 “Most invasive ants don’t do well in native settings, but we’re starting to see high numbers of the trapjaw ants in natural wooded habitats.”
MacGown said chemicals commonly used to control other ants have been effective on this new pest as well. Unlike fire ants which form mounds in yards, trapjaw ants are not nuisances in most places. They have not been found in buildings and have not become much of a problem because they tend to nest in out-of-the-way places.
So far, MacGown has found the ants in Jackson and Greene counties in Mississippi, but he first collected them in Baldwin County, Alabama almost 20 years ago. The earliest record he found of them was from unidentified specimens in the Smithsonian National Collection gathered in the mid-1950s from Mobile, Alabama.
“This ant basically went unnoticed for the next 30 to 40 years until large populations built up,” he said. “It is common to have an invasive species come into an area and be there in small numbers for 50 or 60 years, then something shifts, and they build a huge population.”
MacGown was instrumental in correctly identifying this species. He has spent his career studying ants in the Southeast and has done extensive work describing various species so they can be correctly categorized.
“These ants were misidentified for a long time, but we were able to give them a definitive name last year,” he said. “To know if something is new, you have to know every species in the group, and there was a lot of confusion about the taxonomy of this genus in the United States.”
MacGown completed a revision of this ant genus for North America, a comprehensive process that involved making better scientific descriptions of the species for a more accurate listing.
Richard Brown, director of the Mississippi Entomological Museum housed in Mississippi State University’s Clay Lyle Entomology Building, praised MacGown’s work to correctly identify ant species.
“Joe MacGown has become a leading authority on ants of the Southeastern United States,” Brown said. “His publications and findings have drawn the attention of researchers at many other institutions who have come here to work with Joe.”
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