Myrmica luteola Kupyanskaya, 1990

Chen, Zhilin, Zhou, Shanyi & Huang, Jianhua, 2016, Seven species new to science and one newly recorded species of the ant genus Myrmica Latreille, 1804 from China, with proposal of a new synonym (Hymenoptera, Formicidae), ZooKeys 551, pp. 85-128 : 93

Taxon classification Animalia ORDO FAMILIA

Myrmica luteola Kupyanskaya, 1990 Figures 1-4

Myrmica luteola Kupyanskaya, 1990: 103, Figs 16, 17 (w.q.) RUSSIA; 2003: 239; Radchenko and Elmes 2010: 197.

Myrmica zhengi Ma & Xu, 2011: 795, figs 1−5 (w.m.) CHINA. syn. n.

Material examined.

Myrmica zhengi : paratypes, 4 workers: Foping Nature Reserve (33°42'N, 107°48'E), Shaanxi Province, China. 23.vii.2006, leg. Libin Ma, No. G060078 ; 3 workers: Qin Ling , Shaanxi Province, China. 27.vii.2006, leg. Zhao Tan, No. G060158 ; 1 worker, identification and presentation by Alexander G. Radchenko, but lack of collecting information.

Differential diagnosis.

As Radchenko and Elmes (2010) noted, this species is very easy to distinguish from all other Myrmica species due to its unique features, i.e. strongly reduced and simple non-pectinate spurs on the middle and hind tibiae, and somewhat developed ventral petiolar and postpetiolar processes. Moreover, the workers show another feature that very rarely occurs in Myrmica species: the base of the first gastral tergite is distinctly longitudinally striated. Ma and Xu (2011) described Myrmica zhengi from Shaanxi perhaps without reading the papers by Kupyanskaya (1990) and Radchenko et al. (2003a, 2010). These three important references are also not cited by Ma & Xu, so that they missed the key features. After a careful comparison of the five workers paratype and one queen paratype of Myrmica zhengi with the original morphological descriptions and the identified specimens of Myrmica luteola by Prof. Alexander G. Radchenko (Museum and Institute of Zoology Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland), we found no differences between them; therefore, we propose Myrmica zhengi as a junior synonym of Myrmica luteola .