Oecophylla textor Santschi - new status

Type location Zanzibar (Oecophylla smaragdina stirps longinoda Latr., var. textor nov., Santschi, 1914b: 128) collectors Alluaud & Jeannel. Note - the type location is wrongly given as Zaïre by Bolton (1995), presumably as misreading of Wheeler's catalogue list (1922: 947) .

Santschi's (1914b) description of textor is at .

Also known from "British East Africa" - Kenya, locations near Mombasa (Allaud & Jeannel).

Overall,Oecophylla textor appears to be more closely related to Oecophylla smaragdina than the West Africa/Congo Basin Oecophylla longinoda. In full face view the head, clypeus, mandibles and antennae are similar, but with smaragdina the head profile is more bulbous, in full face view the occiput is near straight; the propodeum is angular and the petiole both more slender and shallower (see below).

Weber (1946c) wrote of "Dimorphism in the African Oecophylla worker" as if it was an unknown phenomenon - . The sole reference (apart from his own report on the ants of the Imatong Mountains) was to the summary in Wheeler (1922). It seems that Weber was unaware of the earlier work, e.g. Andre's (1890) description of the minor worker, thinking it was a distinct species, Oecophylla brevinodis, from among the major workers of "Oecophylla smaragdina" from Sierra Leone .

Of particular interest, here, is that Weber studied mainly specimens from his own collections in southern Sudan. He described and illustrated the Sudan specimens and referred to others sent to him from Tchole I and Mafia I, both off the coast of Tanzania, "supposedly belonging to the variety textor". The over shape of Weber's maxima specimens, specially the lateral alitrunk and petiole, matches Santschi's textor and the specimens sent to me from southern Sudan (below). Weber also described the gaster as distinctly paler ferruginous (than Wheeler's typical longinoda), adding that after chloroforming the gaster became distinctly darker than the rest of the body and became distinctly ringed. The shading in Way's drawing and my photographs both show exactly that banding.

The species, as Oecophylla longinoda var. textor was extensively studied in Zanzibar by M J Way, who followed the Wheeler (1922) concept of there being five varieties of Oecophylla longinoda (Way, 1955). He provided the drawings of the workers and (in his paper) sexual forms. When the images are overlaid the major worker exactly matches the Sudan specimen shown below.

Menozzi & Consani (1952: 69) also had recorded Oecophylla longinoda textor (citing Wheeler, 1922, as their authority), three workers, from Meule in Ethiopia, collected by the Zavattari Expedition of 1939.

Photomontage of specimen from Sudan, Yambio, South Sudan Province; collector Awatif Omer, 2006, Sudan 23_01. This matches the Santschi's description and the Way drawing (above).

Other images can be seen in the folder at -