known and most obvious in the environments where Dorylus are found, there are many other species within it that have very different lifestyles. For example, many Dorylus species do prey exclusively on other ants, which is unsurprising as that is typical for dorylines; the driver ants are a notable exception to that rule. Also, some species forage underground as opposed to on the surface, and at least one species, Dorylus orientalis, frequently eats plants, in contrast to the idea that this genus is exclusively predatory. There are some aspects of the genus that just don't get touched on here one way or another right now, too, such as the history of its taxonomy which has some interesting twists and turns.

Anyway, I guess all of this is to say that, although I originally set out only to find citations for the material in what is currently the last paragraph, I'm now setting out on a more dramatic reworking of the page. I think the driver ant material can stay here at least overall, but it should definitely go into its own section and I'm not entirely convinced at this point that it was the right move to merge the old driver ant article with the Dorylus article as they're definitely not the same thing. The main reason why it seems reasonable to keep it here to me at this point is that there is a historical subgenus Anomma which contains the various "driver ant" species, but it also contains a couple species that don't fit the driver ant paradigm, and in any case entomologists seem to have been moving more and more in the direction of abandoning it it in recent decades in light of molecular data. If entomologists settle on a new taxonomic scheme for Dorylus that puts the driver ant species in some sort of distinct group, it may make sense to move that material into a page for that group at that time, but until then I think this is probably the most specific page it can reasonably go on. The driver ants do apparently form a clade but I don't think it has a formal name or anything (at least not yet). 🍉◜◞ↂ🄜e𝚜𝚘𝚌𝚊r🅟ම𛱘‎🥑《 𔑪‎talk〗⇤ 14:06, 5 July 2023 (UTC)