The internal phylogeny of ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)

Abstract

Abstract. The higher phylogeny of the Formicidae was analysed using 68 characters and 19 taxa: the 14 currently recognized ant subfamilies plus 5 potentially critical infrasubfamilial taxa. The results justified the recognition of 3 additional subfamilies: Aenictogitoninae Ashmead (new status), Apomyrminae Dlussky & Fedoseeva (new status), and Leptanilloidinae Bolton (new subfamily). A second analysis on these better delimited 17 subfamilies resulted in 24 equally most parsimonious trees. All trees showed a basal division of extant Formicidae into two groups, the first containing (Myrmicinae, Pseudomyrmecinae, Nothomyrmeciinae, Myrmeciinae, Formicinae, Dolichoderinae, Aneuretinae) and the second the remaining subfamilies. Clades appearing within these groups included the Cerapachyinae plus ‘army ants’, the Nothomyrmeciinae plus Myrmeciinae, the ‘formicoid’ subfamilies (Aneuretinae + Dolichoderinae + Formicinae), and the Old World army ants (Aenictinae + Aenictogitoninae + Doryline), but relationships within the last two groups were not resolved, and the relative positions of the Apomyrminae, Leptanillinae and Ponerinae remained ambiguous. Moreover, a bootstrap analysis produced a consensus tree in which all branches were represented in proportions much lower than 95%. A reconstruction of the ground plan of the Formicidae indicated that the most specialized of all recent ants are the members of the subfamily Dorylinae and the least specialized ones are the monotypic Apomyrminae.

Contributions to the knowledge of Formicidae (Hymenoptera, Aculeata): a new diagnosis of the family, the first global male-based key to subfamilies, and a treatment of early branching lineages

“…Apomyrma, in its original description (Brown et al 1971), was proposed to be closely related to the Amblyoponinae (then Amblyoponini), a contention supported by Wheeler & Wheeler (1985) and Hölldobler & Wilson (1990). other authors demurred, placing the genus in its own tribe (Apomyrmini) in the Ponerinae sensu lato (dlussky & Fedoseeva 1988) and in the Leptanillinae (Bolton 1990b;, and eventually in its own subfamily, Apomyrminae (Baroni urbani et al 1992;Bolton 1994Bolton , 2003. the "Apomyrma" sequences used by Saux et al (2004) were contaminated (P.S.…”

“…unlike the remainder of the leg cuticle, this patch was clearly thick and opaque. Recorded as absent by Baroni-urbani et al (1992), not recorded by Billen et al (2013). Future specimens of Martialis workers should be subjected to detailed SEM and tEM study.…”

“…As posited by Bolton (1994), "it is a truism that [ants] occupy a position among the terrestrial invertebrates equivalent to that occupied by our species among the vertebrates". the higher taxonomy and internal phylogeny of the Formicidae has stabilized significantly in the past few decades due to the active study of ant systematics at the macro scale (Baroni urbani et al 1992;Bolton 1994Bolton , 2003Moreau et al 2006;Brady et al 2006;Ward et al 2010;Schmidt 2013;Schmidt & Shattuck 2014;Brady et al 2014;Ward et al 2015), spurred by the pioneering morphological studies of the family by Bolton (1990aBolton ( , 1990bBolton ( , 1990cBolton ( , 1994Bolton ( , 2003. the relationship of the Formicidae with other aculeate families is still rather liquid (see references in Ward 2014), but a recent phylogenomic study supports a sister-group relationship with the Apoidea (Johnson et al 2013).…”

Brood stimulation controls the phasic reproductive cycle of the parthenogenetic ant Cerapachys biroi

“…First, Cerapachyinae are phylogenetically related to army ants, both taxa belonging to the same monophyletic doryline section (Bolton, 1990;Baroni Urbani et al, 1992;Grimaldi et al, 1997;Brady, 2003). Their specialised predatory behaviour, especially the grouprecruitment raiding, was considered as an early stage towards the evolution of the legionary syndrome, leading to the huge ecitonine and doryline societies (Wilson, 1958a,b;Hölldo-bler and Wilson, 1990).…”

Aenictus yangi sp. n. – a new species of the A. ceylonicus species group (Hymenoptera, Formicidae, Dorylinae) from Yunnan, China

“…Mayr 1865;Dalla Torre 1893;Emery 1895;Borgmeier 1954). In the last decades it was mostly considered as the only genus of the subfamily Aenictinae (Bolton 1990(Bolton , 1995Baroni Urbani et al 1992) until the recent molecular phylogeny of Brady et al (2014), which showed that Aenictus belongs to a monophyletic group containing all dorylomorph genera now placed in the subfamily Dorylinae.…”