Cephalotes trichophorus De Andrade, 1999

Pazmiño-Palomino, Alex & Troya, Adrian, 2022, Ants of Ecuador: new species records for a megadiverse country in South America, Revista Brasileira de Entomologia (e 20210089) 66 (2), pp. 1-15 : 8

Cephalotes trichophorus De Andrade, 1999

Figs. 14 , 21D

Material examined. Ecuador. Orellana: Parque Nacional Yasuní , 38 km SE Limoncocha, 0.66667°S, 76.3833°W, 120m, 2☿, 2005-07-05, Argoti, A., fogging ( MEPN) .

Comments. This scantly collected species is placed in the diverse coffeae clade sensu De Andrade and Baroni Urbani (1999) and confirmed in Oliveira et al. (2021). Most of its members are extinct. Workers of C. trichophorus are morphologically very similar to those of C.setulifer Emery. The easiest way to distinguish the workers of C. trichophorus from C.setulifer is through the lateral pronotal margins: forming slight, non-spiny lamellae in C. trichophorus , while C. setulifer bears two pairs of small, feebly developed denticles anteriorly. According to the phylogeny of De Andrade and Baroni Urbani (1999), C. trichophorus is sister to C.coffeae Kempf (morphological analysis), while in Price et al. (2014) C. trichophorus is sometimes placed as sister to C. setulifer (molecular analysis), and more usually as sister to C. peruviensis De Andrade (combined morphology and molecular data) which is another related species in this clade. Although Price et al. (2014) did not include C. coffeae in their analyses is clear that morphology alone is relatively limited for clarifying relationships in these taxa which show certain degree of morphological plasticity.Nothing is known about the biology of C. trichophorus except that it has been collected in Amazonian rainforests of Brazil (Acre) using arboreal pitfall traps ( Oliveira et al., 2021). Currently examined specimens were collected through fogging in a well-preserved Amazonian rain forest. This species was previously reported only in Peru and Brazil (Acre, Amazonas) ( Andrade and Baroni Urbani, 1999; Oliveira et al., 2021).

Figures

Figure 14 Cephalotes trichophorus De Andrade (worker, MEPN28351):A) dorsal view, B) frontal view, C) profile.Images by Vladimir Carvajal.Scale bars = 1 mm.

Figure 21 Geographic distribution of the species examined in the present study.