The Rettenmeyer Army Ant Guest Collection: A Multifaceted Resource for Investigating the Fundamental Nature of the Associations between Army Ants and Their “Guests”

Less well known in the parasitological community than in the entomological community are the wonderfully complex systems of army ants and the multitude of taxa that associate with them, collectively termed guests. Guests include vertebrates such as antbirds, but also a diversity of arthropods such as beetles, flies, wasps, millipedes, thysanurans, and collembolans. In addition, a wide variety of mites live on the bodies of army ants and appear to have become modified in form to conform with a particular site on their ant host. The nature of the relationships between army ants and many of their guest taxa remains to be definitively determined. Nonetheless, relationships involving commensalism, mutualism, parasitism, parasitoidism, and phoresy have all been described. The Carl W. and Marian E. Rettenmeyer Army Ant Guest Collection (AAGC) is largely the result of 55 yr of fieldwork (from 1951 to 2004) by the Rettenmeyers in the jungles of Central and South America. It was donated to the Biodiversity Research Collection at the University of Connecticut in 2016 and has since been stabilized and almost fully digitized. This multifaceted resource includes specimens of army ants and their guests housed in 7,310 vials and 278 jars of ethanol, 5,500 microscope slides of guests, and 108 Cornell-style drawers of pinned specimens. We estimate that it includes over 2,000,000 specimens representing 40 species of army ants and their numerous species of guests and prey. Ancillary material includes data from, and images of, 6,246 Kodachrome slides and 9,500 field cards that provide detailed observations on the members of these systems in the field. An online database consisting of 4 modules (i.e., Specimens, Colonies, Kodachromes, and Field Cards) provides digital access to these materials. Because of its interconnected and detailed nature, the AAGC can serve as an unprecedented resource not only for expanding understanding of multiple aspects of the associations between army ants and their guests, but also for helping to inform fundamental questions about the evolution of interspecific interactions and, of primary interest to this audience, parasitism and parasitoidism.