''Asphinctopone'' is a small

genus Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms as well as viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus comes above species and below family. In binomial nom ...

of rarely encountered Afrotropical

ant Ants are eusocial insects of the family Formicidae and, along with the related wasps and bees, belong to the order Hymenoptera. Ants evolved from vespoid wasp ancestors in the Cretaceous period. More than 13,800 of an estimated total of ...

s in the subfamily

Ponerinae Ponerinae is a subfamily of ants in the Poneromorph subfamilies group, with about 1,600 species in 47 extant genera, including '' Dinoponera gigantea'' - one of the world's largest species of ant. Mated workers have replaced the queen as the ...

Species

* '' Asphinctopone differens'' Bolton & Fisher, 2008 * '' Asphinctopone pilosa'' Hawkes, 2010 * '' Asphinctopone silvestrii'' Santschi, 1914

Habitat and distribution

The three recognized species are known from the wet forest zones of

West West or Occident is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from east and is the direction in which the Sun sets on the Earth. Etymology The word "west" is a Germanic word passed into some ...

and

Central Africa Central Africa is a subregion of the African continent comprising various countries according to different definitions. Angola, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo ...

and from the Kilindi Forest Reserve in

Tanzania Tanzania (; ), officially the United Republic of Tanzania ( sw, Jamhuri ya Muungano wa Tanzania), is a country in East Africa within the African Great Lakes region. It borders Uganda to the north; Kenya to the northeast; Comoro Islands ...

. ''Asphinctopone'' are very rarely encountered; whether this is due to actual rarity of members of the genus, or to a secretive and perhaps deeply subterranean lifestyle, is unknown. Specimens are seldom found and most samples recovered consist of only one or two workers. As a measure of its rarity, a survey of leaf litter in

Ghana Ghana (; tw, Gaana, ee, Gana), officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country in West Africa. It abuts the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, sharing borders with Ivory Coast in the west, Burkina Faso in the north, and To ...

recorded 43,824 individual ants, of which only 5 (about 0.01%) were ''Asphinctopone''. Despite this rarity, the genus is widespread in wet forest zones in leaf litter, topsoil, pieces of rotten wood and rotting vegetation on the forest floor. One worker has been found foraging in a fallen, abandoned termitary. Beyond this nothing is known of its biology. Its specialized morphology implies that it may be prey-specific, but its victims remain unknown.

Taxonomy

The genus was first described by Santschi (1914) with a single species, ''A. silvestrii''. Two more species were subsequently described: ''A. lucidus'' (Weber 1949) and A. ''lamottei'' (Bernard 1953), the latter originally ascribed by Bernard to a new genus, ''Lepidopone'', but subsequently placed in ''Asphinctopone'' by Brown (1953). In a recent revision of the genus, Bolton & Fisher (2008) synonymised all three previously described species and described one additional species, bringing the total number of described species to two. Of these ''A. differens'' (Bolton & Fisher 2008) is known only from the

holotype A holotype is a single physical example (or illustration) of an organism, known to have been used when the species (or lower-ranked taxon) was formally described. It is either the single such physical example (or illustration) or one of sever ...

(collected in the

Central African Republic The Central African Republic (CAR; ; , RCA; , or , ) is a landlocked country in Central Africa. It is bordered by Chad to the north, Sudan to the northeast, South Sudan to the southeast, the DR Congo to the south, the Republic of th ...

), while ''A. silvestrii'' (now including ''A. lucidus'' and ''A. lamottei'') has been recorded multiple times in West and Central Africa (Bolton & Fisher 2008). A third species, ''A. pilosa'', was described by Hawkes (2010) from a single specimen the Kilindi Forest Reserve (

Kilindi District Kilindi is one of eleven administrative districts of Tanga Region in Tanzania. The District covers an area of . It is bordered to the east by the Handeni District and Handeni Town Council, to the south west by the Kiteto District and north west ...

, Tanzania).

References

Bibliography

* *Bernard, F. (1953) La reserve naturelle integrale du Mt Nimba. XI. Hyménoptères Formicidae. ''Mémoires de l'Institut Français d'Afrique Noire'', 19, 165–270. * *Brown, W.L.,Jr. (1953) Characters and synonymies among the genera of ants. Part II. Breviora, 18, 1–8. * *Santschi, F. (1914) Formicides de l’Afrique occidentale et australe du voyage de Mr. le Professeur F. Silvestri. ''Bollettino del Laboratorio di Zoologia Generale e Agraria della R. Scuola Superiore d'Agricultura'', 8, 309–385. *Weber, N.A. (1949) New Ponerine Ants from Equatorial Africa. ''American Museum Novitates'', 1398, 1–9. * *

External links

* {{Taxonbar, from=Q9161245 Ponerinae Ant genera Hymenoptera of Africa