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  9. ›Formicoidea
  10. ›Ants
  11. ›Ponerine Ants
  12. ›Typical Ponerine Ants
  13. ›Paltothyreus
African stink ant
Plate 1 of 9. (c) Vaughan Jessnitz, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC), uploaded by Vaughan Jessnitz · via iNaturalist

African stink ant

Paltothyreus tarsatus

Paltothyreus (also known as African stink ant) is a monotypic genus of ants in the subfamily Ponerinae. Paltothyreus tarsatus, the single described species, is widely distributed in Sub-Saharan Africa. Workers are very large in size (17–20 mm); queens are similar to workers, but larger (23 mm) and winged.

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From the article Paltothyreus on Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), quoted section by section

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Range & habitat

Paltothyreus tarsatus construct shallow nests that cover a large home range. Most of the nest is shallow tunnels used by foragers to travel without risking predation and emerging far from the nest center. The nests can have as many as 5000 workers, a number very few ant species are able to match. Although the ants are predators and feed on animals as large as beetles, the frog Phrynomantis microps is sometimes found inside the nests as it uses them as a burrow. A skin secretion that inhibits the ant's aggression allows it to coexist with the ants.

Wikipedia: “Habitat”

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This page is assembled live from iNaturalist, GBIF, Wikipedia, the Source Library and the Internet Archive. It is not yet part of the hand-edited codex. iNaturalist taxon 475699.