6 Mysterious ‘Dracula’ Ant Species Discovered in Madagascar

By Tia Ghose, Staff Writer | March 31, 2014 10:00am ET

An ant of the enigmatic Mystrium species. These Dracula ants are known for sucking the blood of their young.

Credit: Alex Wild. Adetomyrma is a genus of ants endemic to Madagascar. Workers of this genus are blind.[3] The type species Adetomyrma venatrix was described in 1994, with the genus being an atypical member of its tribe, the Amblyoponini. This tribe includes the dracula ants, members of which feed on the hemolymph of larvae.

The so-called Dracula ants, described today (March 31) in the journal ZooKeys, seem to defy many of the normal rules that scientists use to classify ants.

“The genus Mystrium is the most mysterious group within the bizarre Dracula ants,” study co-author Masashi Yoshimura, a researcher at the California Academy of Sciences, said in a statement. “Mystrium was a difficult group to identify because of the remarkable variation within each species.”