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This genus is very distinctive and very isolated within the Formicidae. Brown and Kempf described it in 1968. They considered it a very primitive ant and placed it in Myrmicinae, tribe Agroecomyrmecini, together with ants known from Oligocene Baltic amber and Miocene Florissant Shale. It bears superficial resemblance to some extant genera (the "Glamyromyrmex" Pyramica, Ishakidris, Pilotrochus, and Phalacromyrmex) but Brown and Kempf (1968) and Bolton (1984) considered these similarities to be due to convergence. Bolton (2003) raised the tribe to subfamily status, suggesting that Agroecomyrmecinae might be the sister taxon to Myrmicinae.
The name Tatuidris means "armadillo ant," and the specific epithet for the single described species, tatusia, is an old generic name for armadillo (Brown and Kempf 1968), so an appropriate common name is armadillo ants.
Brown and Kempf described a single species, T. tatusia, based on two workers sent to them by Roy Snelling at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. The specimens were from El Salvador, collected in a Berlese sample of humus. Since then published records are few, but Bolton (1984) reported a second collection from Mexico and Fernando Fernandez has reported its occurrence in Colombia (URL). I am sure there are many more records in collections that have simply not made it into any publications or databases yet. With the advent of litter sifting and Winkler extraction as a popular method of ant collecting, Tatuidris are not as rare as they used to seem. Although not very abundant, with frequent litter sifting they can be reliably found in Costa Rican wet forests.
The biology is these ants remains to be observed. I do not know anyone who has seen a live one, and no sexuals are known. The genus is only known as isolated workers found in Winkler or Berlese samples. Tatuidris workers have peculiar mandibular brushes and a powerful sting, which led Brown and Kempf to speculate that Tatuidris might be specialist predators of active or slippery arthropod prey.
Winkler sampling in Costa Rica has yielded a curious observation of what appear to be three distinct species based solely on pilosity characters. The general size, shape, and sculpture characters are extremely uniform, but three radically different pilosity types occur with no intermediates: abundant long flexuous setae (tatusia), no erect setae (JTL-001), and a dense lanose pubescence (JTL-002).
Literature Cited
Bolton, B. 1984. Diagnosis and relationships of the myrmicine ant genus Ishakidris gen. n. (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Systematic Entomology 9:373-382.
Bolton, B. 2003. Synopsis and classification of Formicidae. Mem. Amer. Entomol. Inst. 71:1-370.
Brown, W. L., Jr., and W. W. Kempf. 1968 ("1967"). Tatuidris, a remarkable new genus of Formicidae (Hymenoptera). Psyche (Cambridge) 74:183-190.
Page author: John T. Longino longinoj@evergreen.edu
Date of this version: 4 September 2004.