Camponotus xerxes Forel, 1904

Sharaf, Mostafa R., Abdel-Dayem, Mahmoud S., Mohamed, Amr A., Fisher, Brian L. & Aldawood, Abdulrahman S., 2020, A Preliminary Synopsis of the Ant Fauna (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) of Qatar with Remarks on the Zoogeography, Annales Zoologici 70 (4), pp. 533-560 : 539-540

Camponotus xerxes Forel, 1904

( Fig. 7 A–C)

Camponotus maculatus r. xerxes Forel, 1904 g: 424 (w.q.) Iran. Palearctic.

Diagnosis. Worker. A species with a high degree of polymorphism ( Collingwood 1985, Collingwood and Agosti 1996, Sharaf et al. 2013). Large workers entirely dark brown to black except for the paler legs;

propodeum unicolorous dark with rest of mesosoma; underside of head without setae. Camponotus xerxes is closely related to C. fellah Emery, 1908 but can be distinguished by the absence of erect setae on the underside of head, whereas C. fellah has 1–10 setae ( Ionescu-Hirsch, 2009).

Material examined. Qatar, Msaid Road , 09.iv.2005, 24 ° 59 ’ N, 51 ° 33 ’ E, (M.S. Abdel-Dayem leg.) 7w, ( KSMA) .

Geographic distribution. A Palearctic species originally described from Iran and widely spread in several countries in the Arabian Peninsula including the KSA ( Collingwood 1985), Kuwait, Oman, UAE ( Collingwood and Agosti 1996), Qatar ( Abdel-Dayem 2007), Syria ( Tohmé and Tohmé 2000), North Africa ( Sharaf 2006), Turkey ( Karaman and Aktaç 2013), and central Asia: Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan ( Radchenko 1997 a).

Ecological and biological notes. The seasonal foraging activity of this species stretches from March to October with a peak in September ( Sharaf et al. 2013), where workers frequently forage on the milkweed tree, Calotropis procera (Aiton) W. T. Aiton (Apocynaceae) . Collingwood (1985) mentioned that the species start foraging in the early evening in the KSA.

Figures

Figure 7. Camponotus xerxes, large worker, A, body in profile B, body in dorsal view C, head in full-face view, CASENT0905292 (Will Ericson), www.AntWeb.org.