Zusammenfassung
A small minority of the presently recognized similar to 12,500 species of ants are slave-makers, which permanently depend on the help of "slave workers," that is workers of other ant species, which they pillage as brood from their nests in well-organized slave raids. The genus Myrmoxenus is one of the most species-rich taxa of slave-making ants, but individual species are often not ...
Zusammenfassung
A small minority of the presently recognized similar to 12,500 species of ants are slave-makers, which permanently depend on the help of "slave workers," that is workers of other ant species, which they pillage as brood from their nests in well-organized slave raids. The genus Myrmoxenus is one of the most species-rich taxa of slave-making ants, but individual species are often not well-delimited. Here, we compare behavior, morphometry, and nuclear and mtDNA sequences between two taxa of Myrmoxenus: Myrmoxenus tamarae (Arnoldi, 1968), known only from its type locality in Georgia, and the wide-spread M. ravouxi (Andr,, 1896) to determine if the former might simply represent a Caucasian variant of the latter. Workers of the two taxa differed clearly in locomotor activity and slightly also in morphometry, while genetic investigations with nuclear and mitochondrial genes revealed only a weak differentiation. Given that Myrmoxenus appears to be a genus with a relatively recent radiation, we suggest to conservatively keep the present taxonomic situation with M. ravouxi and M. tamarae as separate species. The latter would then include specimens from Eastern Turkey and probably also Ukraine. Further studies, in particular in Greece and Turkey, might help to clarify the status of these endangered ants.
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