Word: camponotus
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Scientists have long admired the industrious ants that keep aphids as cows and milk them for their sweet "honeydew" secretion. Now a graduate student in entomology has added to the brief catalogue of insect husbandry Louisiana State University's Gary Ross has watched Mexican carpenter ants (Camponotus abominalis) protect caterpillars against their natural enemies and live on the juices that the caterpillars excrete. Though both parties benefit from the odd relationship, nature ensures that it is always brief: by the time they are 83 days old, the caterpillar cattle sprout orange-rimmed wings and fly away...
Them (Warner) are ants, but not the kind one usually shares a picnic with. Caught in a radioactive fallout from an atomic-test explosion at Alamogordo, a desert colony of Camponotus vicinus has suffered mutation into a race of creatures more than ten feet long. They are discovered by Myrmecologist Edmund Gwenn after two people disappear in the desert and two others are found dead with their carcasses full of formic acid...
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