Tetramorium sp.

Schär, Sämi, Menchetti, Mattia, Schifani, Enrico, Hinojosa, Joan Carles, Platania, Leonardo, Dapporto, Leonardo & Vila, Roger, 2020, Integrative biodiversity inventory of ants from a Sicilian archipelago reveals high diversity on young volcanic islands (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), Organisms Diversity & Evolution (New York, N. Y.) 20 (3), pp. 405-416 : 414

Tetramorium sp.

A sample of the genus Tetramorium from a site in Calabria, mainland Italy (Bova, specimen 149, see ESM 1 for image), could not be identified with certainty. Visually, this worker resembles T. punctatum due to its small size, yellowish colour and smooth integument. However, it is genetically distinct (10% divergence) and, according to mtDNA, more closely related to T. semilaeve ( Fig. 2 ). On the other hand, T. diomedeum cannot be safely excluded in this case, a taxon of somewhat uncertain identity thought to be related to T. ferox ( Csösz and Schulz 2010) . Thus, future improvement of the taxonomic knowledge of the genus Tetramorium may help to identify this sample or evaluate its status as a potentially undescribed species.

Figures

Fig. 2 Maximum likelihood tree of 143 DNA barcodes belonging to 44 ant taxa. The scale bar indicates the number of changes per site. The colours given at nodes show % node support from 1000 bootstrap replicates.