Megalomyrmex emeryi Forel, 1904

Brandão, Carlos Roberto F., 2003, Further Revisionary Studies On The Ant Genus Megalomyrmex Forel (Hymenoptera: Formicidae: Myrmicinae: Solenopsidini) C R F. B Abstract, Papéis Avulsos de Zoologia (São Paulo) 43 (8), pp. 145-159 : 152

Megalomyrmex emeryi Forel, 1904

Until now, the only known specimen of the rather aberrant M. emeryi is a worker, the holotype, collected somewhere in Suriname (see Brandão, 1990). I tentatively assigned a male from southern French Guyana to this species, which has also aberrant characters in relation to the known males of other species in this group, and does not belong to any of the species in the Leoninus group known to occur in the region. It was with great surprise that I received from the LACM 6 workers clearly belonging to this rather distinctive species from Boquerón (500 m), Loreto, Peru collected by J. Schunke in July 7 to 14, 1965, and bearing a label that reads “ M. latreillei Emery, R. Hamton det.”. At first, I thought the extreme modifications could be the result of some kind of parasitism, but I am not aware of any case where parasitism might have resulted in such extreme modifications, particularly involving the characters that separate M. emeryi from all other taxa in this species group. Notwithstanding, since this new sample comes from a locality so distant from that of the holotype, I cannot rule out this hypothesis.