Oxyepoecus ephippiatus Albuquerque & Brandão, 2004

Oxyepoecus ephippiatus Albuquerque & Brandão, 2004 View in CoL

Materials

Type status: Other material. Occurrence: catalogNumber: LEUA- 00000066491 ; recordedBy: Kenna Martinez; individualCount: 1; sex: female; occurrenceID: 68EE000B-4A46-5F36-9032-80084D733F2D; Taxon: scientificName: Oxyepoecus ephippiatus ; kingdom: Animalia; phylum: Arthropoda; class: Insecta; order: Hymenoptera ; family: Formicidae ; genus: Oxyepoecus ; specificEpithet: ephippiatus ; scientificNameAuthorship: Albuquerque & Brandão, 2004; Location: continent: South America; country: Colombia; countryCode: CO; stateProvince: Caquetá; county: Florencia; locality: Vda. San Luis, Fca. El Carmen 1 ; verbatimElevation: 433 m; locationRemarks: Collected in leaf Litter; verbatimCoordinates: 01°40'34.2"N 75°37'39.2"W; verbatimCoordinateSystem: WGS 84; Event: samplingProtocol: Monolite / TSBF; eventDate: 2022-12-20; Record Level: language: es; collectionID: RNC: 270; institutionCode: Universidad de la Amazonia (UDLA); basisOfRecord: PreservedSpecimen GoogleMaps

Diagnosis

This species is recognised by the following characteristics: dorsum of mesosoma smooth and shiny, irregularly reticulate sculpture absent; length of head not clearly greater than width; pronotum convex and rounded above, propodeum and metapleuron with well-marked costulae; propodeum saddle-shaped; posterior border of the katepisternum and posterior face of the postpetiole smooth and shining; petiole anteroposteriorly compressed, scale-like (Fig. 13 View Figure 13 ) ( Albuquerque and Brandão 2004).

Distribution

This species is rarely collected, with only a few records from the Amazon rainforest ( Albuquerque and Brandão 2004). This is the first report of the species in Colombia and the second report of the genus in the country, which was previously known from only a single record in the Department of Meta. In the Neotropical Region, the species has also been recorded in Brazil, Ecuador and French Guiana ( Albuquerque and Brandão 2004, Salazar et al. 2015, Franco et al. 2019).

Biology

The only specimen of Oxyepoecus ephippiatus was collected in leaf litter in the Andean-Amazonian transition zone, in the lower cloud forest of the Hacha River Basin.