Formica lugubris ZETTERSTEDT, 1838

Seifert, Bernhard, 2021, A taxonomic revision of the Palaearctic members of the Formica rufa group (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) - the famous mound-building red wood ants, Myrmecological News 31, pp. 133-179 : 164

Formica lugubris ZETTERSTEDT, 1838

Formica lugubris ZETTERSTEDT, 1838 [diagnosis of YAR- ROW (1955)]

The taxon was described from a male from Ofotford ( Norway, 68.43° N, 17.03° E). ZETTERSTEDT (1838) ’s description matches all three species expected to occur at the Ofotford: F. lugubris , Formica aquilonia , and Formica truncorum . YARROW (1955), who was the first after 120 years to revive F. lugubris from synonymy and to give it a status of a good species, did not explain on which basis he identified J.W. Zetterstedt’s male. All later authors (including me) followed YARROW (1955) ’s diagnosis based on workers and gynes and kept silent regarding the male problem. J.W. Zetterstedt’s type male is, according to YARROW (1955), stored in ZMLU Lund. If still present there, its identity can only be determined after a thorough, broad-based study on male characters at least in the Fennoscandian population of F. lugubris , F. aquilonia and F. truncorum – at least it remains to be investigated if the differential characters proposed in the keys of KUTTER (1977) and CZECHOWSKI & al. (2012) for the Central European population do apply to the boreal populations of these species.