Mimicked by what?

but other arthropods that share the same habitat and spend a lot of time on the ground -- possibly spiders, some of which appear to mimic true ants. On the other hand, maybe all the velvet ant mimics live in Africa. I'm just guessing because of the bold markings that advertise a painful sting, and the fact that there *are* velvet ant mimics elsewhere.

This is a very cool species.

The most convincing mimics of mutillids, in my opinion, are checkered beetles, Cleridae. In the clerid section on this site, there is a really good mimic of the less hairy eastern species. Also, there are many nocturnal clerids that look extremely similar to the pale brown mutillids that are active at that time. To add to the mimicry, most clerids I have played with stridulate just like mutillids do.

There was a paper published last year about a spider genus in Africa (Grapartia, I think) that exclusively mimics mutillids. I think that a lot of jumping spiders carry simialr patterns to mutillids here in the states.