A subterranean ant Acanthostichus Mayr, 1887 is revealed in Costa Rica
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Insectes Sociaux
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A subterranean ant Acanthostichus Mayr, 1887 is revealed in Costa Rica M. A. Smith1 · W. Hallwachs2 · D. H. Janzen2 · J. T. Longino3 · M. G. Branstetter4 Received: 25 October 2019 / Revised: 16 January 2020 / Accepted: 28 January 2020 © This is a U.S. government work and its text is not subject to copyright protection in the United States; however, its text may be subject to foreign copyright protection 2020
Abstract In this study, pinned insect specimens derived from Malaise traps in Costa Rica were identified using a collaborative process, resulting in a significant addition to our understanding of the range of a rare Neotropical ant genus. The specimens were imaged and the COI barcode region of mitochondrial DNA was sequenced. The images and sequence data were shared in an open access database. Public exposure from such a digitally based approach to biodiversity analysis allowed us to collaboratively uncover the first known Costa Rican occurrence of the subterranean ant genus Acanthostichus, filling in a heretofore confusing hole in its geographic range. Keywords Formicidae · Barcode · Area de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG) For insect species that are known only from the type collection, the data associated with these type specimens represent the entirety of what we know about the ecology of the species. Currently, 20% of all species are known only from the types (Deng et al. 2019). Thus, much of the value enclosed in natural history collections, museums and herbaria come from the iterative analysis of insects on pins (Meineke et al. 2019). In this study, a new genus for Costa Rica was uncovered when pinned insect specimens from an ongoing inventory were imaged and sequenced and then the data were shared in a publicly available database. This digitally driven “crowd-sourcing” approach to biodiversity analysis allowed us to discover the first Costa Rican occurrence of a subterranean genus of ants and to fill in a previously confusing hole in its geographic range. Species in the ant genus Acanthostichus Mayr 1887 are subterranean and widely distributed, from the southern * M. A. Smith [email protected] 1
Department of Integrative Biology, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON N1G 2W1, Canada
2
Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
3
Department of Biology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA
4
USDA‑ARS Pollinating Insects Research Unit, Utah State University, Logan, UT 84322, USA
United States to northern Argentina (Borowiec 2016; MacKay 1996) (Fig. 1). However, despite this broad distribution, it is uncommon to collect Acanthostichus, and our understanding of their distribution contains significant gaps. For example, despite many years of research and sampling by multiple investigators, the genus has never been documented in Costa Rica (http://antmaps.org/index.html?mode=diver sity&genus=Acanthostichus). Using a Townes-style Malaise trap, which passively collects bulk samples of mostly flying insects, we co
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