Cephalotes serraticeps (Smith, 1858)

Pazmiño-Palomino, Alex & Troya, Adrian, 2022, Ants of Ecuador: new species records for a megadiverse country in South America, Revista Brasileira de Entomologia (e 20210089) 66 (2), pp. 1-15 : 7

Cephalotes serraticeps (Smith, 1858)

Figs. 11 , 21C

Material examined. Ecuador. Orellana: Parque Nacional Yasuní, 27 Km SSE Limoncocha , 0.625226°S, 76.4967°W, 207m, 7☿, 2008-05-21, Troya, A., fogging, ( MEPN) .

Comments. This species is a member of the C. atratus clade, sensu De Andrade & Baroni Urbani (1999), and confirmed in Oliveira et al. (2021), and is characterized mainly by the bispinose cephalic corners; presence of dorsal stout spines both on the pronotum and propodeum; usually entirely jet-black body lacking scales and dense pubescence; and flattened meso- and metabasitarsi which are distally narrowed. Although the soldiers and queens ofC. serraticeps are easily separated from those in its sister species C. alfaroi Emery by the strongly crenulate frontal lobes (absent in C. alfaroi ), the workers of both species are not so easily distinguished. A longitudinal, well-impressed, dorsal pronotal carina present only in workers of C. serraticeps , can be of aid. Virtually nothing is known about the natural history of this species. The workers from Ecuador were collected through canopy fogging in a temporarily flooded Amazonian forest in the beginning of the rainy season.Previous records of this species include regions of the Colombian Amazonia and Orinoquia ( Sandoval-Gómez and Sánchez-Restrepo, 2019), and Amazonian lowland forests in southern Peru and Brazil (Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Maranhão, Rondônia, Pará) ( De Andrade and Baroni Urbani, 1999; Oliveira et al. 2021). A soldier (CASENT0922509) collected by P. Ward at Corcovado National Park, Costa Rica, has been recently uploaded to AntWeb (AntWeb, 2021).

Figures

Figure 11 Cephalotes serraticeps (Smith) (worker, MEPN 28224): A) dorsal view, B) frontal view, C) profile.Images by Vladimir Carvajal.Scale bars = 1 mm.

Figure 21 Geographic distribution of the species examined in the present study.