Ants of Tawau and Borneo — Formicidae

Records of ants photographed in and around Tawau, Sabah, by Wong Fook Yee. This page gathers them from across the Insects/ folders and says plainly what each record does and does not establish.

What makes an ant an ant

Ants are wasps that took up living in colonies. They are a single family, Formicidae, inside the order Hymenoptera, and about 13,800 species have been described. Three characters separate them from every other insect, and two of the three can often be read straight off a photograph:

Geniculate antennae. The antenna has a long first segment, the scape, and then bends at a sharp elbow into the rest. Nothing else in the insects carries antennae quite like it, and it is the single most useful thing to look for when you suspect you are being shown a mimic.
A node-like waist. The second abdominal segment is strongly constricted into a petiole bearing one or two distinct nodes. A real ant's waist is a genuine narrowing with a lump on it, not a pale band across an unbroken body.
The metapleural gland, which produces antibiotic secretions that keep a crowded nest free of disease. It is unique to ants among all insects — but it cannot be seen in a field photograph, and some genera, Camponotus among them, have lost it.

Those first two characters are why this site can be confident that an animal is an ant while still being unable to say which ant. They establish the family and go no further.

Why this index sits above the wing-count folders

The Insects/ section of this site began filed by wing count — 0_Wing/, 1_pairWing/, 2_pairWings/. Since October 2026 every ant record is filed by scientific classification instead, in 2_pairWings/Family_Formicidae/ (with a Genus_<Name>/ folder when the genus is known), because winged ants have two pairs of wings. The old key could not hold ants, and the reason is worth understanding: for an ant the number of wings is not a species character at all. It is a caste character.

Workers are always wingless, in every ant species without exception. Nearly every ant anyone photographs is a worker.
Queens and males have two pairs of wings. They fly once, on the nuptial flight, which in Borneo often follows heavy rain and brings them to lighted windows in numbers. A winged ant was the only kind the old key put under 2_pairWings/.
A mated queen is wingless again. She sheds her wings after the flight, leaving visible stubs on a deep, boxy thorax built for flight muscle. Under the old key the same individual would have been filed in two different folders at two points in her life.

Under the old key one species could generate records in two folders, and one animal could too. Filing by classification puts them all in one place, and this index lists them together — the same arrangement used for the true bugs and the stick insects.

The records

Formicinae — named to species

The Asian weaver ant, Oecophylla smaragdina (kerengga) — species page, three records
24 June 2007, Ikutmaju Sawmill, Tanah Merah Mangrove Coast: about twenty workers on a white-painted water pipe holding a weevil by its legs and head and pulling outwards, carrying it towards their nest (iNaturalist 407483491). 19 July 2009, a papaya garden opposite Pasar Semarak, Tawau: a dead green queen on a sheet of silk, with fly larvae on her (398990434). 20 December 2022, Kampung Sayap, Kota Belud: a major worker touched a nettle caterpillar's spines with an antenna and left it (399882665).
Workers red, queens green. A record page for specialists; the two earlier pages for Records 2 and 3 now forward here.

The Fish Hook Ant — the fig garden, Tawau Hills
4 June 2023. About 10 mm, orange-brown under a dense golden pile, with black legs, black antennae and black spine tips. Seen walking fast and alone in low bush in the fig garden opposite Tawau Hills Park; photographed the same night in a container, which is why the background is white.
Polyrhachis bihamata (Drury, 1773) — the first ant on this site carried to species, and it gets there because the deciding character is finally visible: a pair of long hook-shaped spines lying parallel on the waist. Bihamata means "two-hooked". The three look-alikes (P. dostali, P. lacroixi, P. tonsilis) are separated on strongly reduced standing hairs, which this animal does not have.
Worth noting: the Malaysia Biodiversity Information System lists this species from Negeri Sembilan and Perak only, with no Sabah locality. Written for visitors rather than for specialists. — iNaturalist observation 399103222

Formicinae — genus determined

A spiny ant on dead wood — the fig garden site, Tawau Hills
4 September 2015, 13:51. About 10 mm, black and strongly shining, walking alone on a split piece of rotten wood on the same strip opposite Tawau Hills Park — ninety-four minutes after the record below, and a few paces away. Recorded at genus level: Polyrhachis, the spiny ants, on the spined and sharply margined thorax. Echinopla and Camponotus are both excluded because neither carries thoracic spines. The species is left open. A second frame was taken from above specifically to show the waist, whose spines separate the species; it shows the waist as a low unarmed node but its corners are crossed by a leg and in shadow, so no count is claimed. Two small red bodies, probably mites, ride on the legs. — iNaturalist observation 398945387

A golden-haired spiny ant that stood still — Ladang Table
Old Rubber Plantation, Ladang Table, Merotai. 13 July 2015, 17:07. Glossy black abdomen, head and thorax under short golden hairs, on a broad leaf in low afternoon sun. Unlike most ants it hardly moved, and stayed through 26 frames. Not measured. Genus Polyrhachis from iNaturalist identifiers, on the spines on the waist and thorax; the species is left open. A record page for specialists. — iNaturalist observation 407753265

Formicinae — subfamily confirmed

A pale yellow ant with a large head — Sabah Tea Garden, Ranau
15 December 2009, 16:44. About 17 mm, measured on 2 mm graph paper; pale yellowish-orange, a large broad head notched at the back, one waist node and no spines on the thorax. Walking on tree bark; it gripped a twig in its jaws and was photographed hanging from it, then returned to the tree. Subfamily Formicinae from iNaturalist identifiers; probably Camponotus, genus not determined. A record page for specialists. — iNaturalist observation 407517056

Formicinae — probable

A black ant on a grass stem — the fig garden site, Tawau Hills
4 September 2015, 12:17. About 10 mm, black and shiny, with very long bristled legs, walking alone along a grass stem on the strip of ground opposite Tawau Hills Park. Almost certainly a worker. Recorded at family level; the waist appears to carry a single node, which would put it in Formicinae. Camponotus and Polyrhachis are the two candidate genera and the page explains why the photograph cannot choose between them — and the record above, taken on the same strip the same afternoon, is a Polyrhachis beyond doubt, which is worth comparing against. Its second value is as a dated record of that half-kilometre six years before it was planted as the Plant4Tawau fig garden. — iNaturalist observation 398063624

Ants at work — not yet named

White scale insects and their ant — The Flower Girl nursery, Tawau
28 September 2026. A slender ant, roughly 4 to 5 mm, with an orange-red head, thorax and legs and a glossy black abdomen, tending a cluster of white scale insects on a potted sapling: walking backwards and forwards along the cluster and pausing over individual insects. The page is filed with the scale insects, because they are the record; the ant is recorded at family level only. It is listed here because it shows an ant at work, farming honeydew insects.

Not an ant, but filed here on purpose

An ant that is not an ant — Ikutmaju Saw Mill, Merotai
23 October 2014. A true bug, not an ant. Its narrow waist is a pair of pale markings rather than a real constriction, and the photographer's own field note recorded "two segments, the head and body", which is the mimicry succeeding on an experienced observer at close range. It is listed here because anyone using this index to name a black insect with a narrow waist needs to meet it. Ant mimicry has evolved independently more than seventy times.

The older "Ant of Sabah" page

An earlier page at 0_Wing/INDEXAnt.htm, last edited in January 2016, presented ten photographs of Sabah ants as a row of thumbnails with no names, no localities and no dates. That address now redirects here.

All ten photographs are missing from the server. Checked on 7 September 2026: Ant_01_small.jpg, Ant_01.jpg, Ant_05_small.jpg and Ant_10.jpg all return 404, against a control image on the same folder that loads normally. The page has been showing ten broken thumbnails to anyone who followed the "ANTS" link from the insects index.

The photographs themselves are very likely still in the photographer's own archive. If they are, each one can become a record here on the same terms as the record above — a locality, a date, a size, and an honest statement of how far the identification goes. Ten unnamed thumbnails are worth little; ten dated field records from Sabah are worth a great deal.

How much of this is still unnamed

The standing checklist of Bornean ants records 717 valid species and 52 further subspecies, in 97 genera and 12 subfamilies, and its authors estimate that at least 1,100 species are actually present on the island. Two subfamilies hold most of them: Myrmicinae with 315 species and Formicinae with 213. The largest single genus is Polyrhachis, the spiny ants, with 98 recorded Bornean species; Pheidole, Camponotus, Crematogaster and Strumigenys are also well represented, and half of all Bornean ant genera contain only one or two species each.

This is the background against which the caution on these pages should be read. A photograph of a black ant on a leaf, taken with a compact camera, is not evidence for a species name when the island holds a hundred species in one genus alone. Family is often as far as it goes, and family, honestly stated and attached to a date and a place, is a real record.

References used across these pages

Ant — family-level summary: geniculate antennae, the metapleural gland and its loss in Camponotus, the node-like petiole, wingless workers, winged reproductives, queens shedding their wings after the nuptial flight, and the approximate world species total quoted above.
Polyrhachis, AntWiki — the pronotal, propodeal and petiolar armature that separates the spiny ants from Camponotus.
Pfeiffer, M., Mezger, D., Hosoishi, S., Yahya, B.E. & Kohout, R.J. (2011), "The Formicidae of Borneo (Insecta: Hymenoptera): a preliminary species list", Asian Myrmecology 4(1): 9–58 — the Bornean species, genus and subfamily totals quoted above.
iNaturalist — where these observations are open to identification by specialists. Observer: wongfookyee.