To find candidates I looked in general entomology text books and asked professors and fellow graduate students in University of Florida's Entomology and Nematology Department. In the case of Pogonomyrmex owyheei , worker ants live only one or two years but colonies themselves live for several decades. Queens live as long as the colony. In each case the researchers determined whether the mounds remained active or the colonies had perished. The weakness of this estimate is that colony mortality during the two-year monitoring period may have been unusually low.
Ant colonies are apparently very long lived once they became established.
I thank Dr. H. McAuslane, Dr. J. Nation and Dr. T. J. Walker for their suggestions on this paper. I am also grateful to Elke W. Fulton for translating the needed paper which was printed in German. References Cited Chew, R. M. 1987 . Population dynamics of colonies of three species of ants in desertified grassland, southeastern Arizona, 1958-1981. Lavigne, R.J. 1969 .