Paratrechina longicornis ( Latreille, 1802 )

Sharaf, Mostafa R., Wetterer, James K., Mohamed, AbdulAziz M. A., Georgiadis, Christos, Nasser, Mohamed G. & Aldawood, Abdulrahman S., 2024, Filling gaps in global myrmecology: ants of the Kingdom of Bahrain (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), Journal of Natural History 58 (41 - 44), pp. 1705-1786 : 1732

Paratrechina longicornis ( Latreille, 1802)

( Figure 17 )

Formica longicornis Latreille, 1802, p. 113 (w.), Senegal. Afrotropic.

Diagnosis

Worker. Head, mesosoma, petiole and gaster dark brown to black-brown; body with feeble bluish iridescence; body slightly small (TL 2.30–3.00 mm); scapes exceptionally long, when laid back from their insertions surpassing posterior margin of head by at least one-half its length; eyes close to posterior margin of head; legs extraordinarily long; body with long, stout, scattered, suberect to erect, greyish or whitish setae.

Material examined. Twelve sites: 4; 9; 10; 13; 15; 17; 23; 25; 27; 28; 29; 30.

Geographic range. Paratrechina longicornis , of African or Asian origin, has a remarkable capacity to invade a diversity of disturbed habitats, making it one of the most successful invasive species worldwide throughout the tropics and subtropics, in both the northern and southern hemispheres ( Wetterer 2008). It has been found in all countries of the Arabian Peninsula: the KSA ( Collingwood 1985; Sharaf et al. 2023), the UAE ( Collingwood et al. 1997, 2011), Oman ( Collingwood 1985), Yemen ( Collingwood and Agosti 1996), Kuwait (unpublished data) and Qatar ( Wetterer 2008).

Ecology and biology. This species nests in both dry and humid habitats, in trash, plants, rotten wood, and soil ( Smith 1965), and under stones in irrigated public gardens, parks, and date palm plantations ( Sharaf et al. 2017); it also thrives in greenhouses, zoos, highly disturbed human-modified habitats like piles of trash, or in leaf bases of palm trees ( Deyrup 2017), in coastal human-impacted sites where debris and human detritus exist ( Jaffe 1993), and indoors, frequently in wall voids and under carpets ( Hedges 1997). It is a general scavenger; some dead workers of the genera Camponotus and Pheidole were observed inside the nest. It is also fond of sugary material and also tends honeydewproducing mealybugs and scale insects ( Smith 1965; Wetterer et al. 1999). For more details on habitats and biology see Klotz et al. (2008) and Sharaf et al. (2017).

Figures

Figure 17. Paratrechina longicornis. Worker. (A) Body in profile. (B) Head in full-face view, ANTWEB1041929, AntWeb.org (Michele Esposito). (C) Distribution map.