Most of the ants in and around my house are a uniform shade of dark brown nearly indistinguishable from a pure black.They're a uniform size, too, to within a millimeter.

This past year, though, I've been seeing a single ant that has an identical front two sections (AKA head and thorax) to the rest of them, but a rather distinctive back section (AKA abdomen).

You see, there is a very light stripe in the middle of that back section, and the rest of the abdomen is colored in shades of brown somewhat easier to tell apart from black than the normal coloration of the ants. Not only that, the abdomen is noticeably larger than those of the surrounding ants; maybe by as much as a millimeter, but at least something visible.

I learned yesterday that if you look very closely you can see straight though the stripe. That's why it's so lightly colored--- it isn't colored at all, and I've just been seeing the ant on white surfaces. I got a good look at it on a pink surface yesterday, and it even stuck around long enough for me to grab a sketchbook and pencil and draw it. (I colored the sketch later, though, so the shades of brown aren't very accurate; not that I could've got it right with my set of colored pencils anyway.)

The ant is accepted by the other ants as part of the colony, though as far as I've seen it does seem to be a bit of a loner as ants go. I'm wondering whether it's a new ant variation unique to my house. I don't know much about ant genetics or already known variations, but I've only ever seen the one, it's clearly the same as the other ants except in abdomen, and I spent at least half an hour on the internet trying to find any mention of ants with partially transparent abdomens with no success. I did eventually determine that the ants in my house are, or at least most closely match, Black House Ants (a rather accurate description, I suppose) but when I added that to my search the results stopped being things like Ghost Ants, Pharaoh Ants, and Ant Identification Guides; instead including such off topic things as Cockroaches, Termites, and general Insect Identification Guides.

(Yes, Ghost Ants, or at least the variety that somebody fed colored sugarwater and then photographed, do have partially transparent abdomens. No, it is not possible that my ant is one. First of all, those Ghost Ants are way lighter in color throughout their entire bodies than this ant is in any section except the transparent stripe. Secondly, the ghost ants appear to have a bumpy pattern to their abdomen shape; the TransparAnt has a smooth, unbroken curve just like the rest of the ants here. Third, while the Ghost Ants have their transparent section going around and under one of the previously mentioned bumps, which means one large section of transparency going under and two thinner, separated sections going over, the transparent section in this ant is a neat approximate cylinder, a little less than the length of the central third of the abdomen in which it is placed. Fourth, the ant is, again, otherwise obviously related to the other ants, which are already determined to be Black House Ants. The Ghost Ants more common on Google Images do have dark heads and midsections more like the ants in my house, including the TransparAnt, but they still have the bumpyness to the abdomen, the abdomen is overall too lightly colored, and I have seen no evidence that the transparency is in a neat cylinder rather than the same pattern as the dyed ants or even a semi-transparency of the whole abdomen. On top of that, the legs and anttenae are a bright white rather than black and seem to be proportionally thicker than the legs of the ants in my house. Also, I didn't look up the size of Ghost Ants, but from what I've read there's a large chance that they are at least double the size of the ant here)

If, by some miracle, anyone reading this is an ant expert, I would be happy to know whether this is a new and possibly unique variation or a known and established thing.

I think I will try to get some photos, though I doubt the success of it...