Skip to main content Skip to main navigation menu Skip to site footer
Type: Articles
Published: 2009-09-04
Page range: 41–57
Abstract views: 36
PDF downloaded: 1

The ant genus Stenamma Westwood (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) redefined, with a description of a new genus Propodilobus

Department of Entomology, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA
Hymenoptera ant taxonomy molecular phylogenetics Myrmicinae Stenamma Lordomyrma Propodilobus

Abstract

The myrmicine ant genus Stenamma Westwood is redefined and a new diagnosis of the worker caste is presented. Justified by both morphology and molecular data, two species are removed from Stenamma and transferred to the genus Lordomyrma Emery: L. bhutanensis (Baroni Urbani) comb. n. and L. sinensis (Ma, Xu, Makio & DuBois) comb. n. Based on compelling differences in morphology, a third species originally described in Stenamma is transferred to the genus Propodilobus gen. n.: P. pingorum (DuBois) comb. n. Molecular results also indicate that Stenamma, as newly defined here, is a monophyletic genus that forms a clade with Aphaenogaster Mayr and Messor Forel. Additional notes on the diversity and distributions of Stenamma, Lordomyrma, and Propodilobus are provided.

References

  1. Arnol'di, K.V. (1975) A review of the genus Stenamma (Hymenoptera, Formicidae) of the USSR and a description of new species. Zoologicheskii Zhurnal, 54, 1819–1829.

    Bolton, B. (1981) A review of six minor genera of Myrmicinae (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) in the Ethiopian zoogeographical region. Bulletin of the british Museum (Natural History) (Entomology), 43, 245–307.

    Bolton, B. (1994) Identification guide to the ant genera of the world. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 222 pp.

    Bolton, B. (2003) Synopsis and classification of Formicidae. Memoirs of the American Entomological Institute, Gainesville, Florida, 370 pp.

    Brady, S.G., Schultz, T.R., Fisher, B.L. & Ward, P.S. (2006) Evaluating alternative hypotheses for the early evolution and diversification of ants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103, 18172–18177.

    DuBois, M.B. (1998) A revision of the ant genus Stenamma in the Palaearctic and Oriental regions. Sociobiology, 32, 193–403.

    Jeanmougin, F., Thompson, J.D., Gouy, M., Higgins, D.G. & Gibson, T.J. (1998) Multiple sequence alignment with Clustal X. Trends in Biochemical Sciences, 23, 403–405.

    Ma, L.-B., Xu, S.-Q., Makio, T. & Dubois, M.B. (2007) A new species of the genus Stenamma (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) from China. Sociobiology, 50, 371–377.

    Maddison, D.R. & Maddison, W.P. (2005) MacClade. v. 4.08. Sinauer, Sunderland, Massachusetts.

    Moreau, C.S., Bell, C.D., Vila, R., Archiblad, S.B. & Pierce, N.E. (2006) Phylogeny of the ants: Diversification in the age of the angiosperms. Science, 312, 101–104.

    Nylander, J.A.A. (2004a) Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of combined data. Systematic Biology, 53, 47–67.

    Nylander, J.A.A. (2004b) MrModeltest v. 2. Program distributed by the author, Evolutionary Biology Centre, Uppsala University.

    Posada, D. & Crandall, K.A. (1998) Modeltest: testing the model of DNA substitution. Bioinformatics, 14, 817–818.

    Rambaut, A. & Drummond, A.J. (2007) Tracer. v. 1.4. Available from http://beast.bio.ed.ac.uk/Tracer.

    Ronquist, F. & Huelsenbeck, J.P. (2003) MrBayes 3: Bayesian phylogenetic inference under mixed models. Bioinformatics, 19, 1572–1574.

    Sarnat, E. (2006) Lordomyrma (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) of the Fiji Islands. Bishop Museum Occasional Papers, 90, 9–42.

    Smith, M.R. (1957) Revision of the genus Stenamma Westwood in America north of Mexico (Hymenoptera, Formicidae). American Midland Naturalist, 57, 133–174.

    Smith, M.R. (1962) A remarkable new Stenamma from Costa Rica, with pertinent facts on other Mexican and Central American species (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Journal of the New York Entomological Society, 70, 33–38.

    Snelling, R.R. (1973) Studies on California ants. 7. The genus Stenamma (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Contributions in Science (Los Angeles), 245, 1–38.

    Stamatakis, A., Hoover, P. & Rougemont, J. (2008) A rapid bootstrap algorithm for the RAxML web servers. Systematic Biology, 57, 758–771.

    Taylor, R.W. (2009) Ants of the genus Lordomyrma Emery (1) Generic synonymy, composition and distribution, with notes on Ancyridris Wheler and Cyphoidris Weber (Hymenoptera: formicidae: Myrmicinae). Zootaxa, 1979, 16–28.

    Ward, P.S. (2007) Phylogeny, classification, and species-level taxonomy of ants. Zootaxa, 1668, 549–563.