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In this topic I would like to tell you about some moments in my life that were influenced by ants...

How did I get interested in ants? In the beginning of 1983 I was in my second year on the L.U.C., the University Centrum of Limburg, now known under another name... In it there were two professors/dokters with the same family name, one was Lucien Van Poucke, professor of chemistry in the first year, the other was Marcel Van Poucke, professor of the taxonomy of plants in the second year. I was also in the student-group "DiP's", or to say it in full "Dissipuli Pouckii's", for the two professors. Around Easter that year, a fellow student and I were talking with Marcel, a zoologist that specialized in plants. And the discussion was not about plants taxonomy but about animals because our professor of zoology was an incompetent zoologist. So on a day we were talking about sociobiology. And the professor made a suggestion to us, to read "Sociobiology, the new synthesis" by E. O. Wilson.

Now, the book was relative rapid in my possession but I had troubles with reading it. Again to the professor. "Maybe it is to technical for you" he said "but maybe another book of the same author will be better for you... It is called "The Insect Societies."". That time I read the book completely and I became interested in those little crawling ants...

One year later, when going on a geology camp for a few days, I had copies with me from "The Insect Societies" about ants and they stayed as "important" in the rest of my life...

What were my first ant genera I got interested in?

That is a relative easy question. It were Myrmecia and Nothomyrmecia, the first genera with a more general review in "The Insect Societies." And what a picture they started with in that book... They are the more primitive Australian ants and what a story when they were talking about the search for new specimens of Nothomyrmecia... But fairly quick the fascination shifted to other genera, e.g. like Anomma, with all the publications of van Boven, even those in the University Library of Leuven, and more general the genus Solenopsis... This last genus came later back with the still interesting species of Fire Ants, the subgenus Solenopsis (Solenopsis). And then came species of still more genera...

But to take you off from this shifting story, maybe I should tell you about my first big online "story" on internet. It was about the extreme, workerless inquilines and it started in 2002 on The Ant Farm. The Ant Farm still exist but with a different provider, nl. www.tapatalk.com/groups/antfarm . If you want to clean up your English you can go and have a look there...

But then, my interesse in the genus Teleutomyrmex started to take "over" my life. I got to these animals not through "The Insect Societies" but slowly in the period 1989-1991, especially with the little book Kutter, H., 1968 (“1969”), “Die sozialparasitischen Ameisen der Schweiz.” Neujahrsblatt herausgegeben von der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Zürich auf das Jahr 1969, vol. 171, (Ausgegeben am 31. Dezember 1968), p. 1-62. I started to read the original articles and got to the point were I am now, still a Teleutomyrmex-fanatic.