Monomorium subopacum ( Smith, 1858 )

Sharaf, Mostafa R., Wetterer, James K., Mohamed, AbdulAziz M. A., Georgiadis, Christos, Nasser, Mohamed G. & Aldawood, Abdulrahman S., 2024, Filling gaps in global myrmecology: ants of the Kingdom of Bahrain (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), Journal of Natural History 58 (41 - 44), pp. 1705-1786 : 1752-1754

Monomorium subopacum ( Smith, 1858)

( Figure 30 )

Myrmica subopaca Smith, 1858, p. 127 (w.q.) Portugal (Madeira I.). Palaearctic.

Diagnosis

Worker. This species can be recognised by the following characters: colour brown, varying in shade but usually gaster darker than head and mesosoma; eyes with 9–11 ommatidia in longest row; mesosoma in profile with metanotal groove feebly impressed; cephalic dorsum without standing setae behind level of frontal; mesosoma without standing setae; petiole and postpetiole each with a single pair of setae; first gastral tergite with an apical transverse row of setae; cephalic surface reticulate-granulate to shagreenate-punctulate.

Material examined

Four sites: 2; 9; 15; 31.

Geographic range. Species widely distributed in North Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, and the Afrotropical, Malagasy, and Oriental regions ( Bolton 1987). On the Arabian Peninsula, the species was recorded from the KSA ( Collingwood 1985; Sharaf et al. 2023), Oman ( Collingwood and Agosti 1996; Sharaf et al. 2018b), Yemen ( Collingwood and Agosti 1996), the UAE ( Collingwood et al. 2011), and Qatar ( Sharaf et al. 2020a).

Ecology and biology. Little is known about the ecology and biology of the species, but it was reported from a highly degraded site on the Canary Island at 850 m ( Espadaler 2007), whereas in Oman it was found foraging next to an Acacia tree in a dry valley ( Sharaf et al. 2018b). The species was described as halophilic in the Sahara ( Barech et al. 2017), but it was not collected from saline habitats on the Arabian Peninsula.

Figures

Figure 30. Monomorium subopacum. Worker. (A) Body in profile. (B) Head in full-face view, ANTWEB1041896, AntWeb.org (Michele Esposito). (C) Distribution map.