Ants of YNC Agumbe Trip 2023

This post includes all the interesting ant records and findings from YNCs 3-day trip to Agumbe. We managed to record a total of 59 taxa, 54 of which were identified to species. Quite a few were inat firsts, first official state records, and regional records. The inat first species include – Aenictus arya, Aenictus clavitibia, Aenictus peguensis, Crematogaster politula, Lepisiota fergusoni, Monomorium schurri, Pheidole phipsoni and Tetramorium keralense. The most diverse genus recorded was a 3-way tie between Pheidole, Camponotus and Polyrhachis with 5 species recorded each. The most common species observed varied a lot among the different locations visited, however a few species were observed commonly across several locations, these were – Pheidole phipsoni, Polyrhachis hippomanes, Aphaenogaster beccarii and Camponotus carin. Polyrhachis hippomanes which has only been officially recorded from Northeast India was seen to be extremely populous across the Agumbe region. This confirms that it is a new regional record (a previous observation by Aniruddha H D from Karnataka on inat had already hinted towards this being the case) and also a commonly observed species of the region. The true highlight of the trip was Meranoplus bellii, a gem of a species endemic only to the Western Ghats regions of India, its unique bright orange colored abdomen truly makes it a sight to behold. Other cool records include the Indian Jumping Ant, Harpegnathos saltator which is the posterchild cool and unique ant species of India, Polyrhachis gracilior, which has a pretty red and black coloration as well as Colobopsis sp, whose queens were having large scale nuptial flights at the time. They seem to somewhat resemble C. rothneyi, however the worker seemed slightly deviant from the recorded specimen of C. rothneyi. 2 other specimens of Monomorium and Tetramorium respectively also seemed to be deviant from known species in India, further investigations need to be done on those 3 in order to confirm whether or not they are species new to science.
With this, I would like to conclude the report on the ants of YNC Agumbe Trip 2023. The link to all the observations on inat is given below:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&project_id=ync-agumbe-trip&taxon_id=47336&verifiable=any

Posted on May 31, 2023 04:32 AM by paul_ant