Prionopelta punctulata Mayr, 1866

Prionopelta punctulata Mayr, 1866 View in CoL

In March 12 th, 1972 Diniz and Willian collected a series of Prionopelta ants with a combination of dark and desaturated tones of orange/red and a main grayish color ( Fig. 2 View Figure 2 D-F) at the municipality of Mirassol, São Paulo state ( Fig. 3 View Figure 3 ). The specimens are currently hosted at DZUP and, after disregarding the option of being preserved in liquid containing artificial colored substances, it was thought to represent a new Neotropical Prionopelta or a dark variety of an already known species.

Prionopelta species are distributed around the world’s tropics. These ants nest and forage in soil and litter, and its morphology suggest cryptobiotic habits that may reflect in depigmented ( Wong and Guénard, 2017), yellowish, reddish and brownish bodies as in other lineages of ants with similar habits ( Franco and Feitosa, 2018; Pierce et al., 2019; Chaul, 2020). Information about variation on body color are available for several developmental stages of workers ( Hölldobler and Wilson, 1986; Ito and Billen, 1998), which established that males are commonly more pigmented than females and that workers tend to be lighter than queens ( Ladino and Feitosa, 2020). In fact, variation in color patterns were important in the delimitation of some species in the genus (i.e. P. opaca Emery, 1897 View in CoL and P. talos Overson and Fisher, 2015 View in CoL ). The examination of material worldwide suggest that this attribute should be interpreted carefully in the genus, because color might vary throughout body regions and at an intraspecific level, and no melanic forms were known so far. In the Neotropics, most of the species vary from entirely light yellow ( P. minuta Ladino and Feitosa, 2020 View in CoL ) to red-brown (darker specimens of P.amabilis Borgmeier, 1949 View in CoL ), or might present dark patches in several sclerites (some individuals of P. dubia Ladino and Feitosa, 2020 View in CoL ). However, pronounced differences in body color as those found here for workers of Neotropical species have never been reported (seeBrown, 1960; Ladino and Feitosa, 2020).

Besides the dark body color of the specimens reported here, no morphological feature was markedly different from the Neotropical species already known in the genus. All the melanic forms have eleven antennomeres, excluding the options from eight to three species: Prionopelta menininha Ladino and Feitosa, 2020 View in CoL , Prionopelta punctulata Mayr, 1866 View in CoL and Prionopelta tapatia Ladino and Feitosa, 2020 View in CoL .The anterior margin of clypeus strongly projected medially, a comparatively shallow sculpturing in the head dorsum, the apically convergent margins of the subpetiolar process and its occurrence in São Paulo lead us to identify the ants as P. punctulata View in CoL . Prionopelta punctulata View in CoL include individuals with tones mainly ranging from desaturated orange to brown tones ( Fig. 2 View Figure 2 A-C). Most exemplars are known from litter and soil samples frequently collected in southern areas of Brazil. No other melanic series of P. punctulata View in CoL or for the remaining Neotropical Prionopelta species have been reported in the literature so far (Natalia Ladino, pers. obs.).