Megaponera, Mayr

Wheeler, W. M., 1922, The ants collected by the American Museum Congo Expedition., Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 45, pp. 39-269 : 63-64

Megaponera Mayr

Worker.-Rather large black ants with distinctly dimorphic workers, the minor forms having the antennae shorter and with more transverse funicular joints and the surface of the head and thorax usually smoother and less pubescent. Clypeus rounded in front and extending backward in a point between the frontal carinae, which are rather long, continued posteriorly to a level with the eyes and moderately dilated and lobular anteriorly. Cheeks carinate. Mandibles, long, deflected, triangular, with multidentate apical border. Antennal scapes flattened. Eyes a little in front of the middle of the sides of the head. Pronotum long; mesonotum surrounded by a strong suture. Petiole surmounted by a subcuboidal node, its ventral lamella with a blunt, backwardly directed tooth. Constriction between postpetiole and gaster rather feeble. Middle and hind tibiae with two well-developed spurs, one of which is pectinated; claws with a tooth near the base.

Female wingless and ergatomorphic, larger and somewhat more coarsely sculptured than the worker major, with much more voluminous gaster and the petiole almost squamiform and inclined forward.

Male nearly as large as the worker major, with convex clypeus, not prolonged backward between the frontal carinae. Mandibles very short, blunt and edentate. Antennal insertions farther from each other than from the sides of the head; scape longer than the second funicular joint. Eyes occupying less than half the sides of the head, their inner orbits slightly emarginate. Posterior border of head strongly marginate, somewhat colliform. Mesonotum prominent, twice as long as the pronotum, without Mayrian furrows. Ventral lamella of petiole with an acute posteriorly directed tooth behind the middle. Pygidium not spined. Claws with three or four minute basal teeth. Wings short, with a discoidal cell, two cubital cells and a closed radial cell.

This genus, like Paltothyreus , is monotypic and has much the same distribution, the single species, M. foetens (Fabricius) , ranging over a large part of the Ethiopian Region (Map 9).