Cephalotes grandinosus (Smith, 1860)

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 : 6

Cephalotes grandinosus (Smith, 1860)

Figs. 10 , 21C

Material examined. Ecuador. Napo: Carlos Julio Arosemena Tola , 1.165046°S, 77.855307°W, 490 m, 2☿, 2003-12, Wild, A., ( QCAZ) ; Orellana: Parque Nacional YasunÍ, 0.66667°S, 76.3833°W, 120 m, 1☿, 1996-12, Baus, E., ( QCAZ) .

Comments. This species is placed in the C. grandinosus clade in the De Andrade and Baroni Urbani (1999) phylogeny and confirmed in Oliveira et al. (2021). Cephalotes grandinosus is morphologically very similar to C. persimilis De Andrade and C. persimplex De Andrade but differs from them in showing strongly impressed foveae mainly on the head dorsum; also, the propodeal lamellae of C. grandinosus are less broadened than in those species.Homoplasies are prevalent inCephalotes, and in this specific case the degree of character conservatism is evident with C. persimilis and C. persimplex diverging from C. grandinosus (of Miocene origin) approximately during the late Paleocene ( Price et al, 2014). This species is broadly distributed in the Americas, inhabiting tropical deciduous and rain forests from Central America, mainly at the Pacific side, to northwestern South American tropical flooded savannas, Amazonian tropical lowland forests, and deciduous and xeric shrublands and savannas of the Brazilian Caatinga and Cerrado. Cephalotes grandinosus was previously reported in Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Trinidad & Tobago, Venezuela, Guyana, French Guiana, Bolivia, and Brazil (Amazonas, Bahia, Ceará, Espírito Santo, Goiás, Maranhão, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Minas Gerais, Pará, Paraná, Rondônia, São Paulo, Sergipe, Tocantins) ( De Andrade and Baroni Urbani, 1999; Oliveira et al. 2021).

Figures

Figure 10 Cephalotes grandinosus (Smith) (worker, QCAZ 56564): A) dorsal view, B) frontal view, C) profile. Images by Adrian Troya.Scale bars = 1 mm.

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