Jim Wetterer has a paper out in Myrmecological News detailing the global spread of the ghost ant Tapinoma melanocephalum. This diminutive dolichoderine is quite possibly the most widely distributed ant in the world, a hitchhiker on human globalization, thriving in the wake of human-wrought ecological destruction. Their cosmopolitan dominance reflects our own.
Oddly enough, we still don't even know where they originally lived.
Ghost Ants - photo by Picasa user Aimeric
citation: Wetterer, J. K. 2008. Worldwide spread of the ghost ant Tapinoma melanocephalum (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Myrmecological News 12, 23-33.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Aptinoma antongil Fisher 2009
Brian Fisher has a paper out in Zootaxa this week describing a pair of new ant genera from Madagascar. Aptinoma and Ravavy are small ants in the subfamily dolichoderinae related to Tapinoma and Technomyrmex. Apparently, the backstory on these new ants is that…
Finally, a solid taxonomy for the Australian Aphaenogaster:
Â
Shattuck, S. 2008. Australian ants of the genus Aphaenogaster (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Zootaxa 1677: 25-25.
ABSTRACT: The Australian species of the myrmicine ant genus Aphaenogaster Mayr are revised. Eight species are recognised, four…
This week the blogosphere is busy recapping 2007 with lists of top stories in politics, news, and celebrity haircuts. In all the hoopla surrounding year's end, somehow everyone seems to have forgotten the ants, even though the, um, fast-paced world of Myrmecology has made plenty of discoveries…
Amyrmex: Dolichoderinae? Leptanilloidinae? Who knew?
A paper out this week in Zootaxa reminds us of the hazards of excessive reliance on the worker caste for ant taxonomy. Phil Ward and Seán Brady sequenced DNA from few genes from the enigmatic Amyrmex, a rarely-collected dolichoderine genus…
"Oddly enough, we still donât even know where they originally lived."
That's a common theme with synanthropic species, unfortunately. Just look at all those misnamed cockroaches: Blatta orientalis (From the Orient? Maybe.), Blattella germanica (From Germany? Almost definitely not), Periplaneta americana (Um, yeah - probably not American originally). Then there are the cosmopolitan parasitoid Hymenoptera I work on: Evania appendigaster (L.) (Evaniidae), Prosevania fuscipes (Illiger, 1807) (Evaniidae), Trichosteresis glabra (Boheman, 1832) (Megaspilidae), and Aphanogmus fumipennis Thomson, 1858 (Ceraphronidae). Where did any of these originate? Who knows. I'm not even 100% sure how we would figure that out! Maybe some sophisticated techniques borrowed from our population genetics colleagues...I have some ideas anyway of things to try.