Moth flies (Diptera: Psychodidae) collected in colonies of the fire ant Solenopsis virulens (Smith) (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), with description of two new species

Abstract

Moth flies (Diptera: Psychodidae) collected in colonies of the fire ant Solenopsis virulens (Smith) (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), with description of two new species Introduction Association between Diptera and Formicidae (Hymenoptera) has been reported for many species of

Intranest mutualisms between the forest fire ant Solenopsis virulens (Fr. Smith) (Hymenoptera; Formicidae) and two families of Hemiptera (Membracidae, Monophlebidae) in Brazilian Atlantic Forest

“…This species inhabits the entire Northeast of South America and is found in forests or agroforests from the base of the Andes in Southern Bolivia to the Atlantic Coast of Bahia, Brazil (Trager 1991). Until now, no study about mutualistic and other kinds of interactions between this ant and hemipterans is available, except the description a new species of Psychodidae found in colonies of S. virulens (Pereira et al 2015). The present study provides new information and illustration about the protective behavior, and interaction between the ant S. virulens and hemipterans of the Membracidae and Monophlebidae families sampled in a remnant of the biome Atlantic Forest in Northeastern Brazil.…”

“…Solenopsis virulens (Smith) (Figure 1A) (anTweb 2021) is a fire ant species with monomorphic workers (PiTTs et al 2018). This ant builds conspicuous earthen mounds at the base of trees and herbaceous plants, fallen tree trunks and below stones (Pereira et al 2015). This species inhabits the entire Northeast of South America and is found in forests or agroforests from the base of the Andes in Southern Bolivia to the Atlantic Coast of Bahia, Brazil (Trager 1991).…”

Winged insects associated with the poorly studied forest fire ant Solenopsis virulens (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)

“…We chose to collect only the insects that were caught while the ants were still alive. Traps were inspected daily by carefully unscrewing the 50 ml transparent vial and quickly using an aspirator or forceps to collect insects that were then preserved in 70% ethanol, as described in Pereira et al (2015).…”

“…Flies were identifi ed to genus level using the Manual of Central American Diptera (Brown et al, 2009(Brown et al, , 2010. The species of Psychodidae collected were the same as those recorded by Pereira et al (2015). Hymenoptera were identifi ed using Fernández (2000) (Platigastridae classifi cation updated by Aguiar et al, 2013).…”

“…This species belongs to the fi re ant Solenopsis virulens species-group (Pitts et al, 2018) and is more poorly studied than other species of fi re ant (Fox, 2014). Only in the last decade have aspects of its biology and nests been published (Pereira et al, 2015(Pereira et al, , 2021. This ant has been collected almost exclusively in three different forest biomes in Brazil: Atlantic Forest (Resende et al, 2011), Caatinga Dry Forest (Arnan et al, 2018 and Amazonian Forest (Prado et al, 2019).…”