worker-majors

Updated: June 6, 2025

Sometimes two ants join together in carrying one piece, but the worker-majors, with their unwieldy and distorted jaws, are incapacitated from taking any part in the labour. The armies never march far on a beaten path, but seem to prefer the entangled thickets where it is seldom possible to follow them.

Henry Walter Bates - The Naturalist on the River Amazons

There is in all of them a little difference among the workers regarding the size of the head; but in some species this is not sufficient to cause a separation into classes, with division of labour; in others, the jaws are so monstrously lengthened in the worker-majors, that they are incapacitated from taking part in the labours which the worker- minors perform; and again, in others the difference is so great that the distinction of classes becomes complete, one acting the part of soldiers, and the other that of workers.

Henry Walter Bates - The Naturalist on the River Amazons

All the Ecitons hunt in large organised bodies; but almost every species has its own special manner of hunting. Eciton rapax. One of the foragers, Eciton rapax, the giant of its genus, whose worker-majors are half-an-inch in length, hunts in single file through the forest.

Henry Walter Bates - The Naturalist on the River Amazons