Wasmannia sigmoidea (Mayr)

Longino, J. T. & Fernández, F., 2007, Taxonomic review of the genus Wasmannia., Advances in ant systematics (Hymenoptera: Formicidae): Homage to E. O. Wilson - 50 years of contributions. (Memoirs of the American Entomological Institute 80), pp. 271-289 : 281

Wasmannia sigmoidea (Mayr)

Tetramorium sigmoideum Mayr (in Radoszkowsky), 1884: 33. Syntype worker: Cayenne , French Guiana (Jelski) [ NMW] (examined, one worker here designated LECTOTYPE). Combination in Wasmannia and description of queen and male: Forel, 1893: 386.

Comments

Wasmannia sigmoidea is the second oldest name in the genus and to date has been poorly characterized. It has never been satisfactorily differentiated from other species in the genus, particularly rochai . Forel (1884) identified material from St. Vincent Island in the Antilles as W. sigmoidea , and described the queen and male. We have not been able to examine the workers of this collection, but the queens match queens of sigmoidea from Puerto Rico and Costa Rica.

Kempf (1972) gives the range of sigmoidea as Guianas, Antilles St. Vincent, Grenada, and Santa Catarina state of Brazil. The Guianas are listed because of the type locality in French Guiana and some Surinam specimens he tentatively identified as sigmoidea (Kempf 1961). The St. Vincent record is based on Forel ’ s publication. We do not know the basis of the Grenada record. The Santa Catarina record is based on a published record by Mayr (1887), which is a misidentification of specimens of affinis (see under affinis ). We have examined abundant material from Puerto Rico, multiple collections from Costa Rica, and a collection from Guarico state in Venezuela. Thus the current known range of sigmoidea is circumcaribbean.

The few Costa Rican records are as follows. David Olson collected workers during his study of Winkler and pitfall trap sampling methods at La Selva Biological Station (Olson 1991, as Wasmannia sp. 1). This was the only known collection from La Selva, in spite of intensive inventory effort there (Longino et al., 2002), until an August, 2004 collection of workers and alate queens from the rootball of a palm tree in the laboratory clearing. Workers occurred in four different samples from the Project ALAS expeditions to the 500 m site on the Barva Transect: two Malaise trap samples, one flight-intercept sample, and one sweep net sample (Table 2). It is likely that sigmoidea prefers open and synanthropic habitats, hence its undersampling in Costa Rica, where sampling emphasis has been in forested habitats.