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Photo#940526
Western Amazon Ant - Polyergus mexicanus

Western Amazon Ant - Polyergus mexicanus
Santa Barbara County, California, USA
June 18, 2014
Size: ~7mm
Found in Burton Mesa chaparral habitat on hard rocky soil. A troop of raiders had stirred up a whole hive of Camponotus vicinus? which were attacking the amazons as they emerged from the leaf litter with larvae (I'm assuming the amazons were making off with Formica lasioides which were also in the vicinity)

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Western Amazon Ant - Polyergus mexicanus Western Amazon Ant - Polyergus mexicanus Western Amazon Ant - Polyergus mexicanus Western Amazon Ant - Polyergus mexicanus Western Amazon Ant - Polyergus mexicanus Western Amazon Ant - Polyergus mexicanus

Moved
Moved from Ants.

Behavior
These ants weren't traveling in an organized line. I was photographing Camponotus when I saw a big group(50+ widely spaced individuals; looked like a loose herd as opposed to column spread over a 2x5 foot area) heading north into a manzanita, by the time I got my camera ready they had all pretty much exited the clearing. About 15 minutes later, I noticed them coming back my way still as a widely spaced group, the return group featured many somewhat injured looking workers along with workers carrying pupae. I tracked them to the manzanita bush where they would go into the leaf litter and emerge with larvae, there were over a hundred enraged carpenter ants present searching through the litter and trying to catch and kill the amazons. Further back in the bush there were a few Formica lasioides so I'm thinking these were the larvae they were taking (the larvae also looked too small to belong to the attacking Camponotus). There were no F. moki in the vicinity.

 
Host
I went back and revisited this colony on 7/2/2014 and found the nest with Formica lasioides present.

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