Two new species of socially parasitic Nylanderia ants from the southeastern United States

Abstract

In ants, social parasitism is an umbrella term describing a variety of life-history strategies, where a parasitic species depends entirely on a free-living species, for part of or its entire life-cycle, for either colony founding, survival, and/or reproduction. The highly specialized inquiline social parasites are fully dependent on their hosts for their entire lifecycles. Most inquiline species are tolerant of the host queen in the parasitized colony, forgo producing a worker caste, and invest solely in the production of sexual offspring. In general, inquilines are rare, and their geographic distribution is limited, making it difficult to study them. Inquiline populations appear to be small, cryptic, and they are perhaps ephemeral. Thus, information about their natural history is often fragmentary or non-existent but is necessary for understanding the socially parasitic life history syndrome in more detail. Here, we describe two new species of inquiline social parasites, Nylanderia deyrupisp. nov. and Nylanderia parasiticasp. nov., from the southeastern United States, parasitizing Nylanderia wojciki and Nylanderia faisonensis, respectively. The formicine genus Nylanderia is large and globally distributed, but until the recent description of Nylanderia deceptrix, social parasites were unknown from this genus. In addition to describing the new social parasite species, we summarize the fragmentary information known about their biology, present a key to both the queens and the males of the Nylanderia social parasites, and discuss the morphology of the social parasites in the context of the inquiline syndrome.