The Caucaso-Anatolian slave-making ant Myrmoxenus tamarae (Arnoldi, 1968) and its more widely distributed congener Myrmo
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The Caucaso-Anatolian slave-making ant Myrmoxenus tamarae (Arnoldi, 1968) and its more widely distributed congener Myrmoxenus ravouxi (André, 1896): a multidisciplinary comparison (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) Nana Gratiashvili & Abel Bernadou & Masaki Suefuji & Bernhard Seifert & Jürgen Heinze
Received: 13 December 2013 / Accepted: 23 April 2014 / Published online: 29 June 2014 # Gesellschaft für Biologische Systematik 2014
Abstract A small minority of the presently recognized ∼12,500 species of ants are slave-makers, which permanently depend on the help of “slave workers,” that is workers of other ant species, which they pillage as brood from their nests in well-organized slave raids. The genus Myrmoxenus is one of the most species-rich taxa of slave-making ants, but individual species are often not well-delimited. Here, we compare behavior, morphometry, and nuclear and mtDNA sequences between two taxa of Myrmoxenus: Myrmoxenus tamarae (Arnoldi, 1968), known only from its type locality in Georgia, and the wide-spread M. ravouxi (André, 1896) to determine if the former might simply represent a Caucasian variant of the latter. Workers of the two taxa differed clearly in locomotor activity and slightly also in morphometry, while genetic investigations with nuclear and mitochondrial genes revealed only a weak differentiation. Given that Myrmoxenus appears to be a genus with a relatively recent radiation, we suggest to conservatively keep the present taxonomic situation with M. ravouxi and M. tamarae as separate species. The latter would then include specimens from Eastern Turkey and probably also Ukraine. Further studies, in particular in Greece and
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13127-014-0174-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. N. Gratiashvili : A. Bernadou : M. Suefuji : J. Heinze Biologie I, Universität Regensburg, 93040 Regensburg, Germany N. Gratiashvili (*) Institute of Zoology, Ilia State University, Giorgi Tsereteli 3, 0162 Tbilisi, Georgia e-mail: [email protected] B. Seifert Senckenberg Museum für Naturkunde Görlitz, Am Museum 1, 02826 Görlitz, Germany
Turkey, might help to clarify the status of these endangered ants. Keywords Myrmoxenus . Slave-making ants . Dulosis . Phylogeography
Introduction About 150 of the more than 12,500 species of ants are social parasites, which temporarily or permanently depend on the help of workers from other ant species (Hölldobler and Wilson 1990; Buschinger 2009). The myrmicine tribe Formicoxenini is particularly rich in social parasites, with six or more separately evolved workerless inquilines and at least six convergent origins of slave-making (dulosis) (Beibl et al. 2005). Among the slave-making genera, Myrmoxenus Ruzsky, 1902 (formerly Epimyrma) is of particular interest because of its wide geographical range and the large diversity of its life histories. Young Myrmoxenus queens seek adoption into nests of Temnothorax ants, where they kill the resident
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