New Insects in Madagascar and Seychelles: "Dracula" Ants

Tiny ants with dagger-like teeth live in Madagascar, Seychelles, and in many tropical regions of the world, it turns out. Fortunately for the residents of those areas, they are rarely seen. In a recent report, researchers from the California Academy of Sciences (Rick Overson and Brian Fisher) have described six new species of subterranean ants from the genus Prionopelta.

The smallest of the ants makes a fruit fly look large, and is about a millimeter long.

While they live underground or underneath leaf litter and are rarely seen by humans, they are part of a larger group of ants called Dracula ants by Fisher, because they sometimes wound the young of the colony and drink their blood (which is called hemoglyph in insects) as a means of distributing nutrients throughout the colony, said a release about the study.

All of the newly described species are from the Malagasy region: six are from Madagascar, one is from the islands of Seychelles. Previously, only one species was known from Madagascar, which was described in 1924, as Science Daily reported.

Fisher and other members of the Madagascar Biodiversity Center have conducted intensive sampling for more than a decade, resulting in the published study.