New species discovered!
PhD student of the Department of Biology describes Strumigenys ant species in Ecuador
2021/05/11
With a length of only a few millimeters, the newly discovered ant species Strumigenys ayersthey is a small and inconspicuous inhabitant of the Ecuadorian rainforest. But a closer look quickly reveals that there is more to it: the ant belongs to the so-called snapping jaw ants, a group of ants that has unusually long jaws and can close them at extremely high speeds. The newly found species was described in the latest issue of the journal “Zookeys”. The species was named in honor of the recently deceased artist Jeremy Ayers.
Discoverer Philipp Hönle, a PhD student in the Department of Biology at TU Darmstadt, didn't know what he was looking at at first. He found the unusual specimen of the Strumigenys snapping jaw ant in 2018 during an ecological study in northwestern Ecuador. The study is a pilot project for the international Reassembly research group on natural regeneration of rainforests, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), initiated and coordinated by Professor Nico Blüthgen at TU Darmstadt. Ants are one of the many groups of organisms being researched in the project, as they are involved in countless ecologically relevant interactions and are one of the most abundant groups of insects in forests.
Published in ...
Booher DB, Hoenle PO (2021) A new species group of Strumigenys (Hymenoptera, Formicidae) from Ecuador, with a description of its mandible morphology. ZooKeys 1036: 1-19. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.1036.62034
