Platythyrea punctata

Platythyrea punctata


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IUCN Red List Status: NOT EVALUATED

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Platythyrea punctata

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Biology

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John T. Longino
Some Rights Reserved
Some Rights Reserved

Natural History:

My collections of this species have all been individuals captured on tree trunks and low vegetation. The workers are very fast and difficult to capture. They have a powerful sting.

In Costa Rica, I have seen collections from Corcovado National Park, Curu Wildlife Reserve on the Nicoya Peninsula, Santa Rosa National Park, and the La Selva Biological Station in the Atlantic lowlands.

This species exhibits a remarkable diversity of reproductive strategies (Schilder et al. 1999, Heinze and Hoelldobler 1995). Morphologically there are regular alate queens, regular workers, and a range of intercastes between them. Males occur but are rare. Morphological queens occur in some colonies, but are not regularly present. In queenless colonies, unmated workers can produce new workers, queens, and males by parthenogenesis. Workers may also be inseminated, and thus possibly reproduce sexually. In spite of the potentially clonal structure of such colonies, workers exhibit agonistic interactions and dominance hierarchies, and usually one individual, often an unmated worker, is reproductively dominant.