Oecophylla smaragdina

Oecophylla smaragdina
Oecophylla smaragdina
Workers of Oecophylla smaragdina
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta
Order: Hymenoptera
Family: Formicidae
Genus: Oecophylla
Species: O. smaragdina
Binomial name
Oecophylla smaragdina
Fabricius, 1775[1]
Map showing range of Oecophylla
Oecophylla range map. Oecophylla longinoda in blue, Oecophylla smaragdina in red.[1]

Oecophylla smaragdina (common names include weaver ant, green ant, green tree ant, and orange gaster) is a species of arboreal ant found in Asia and Australia. They make nests in trees made of leaves stitched together using the silk produced by their larvae.

Weaver ants may be red or green. In Malaysia they are sometimes mistakenly labelled "fire ants" because a colloquial name in Malay is semut api; another name is kerengga (real fire ants are in a different genus, Solenopsis).

The larvae and pupae are collected and processed into bird food, fish bait and in the production of traditional medicines in Thailand[2] and Indonesia.[3]

References

  1. ^ a b Dlussky, Gennady M.; Torsten Wappler and Sonja Wedmann (2008). "New middle Eocene formicid species from Germany and the evolution of weaver ants". Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 53 (4): 615–626. doi:10.4202/app.2008.0406. http://gap.entclub.org/taxonomists/Dlussky/Oecophylla%20Dlussky08.pdf. 
  2. ^ "The importance of weaver ant (Oecophylla smaragdina Fabricius) harvest to a local community in Northeastern Thailand". Asian Myrmecology 2: 129–138. 2008. http://www.asian-myrmecology.org/publications/sribandit-et-al-am-2008.pdf. 
  3. ^ Césard N. (2004). "Le kroto (Oecophylla smaragdina) dans la région de Malingping, Java-Ouest, Indonésie : collecte et commercialisation d’une ressource animale non négligeable." (in French). Anthropozoologica 39 (2): 15–31. http://hal.inria.fr/docs/00/12/96/02/PDF/AZ_39_2_NC.pdf. 


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