Harpegnathos venator: 10 Facts About the Jumping Hunter

Harpegnathos venator is not your average ant. It stalks its prey with huge eyes, jumps on it, paralyses it with a sting and lives in small colonies in a nest with a chimney. Here are ten facts about this remarkable hunter from South and Southeast Asia.

A Harpegnathos venator worker on the hunt. Photo: Lawrence Hylton, CC BY 4.0, via iNaturalist.

1. Its name means sickle-jawed hunter

Harpegnathos comes from the Greek words for sickle and jaw, and venator is Latin for hunter. That fits perfectly: the workers have long, curved jaws built to grab prey. The species was described in 1858 from Madras, in India.

2. It hunts with its eyes

Most ants find food by smell and follow scent trails. Harpegnathos venator has very large eyes and hunts by sight. Workers patrol alone, spot a moving insect and go after it.

3. It jumps on its prey

Instead of only running, the workers can jump, both to catch prey and to escape. For keepers this means one thing: the lid of the outworld needs to close well.

4. Its sting paralyses

Researchers in China watched how Harpegnathos venator catches cockroaches. The ant clamps the prey in its jaws, curls its body into a C shape and stings for around ten seconds. The cockroaches they tested were completely paralysed.

5. It adjusts its sting to the prey

The same study found that the ants sting livelier and bigger prey for longer, and prey that cannot run away much more briefly. Prey that was stung longer stayed paralysed longer. The researchers think the ants use this to keep prey alive but motionless, a kind of fresh food store for the colony.

6. It is not interested in dead food

In the field, the ants ignored cockroaches that had already been killed. Active prey was the most attractive. Keepers see the same at home: these ants want live insects and hardly show interest in sugar.

7. Its colonies are small

Workers at their nest entrance. Photo: Jonghyun Park, CC BY 4.0, via iNaturalist.

Where many ants live in colonies of thousands, Harpegnathos venator keeps it small. Colonies dug up in northern Thailand had around 60 workers on average. Every worker counts, which is one reason this species grows so slowly.

8. A nest can have several queens

In many related ants a colony has one queen. In Harpegnathos venator researchers often found nests with more than one mated queen laying eggs. Some colonies even had extra young queens that had lost their wings but had not mated.

9. Workers can mate too

A special trait of Harpegnathos is that some workers can mate and lay fertilised eggs. These workers are called gamergates. In Harpegnathos venator the queens usually do most of the egg laying, and colonies where only workers reproduce turned out to be rare.

10. Its nest has a chimney and wallpaper

The nest entrance sticks up from the ground like a little chimney with a funnel on top, about 3 cm wide. Below are two or three flat chambers with smooth floors. The ants decorate the walls and floors with small pieces of old cocoons, something researchers call wall-papering.

Keeping Harpegnathos venator yourself

Photo: Marco Chan, CC BY 4.0, via iNaturalist.

All of this makes Harpegnathos venator one of the most spectacular ants you can keep, but also one of the hardest. It needs warmth, the right humidity and clean live insects. Everything about care is in our Harpegnathos venator care guide. Have a look at our Harpegnathos venator colonies, or read more surprising behaviour in our 10 bizarre ant facts.

Sources

• Nie, L. et al., 2021. Prey status affects paralysis investment in the ponerine ant Harpegnathos venator. Insects.

• Nest architecture, worker reproduction, and polygyny in the ponerine ant Harpegnathos venator. Journal of Insect Behavior.

• AntWiki. Harpegnathos venator and Harpegnathos.

Photos: © Lawrence Hylton (1), © Jonghyun Park (2) and © Marco Chan (3), CC BY 4.0, via iNaturalist.