Species Info General

Other common names include: n/a

Ants of the genus Stigmatomma are commonly referred to as “Dracula Ants” (Ward & Fisher 2016).  This nickname is in reference to the unusual feeding practices of at least some Stigmatomma queens: “[S]tudies indicate that female adults perform nondestructive cannibalism on their own larvae.  This practice, also known as Larval Hemolymph Feeding (LHF), consists of ingestion of hemolymph dripping from punctures made by adults in the larval integument.” (Esteves & Fisher 2016).  In plain English, the mothers feed by biting their babies and drinking their blood (!).  As this is nondestructive cannibalism however, we can rest assured that the young ants grow up healthy and without psychological scars from the experience.

The enigmatic Van Zwaluwenburg’s Dracula Ant was initially described here in the Islands in 1946 from six specimens collected on Oʻahu between 1937–1945 by Reyer H. Van Zwaluwenburg (Williams 1946).  Intriguingly, however, after 1945 it was never again collected there.

“The cryptobiotic nature of this species makes it one of the most rarely collected ants in the world, but probably even more surprisingly, one for which at this point, the native range remains completely unknown . . .”  Thus reported Hamer et al. (2023) in their paper reporting the first ever non-insular collection of this species, of two specimens found in mainland Hong Kong in 2021.

After Van Zwaluwenburg’s Oʻahu collections, this ant was not collected anywhere on Earth for more than four decades, not until a queen was collected on Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean in 1989 (Framenau & Thomas 2008).  A decade later, between 1999–2001 three more specimens were obtained: two more workers collected on Christmas Island and one on Viti Levu in Fiji (Framenau & Thomas 2008, Sarnat & Economo 2012).  Two decades after that, in 2021, the two Hong Kong specimens mentioned above were collected (Hamer et al. 2023).  And then . . . in 2022, back here in the Islands, a single worker was collected at Huelo on Maui.  With two more specimens (AntWeb.org CASENT0923765 – 766) collected in 2024 on Réunion, an island in the Indian Ocean 430 miles east of Madagascar, this ant has been found at just six locations around the world.

The specimen collected on Maui represents the first (and only) detection of this species in the Islands since 1945, and represents one of only around sixteen individuals of this species that have ever been collected.