ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Ecol. Evol.
Sec. Paleoecology
Description of fossil amber with ant syninclusions
Provisionally accepted
- 1Animal Health, Institute for Research on Game Resources, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Ciudad Real, Spain
- 2Universidad de Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain
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The close relationships and interactions between multiple species can have important impacts on ecosystems. Fossil amber syninclusions (when multiple organisms are preserved together within the same fossil amber piece) sometimes preserves such interactions. Studying fossil interactions may thus give us hints of the ecosystems of the past. In this study, we describe six cases in fossil amber (Case 1, Baltic amber, Paleocene, Eocene, 55.8 – 33.9 Mya; Cases 2-4 and 6, Burmese amber, Cretaceous, ca. 99 Mya; Case 5, Dominican amber, Oligocene, 33.9 – 23.03 Mya) with ant syninclusions. Ants are eusocial insects of the family Formicidae considered an ecologically important species with diversity since their origin in late Mesozoic and eusociality in the Early Cretaceous (120 Mya). Morphologically identified organisms in fossil amber with Stem†, Hell† or Crown ant syninclusions included mites, wasp, plants (Case 1), spider (Case 2), land snail, millipede, unclassified insects (Case 3), mite, plants (Case 4), termites, mosquitoes, mite, unclassified insects (Case 5), and Neuroptera larva, spider, wasp, unclassified insects (Case 6). However, does syninclusions reflect a random process or biological interactions between different organisms? To address this question, we characterized syninclusions with ants and multiple organisms in fossil amber. This implies the coexistence and evolution since Cretaceous with possible relationships with commensalism, phoresis and parasitism between ants and other organisms.
Keywords: Baltic amber, Burmese amber, Dominican amber, evolution, Formicidae, insect, Interaction, Syninclusion
Received: 21 Oct 2025; Accepted: 06 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 De La Fuente and Estrada-Peña. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jose De La Fuente
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