Morphology and phenology of sexuals and new distribution data on the blind Mediterranean ant Hypoponera abeillei (Hymenoptera, Formicidae)

Abstract

Hypoponera abeillei is the sole member of the otherwise exclusively Afrotropical abeillei group to occur in the West-Palearctic and since its first description on the basis of two Corsican workers in 1881, it remained little-known. Workers of this species are thought to entirely lack eyes, a rare trait among ants of the region, yet their lifestyle remains undocumented. On the other hand, the male caste has been described from 4 Tunisian specimens in 1921, and queens remained so far undescribed. We present an updated description of the male caste based on 45 specimens and a first description of the queen caste based on 14 specimens. The H. abeillei material we examined comes from Italy, Spain and Malta (mostly originating from coastal localities), and comprises 11 inedit distribution records, including the first findings in the islands of Mallorca, Malta and Sardinia. Moreover, we provide a first phenological overview of the species’ nuptial flights. Our data show that H. abeillei sexuals flight during the summer, mostly in August, and demonstrate that they can easily be distinguished from all the other Hypoponera species inhabiting the Mediterranean region based on their morphology. The remarkable diversity of Mediterranean Hypoponera males and queens suggest that sexuals may have a role in future attempts to understand relationships within this genus, yet the number of species in which sexual castes are documented is still extremely reduced.

Integrating morphology with phylogenomics to describe four island endemic species of Temnothorax from Sicily and Malta (Hymenoptera, Formicidae)

“…In fact, male morphology may, at least occasionally, be a powerful source of information on species group delimitation in some other ant genera (e.g., Alicata & Schifani 2019). Moreover, dispersing sexuals can occasionally prove very important to detect the presence of certain ant species (Espadaler & López-Soria 1991;Schifani et al 2021b;Menchetti et al 2022). However, less than 20% of the descriptions of Temnothorax of the last 20 years included the male caste (Bolton 2021), and even for well-studied regions like Central Europe no keys based on males are available yet (Seifert 2018).…”