Vollenhovia penetrans ( Smith, 1857 )

Akbar, Shahid Ali, Bharti, Himender, Schifani, Enrico & Wachkoo, Aijaz Ahmad, 2023, Overview of the ant genus Vollenhovia (Hymenoptera, Formicidae) in India and Sri Lanka, with an illustrated key and the description of a new species, European Journal of Taxonomy 908, pp. 77-107 : 90

Vollenhovia penetrans ( Smith, 1857)

Fig. 8

Atta penetrans Smith, 1857: 77 .

Type locality: Malaysia, Borneo, Sarawak [Holotype OXUM; images of CASENT 0901383 holotype queen examined].

Aphaenogaster penetrans – Emery 1893: 104; first combination in Aphaenogaster .

Vollenhovia penetrans – Donisthorpe, 1932: 450; first combination in Vollenhovia .

Remarks

The only mention of V. penetrans in the region is that of an AntWeb specimen (CASENT0280819) verified by Bolton in 1976 ( Bharti et al. 2016). This Indan specimen was collected from the Andaman Islands by G. Rogers and housed at NHMUK and agrees well with the holotype ( Smith 1857). The species is unfortunately only known from the queen caste, which is characterized by a finely longitudinally striate head and mesosomal dorsum with oblong punctures. Vollenhovia taxonomy is almost entirely based on the worker caste, which makes the current lack of information on V. penetrans workers problematic. The worker caste is known in V. brevicornis ( Emery, 1893) and V. pertinax (Smith, 1861) from Southeastern Asia, two species that are considered extremely similar to V. penetrans to the point of being considered potential synonyms ( Wang et al. 2022). As mentioned before, known workers from the V. penetrans complex resemble V. oblonga laevithorax among the taxa treated in this study, while they differ from all the others by having a largely smooth area with sparse punctation near the posterior margin of the head and an almost entirely smooth dorsal surface of the mesosoma and metasoma. It is therefore unclear whether V. penetrans and V. oblonga laevithorax records from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands may refer to a single species.

Distribution

Borneo, India (Andaman and Nicobar Islands), Indonesia, Malaysia ( Smith 1857; Wang et al. 2022).

Figures

Fig. 8.Vollenhovia penetrans (Smith, 1857). Dealate queen from India (CASENT0280819, photographer: Shannon Hartman). A. Head, full face view. B. Habitus, lateral view. C. Habitus, dorsal view. D. Data labels of the Indian specimen.