Myrmelachista schumanni Emery, 1890

Myrmelachista schumanni Emery, 1890 View in CoL

Materials

Type status: Other material. Occurrence: catalogNumber: LEUA- 00000066482 ; recordedBy: Brandon S. Arredondo; individualCount: 1; sex: female; occurrenceID: 5B1742BA-8699-5FE1-8D1B-472D1F07DD61; Taxon: scientificName: Myrmelachista schumanni ; kingdom: Animalia; phylum: Arthropoda; class: Insecta; order: Hymenoptera ; family: Formicidae ; genus: Myrmelachista ; specificEpithet: schumanni ; scientificNameAuthorship: Emery, 1890; Location: continent: South America; country: Colombia; countryCode: CO; stateProvince: Caquetá; county: Florencia; locality: Vía Florencia-Guadalupe ; verbatimElevation: 923 m; locationRemarks: Collected in leaf Litter; verbatimCoordinates: 01°46'29.8"N 75°39'9.5"W; verbatimCoordinateSystem: WGS 84; Event: samplingProtocol: Winkler; eventDate: 2023-08-12; Record Level: language: es; collectionID: RNC: 270; institutionCode: Universidad de la Amazonia (UDLA); basisOfRecord: PreservedSpecimen GoogleMaps

Diagnosis

The genus Myrmelachista is recognised by its five-toothed mandible, 9 or 10 segmented antennae, with a 3 or 4 segmented antennal club and a wedge-shaped, erect, prominent and exposed petiole (Fig. 4 View Figure 4 ).

Distribution

Information on this species is scarce. In Colombia, it was known to be present, but without specific locality data ( Fernández et al. 2019). It is reported here for the first time in the Department of Caquetá, in the Colombian Amazon Region. In the Neotropical Region, the species has also been recorded in Ecuador, Peru, Guyana and Venezuela ( Kusnezov 1953, Frederickson 2005 a, Salazar et al. 2015).

Biology

M. schumanni is recognised for its specific relationship with some plant species, forming the so-called Devil's gardens. This mutualistic interaction has been the subject of several studies ( Frederickson et al. 2005, Frederickson 2005 a, Frederickson 2005 b, Frederickson and Gordon 2007), demonstrating the impact of this relationship in tropical rainforests. The collected specimen was sampled by leaf-litter sifting in a preserved area from a cloud forest. The presence of this species in leaf litter can be incidental due to the species' foraging behaviour on vegetation, which can result in its falling to the forest floor.