New “ghostly” ant discovered is named after Voldemort

There are more than 10,000 species of ants on the planet, but researchers at the University of Western Australia (UWA) have discovered one of the most dangerous. This is the species “Leptanilla Voldemort”found after excavations in the arid Pilbara region of northern Western Australia.

Those insects are present throughout the world, except in the Arctic and Antarctica. They are especially common in tropical forests, they are endowed with some truly exceptional qualities and although they rarely exceed two centimeters in length, They are the strongest in the world, being able to lift almost three times their body weight.

The new species has some characteristics that make it even more special: it is undergroundpale, with a slender build, thin legs and long, sharp jaws. Precisely because of these characteristics, she was named after Lord Voldemort, the well-known villain of the Harry Potter saga.

Lead researcher Dr Mark Wong from the UWA Faculty of Biological Sciences named them this way (L. voldemort for short), in honor of the “Lord of Darkness”, since these ants have a ghostly appearance and live in the shadows.

What you didn’t know about ants

Ants are very common insects, but they are endowed with some truly exceptional and unique qualities, for example they are very small but have a lot of strength. They also share very similar characteristics with wasps and bees, as they evolved from a common ancestor.

They are especially common in tropical forests, where they can represent up to half of the insects that inhabit the area.

One of its best-known features is its hypersociality. They are organized into underground communities whose axis of power is the queen ant, and the other groups are assigned a specific role within the colony that follows a common objective: protect the lives of the queen’s daughters so that the species continues to survive.

To the ants communicate and cooperate using chemical substances that can alert others to danger or lead them to a promising food source. Typically feed on nectar, seeds, fungi or insects. However, some species have more unusual diets. Some species are scavengers and others herbivoreswith a known case of a species in the Amazon in which its members cooperate to create traps and thus manage to hunt some prey.

The discovered ant has something that makes it unique

Among the thousands of ant species, only about 60 belong to the genus Leptanilla. As we mentioned, community life is one of the great virtues of these insects, however this discovered species is very different even in terms of social behavior, since live in small colonies, usually made up of a queen and just a hundred workers that nest and feed exclusively underground.

Only two specimens of the new ant were found, and both were collected in a net that was lowered into a 25-meter drilled hole and recovered by scraping the inner surface of the hole.

L. voldemort is the second kind of Leptanilla discovered on the continent, therefore this find receives special attention. To describe it, nothing better than mentioning some characteristics of this fearsome ant:

• It is adapted to life in the dark.
• She’s blind.
• Very small size (between 1 and 2 mm).
• It has sharp jaws.
• It can bite and immobilize other larger animals.
• It feeds on decomposing corpses.
• They have no pigmentation (color).
• They feed on small arthropods, such as centipedes.

You two discovered specimens will continue to be analyzed, as the qualities of these insects continue to surprise scientists. The evolution of these insects takes millions of years.

One of the aspects that most caught the attention of researchers is that These ants “pretend to be dead” to survive, they have powerful venom and they feed on hemolymph, a circulatory fluid (like our blood) coming from the larvae of the captured specimen. That’s why they are convinced that there is still a lot to discover about this new species.