identifier	taxonID	type	CVterm	format	language	title	description	additionalInformationURL	UsageTerms	rights	Owner	contributor	creator	bibliographicCitation
E30CF04CFFC9D6610C4BF8B2FDA7FD59.text	E30CF04CFFC9D6610C4BF8B2FDA7FD59.taxon	http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text	http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/SPMInfoItems#GeneralDescription	text/html	en	Heteroponera dolo (Roger 1860)	<html xmlns:mods="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
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            <p> Heteroponera dolo (Roger, 1860)</p>
            <p> Species of  Heteroponera are found in the Neotropical and Australian regions. However, the highest richness for the genus is found in Brazil, specifically in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. Members of this genus are predominantly predators, but occasionally feed on plant exudates.Most species nest on the ground, mainly on rotten logs, and the colonies are relatively small, containing a few dozen individuals (Feitosa and Prada-Achiardi, 2019). </p>
            <p> Heteroponera dolo is the most common species of the genus, occurring in wet forests from southern Brazil to northern Argentina. Although coloration inHeteroponera species can vary from black (  H. carinifrons Mayr,1887 ) to pale yellow (  H.flava, Kempf, 1962 ), intraspecific variations in coloration were unknown until now. Females of  H. dolo tend to be entirely yellow (Fig. 1 A-C) and the males are black. However, during the exam of specimens deposited in the CPDC,one of us (RMF) found a series of six dark workers collected in 2002 on the soil of a fragment of Atlantic Forest in the municipality of Viçosa, Minas Gerais state. These workers are entirely black, with a golden pubescence on the gaster and iridescent reflects throughout the body, resembling some species of the Australian genus  Rhytidoponera (Feitosa, 2011) . </p>
            <p> At first, it was suspected that the series of melanic workers collected in Viçosa could represent a new species, but, except for the coloration, all the other morphological characters analyzed were entirely compatible with the diagnosis of  H. dolo (Feitosa, 2011) . Diagnostic characters easily separate  Heteroponera dolo from most species of the genus. The closest species is certainly  H. robusta Kempf, 1972 , from which  H. dolo can be quickly separated by its slightly smaller size and smooth and shiny mandibles (striated in  H. robusta ). Except for the dark series recorded here, no other aberrant forms were recorded for  H. dolo or any other species of  Heteroponerini (Rodrigo Feitosa, pers. obs). </p>
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	https://treatment.plazi.org/id/E30CF04CFFC9D6610C4BF8B2FDA7FD59	Public Domain	No known copyright restrictions apply. See Agosti, D., Egloff, W., 2009. Taxonomic information exchange and copyright: the Plazi approach. BMC Research Notes 2009, 2:53 for further explanation.		Plazi	Ladino, Natalia;Feitosa, Rodrigo Machado	Ladino, Natalia, Feitosa, Rodrigo Machado (2024): Nature’s dark artistry: melanic forms discovered in two Neotropical ant species (Hymenoptera, Formicidae). Revista Brasileira de Entomologia (e 20240068) 68 (4): 1-5, DOI: 10.1590/1806-9665-RBENT-2024-0068, URL: https://doi.org/10.1590/1806-9665-rbent-2024-0068
E30CF04CFFC8D6610C69FD1FFA3AFB45.text	E30CF04CFFC8D6610C69FD1FFA3AFB45.taxon	http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text	http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/SPMInfoItems#GeneralDescription	text/html	en	Prionopelta punctulata Mayr 1866	<html xmlns:mods="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
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            <p> Prionopelta punctulata Mayr, 1866</p>
            <p> In March 12 th, 1972 Diniz and Willian collected a series of  Prionopelta ants with a combination of dark and desaturated tones of orange/red and a main grayish color (Fig. 2 D-F) at the municipality of Mirassol, São Paulo state (Fig. 3). The specimens are currently hosted at DZUP and, after disregarding the option of being preserved in liquid containing artificial colored substances, it was thought to represent a new Neotropical  Prionopelta or a dark variety of an already known species. </p>
            <p> Prionopelta species are distributed around the world’s tropics. These ants nest and forage in soil and litter, and its morphology suggest cryptobiotic habits that may reflect in depigmented (Wong and Guénard, 2017), yellowish, reddish and brownish bodies as in other lineages of ants with similar habits (Franco and Feitosa, 2018; Pierce et al., 2019; Chaul, 2020). Information about variation on body color are available for several developmental stages of workers (Hölldobler and Wilson, 1986; Ito and Billen, 1998), which established that males are commonly more pigmented than females and that workers tend to be lighter than queens (Ladino and Feitosa, 2020). In fact, variation in color patterns were important in the delimitation of some species in the genus (i.e.  P. opaca Emery, 1897 and  P. talos Overson and Fisher, 2015 ). The examination of material worldwide suggest that this attribute should be interpreted carefully in the genus, because color might vary throughout body regions and at an intraspecific level, and no melanic forms were known so far. In the Neotropics, most of the species vary from entirely light yellow (  P. minuta Ladino and Feitosa, 2020 ) to red-brown (darker specimens of  P.amabilis Borgmeier, 1949 ), or might present dark patches in several sclerites (some individuals of  P. dubia Ladino and Feitosa, 2020 ). However, pronounced differences in body color as those found here for workers of Neotropical species have never been reported (seeBrown, 1960; Ladino and Feitosa, 2020). </p>
            <p> Besides the dark body color of the specimens reported here, no morphological feature was markedly different from the Neotropical species already known in the genus. All the melanic forms have eleven antennomeres, excluding the options from eight to three species:  Prionopelta menininha Ladino and Feitosa, 2020 ,  Prionopelta punctulata Mayr, 1866 and  Prionopelta tapatia Ladino and Feitosa, 2020 .The anterior margin of clypeus strongly projected medially, a comparatively shallow sculpturing in the head dorsum, the apically convergent margins of the subpetiolar process and its occurrence in São Paulo lead us to identify the ants as  P. punctulata .  Prionopelta punctulata include individuals with tones mainly ranging from desaturated orange to brown tones (Fig. 2 A-C). Most exemplars are known from litter and soil samples frequently collected in southern areas of Brazil. No other melanic series of  P. punctulata or for the remaining Neotropical  Prionopelta species have been reported in the literature so far (Natalia Ladino, pers. obs.). </p>
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	https://treatment.plazi.org/id/E30CF04CFFC8D6610C69FD1FFA3AFB45	Public Domain	No known copyright restrictions apply. See Agosti, D., Egloff, W., 2009. Taxonomic information exchange and copyright: the Plazi approach. BMC Research Notes 2009, 2:53 for further explanation.		Plazi	Ladino, Natalia;Feitosa, Rodrigo Machado	Ladino, Natalia, Feitosa, Rodrigo Machado (2024): Nature’s dark artistry: melanic forms discovered in two Neotropical ant species (Hymenoptera, Formicidae). Revista Brasileira de Entomologia (e 20240068) 68 (4): 1-5, DOI: 10.1590/1806-9665-RBENT-2024-0068, URL: https://doi.org/10.1590/1806-9665-rbent-2024-0068
