While on the same trip to Australia that produced the weaver ant photos, I came across a very unusual-looking worker ant. This worker belongs to the genus Leptomyrmex, which is a peculiar, mostly Australian genus. They are called spider ants because they closely resemble spiders. Unlike almost all other ants, spider ant queens are not born with wings. Instead, they disperse on foot, and the winged male alates fly to them. This means that the chances of a bird spotting the queen alates are much slimmer since queens do not fly. For more information, see this video from Jordan Dean, Ant Room Tour | Spider ants. This genus also possesses repletes, who do literally nothing other than store food or water in their gasters.
I also found some Leptomyrmex unicolor workers. These resemble leptomyrmex erythrocephalus, but unicolor workers are all black, while erythrocephalus are black but have orange heads.
