Pheidole fervens Smith, 1858

Hamer, Matthew T., Lee, Jonathan Hon Chung, Tse, Cheung Yau Leo, Silva, Thiago S. R. & Guénard, Benoit, 2022, Remarkable diversity in a little red dot: a comprehensive checklist of known ant species in Singapore (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) with notes on ecology and taxonomy, Asian Myrmecology (e 015006) 15, pp. 1-152 : 91

publication ID	https://doi.org/10.20362/am.015006
DOI	https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15474361
persistent identifier	https://treatment.plazi.org/id/03B68783-310F-FFFF-FF67-7A9CFD3BFB17
treatment provided by	Felipe
scientific name	Pheidole fervens Smith, 1858
status

Treatment

Pheidole fervens Smith, 1858 View in CoL

Material examined. Labrador beach, 29 Apr 1985, D.H. Murphy leg., ZRC _HYM_0000728 .

Material not physically examined. Syntypes – CASENT0901519-0901520, ANTC21037 ( BMNH) .

Literature. Type – Smith (1858). Viehmeyer (1916), Overbeck (1924) [both as Pheidole javana ]. Eguchi (2001, 2004); Sarnat et al. (2015).

Localities. Bukit Timah Road; Labrador beach.

Habitat/Ecology. This species is associated with a wide variety of habitats in Singapore, especially in heavily disturbed areas in urban and/ or semi-urban settings such as public beaches, roadsides, and forest edges. Nests were typically found in soil or under stones, also in rotten wood, and in dead tree stumps filled with ‘humus’ or other debris. In one instance, a colony was observed underneath a decaying fallen tree, ‘partly in the tree’ and ‘partly in (sic) the ground.’

Remarks. Type locality in Singapore. Substantial numbers of specimens of this species were observed amongst existing unsorted and uncatalogued museum material. Thus it could be inferred that the species is much more common than was represented by official catalogued records of the ZRC, at the time of writing. It is known as a globally widespread and potentially invasive species, and could be native to a large part of the Indomalayan bioregion or the Oceanic region ( Sarnat et al. 2015).