Seifert, B.

A review of the West Palaearctic species of the ant genus Bothriomyrmex Emery, 1869 (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)

The taxonomic status of 32 taxa of the ant genus Bothriomyrmex from Europe, North Africa, Asia Minor, and the Middle East was assessed and commented. Four European species were clearly distinguished by high-performance stereomicroscopy, reproducible numeric recording of 18 phenotypical characters and multivariate analyses: B. meridionalis Roger, 1863, B. atlantis Forel, 1894, B. communistus Santschi, 1919 and B. corsicus Santschi, 1923. Type investigation and evaluation of original descriptions established that there is definitely no Palaearctic taxon described before 31 March 1923 which is a senior synonym to any of these four names. Principal component (PCA) and discriminant analyses (DA) of 204 workers and 58 gynes clearly showed the following synonymies (in brackets posterior probabilities of type specimens in discriminant analyses): B. meridionalis var. adriaca Santschi, 1922 (p = 1.000) and B. corsicus ssp. mohelensis NOVÁK, 1941 (p = 1.000) are synonyms of B. communistus Santschi, 1919 (p = 1.000) while B. meridionalis ssp. gibbus Soudek, 1924 (p = 0.999), B. corsicus ssp. gallicus Emery, 1925 (p = 1.000), B. corsicus var. ligurica Emery, 1925 (p = 1.000), and B. menozzii Emery, 1925 (p = 1.000) are synonyms of B. corsicus Santschi, 1923 (p = 1.000). The performance of the Da was unexpectedly strong: After reduction to eight morphological characters, any individual of B. communistus and B. corsicus was classified with posterior probabilities of p > 0.960 and the error rate in leave-one-out cross-validation was 0%. Furthermore, no specimen was allocated to a wrong cluster in PCA.

Open access, licensed under CC BY 4.0. © 2012 The Author(s).

Bothriomyrmex, ant taxonomy, morphometrics, temporary social parasite.