Ants of Brazil: an overview based on 50 years of diversity studies

Feitosa, Rodrigo M.; Camacho, Gabriela P.; Silva, Thiago S. R.; Ulysséa, Mônica Antunes; Ladino, Natalia; Oliveira, Aline Machado; Albuquerque, Emília Zoppas de; Schmidt, Fernando Augusto; Ribas, Carla R.; Nogueira, Anselmo; Baccaro, Fabrício Beggiato; Queiroz, Antônio César Medeiros de; Dáttilo, Wesley; Silva, Rogério Rosa da; Santos, Jean Carlos; Rabello, Ananza M.; Morini, Maria Santina de Castro; Quinet, Yves; Del‐Claro, Kleber; Harada, Ana Yoshi; Carvalho, Karine S.; Sobrinho, Tathiana G.; Moraes, Aline Bianca; Vargas, André Barbosa; Torezan‐Silingardi, Helena Maura; Souza, Jorge Luiz Pereira; Marques, Tatianne; Izzo, Thiago J.; Lange, Denise; Santos, Iracenir Andrade dos; Nahas, Larissa; Paolucci, Lucas N.; Soares, Stela A.; Costa-Milanez, C. B. da; Diehl‐Fleig, Eduardo; Campos, Renata Bernardes Faria; Solar, Ricardo; Frizzo, Tiago L. M.; DaRocha, Wesley

doi:10.1080/14772000.2022.2089268

Cited by 17 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 69 publications

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“…Such a finding upturns the conventional understanding that regional ant faunas are richest in tropical forest biomes [1]. Ant diversity is considered to be especially high in the Amazon Basin and in Brazilian Atlantic Forest [21]. Approximately 1000 described ant species are known from the Brazilian Amazon, which at >4000 km 2 is more than twice the area of monsoonal Australia [22].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unrecognised Ant Megadiversity in the Australian Monsoonal Tropics III: The Meranoplus ajax Forel Complex

Andersen,

Brassard,

Hoffmann

2024

Diversity

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Australia’s monsoonal (seasonal) tropics are a global centre of ant diversity, but are largely unrecognised as such because the vast majority of its species are undescribed. Here we document another case of undescribed hyper-diversity within a taxon that is formally recognised as a single, widespread species, Meranoplus ajax Forel. We recognise 50 species among 125 specimens of M. ‘ajax’ that we CO1-barcoded, integrating CO1 clustering and divergence, morphological differentiation and geographic distribution. A large proportion (44%) of these species are represented by single records, indicating that very many additional species are yet to be collected in this extremely remote and sparsely populated region. Sampling has been concentrated in the Northern Territory, where 27 of the 50 species occur. If diversity in Western Australia and Queensland were similar to that in the Northern Territory, as appears likely, then the M. ajax complex would comprise >100 species. In 2000, when Australia’s monsoonal ant fauna was estimated to contain 1500 species, Meranoplus ajax was considered to represent a single species. Our previous analyses of a range of other taxa have shown that their diversity has been similarly under-appreciated in this estimate. Our findings suggest that the total number of ant species in monsoonal Australia is several thousand, which would make the region by far the world’s richest known.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unrecognised Ant Megadiversity in the Australian Monsoonal Tropics III: The Meranoplus ajax Forel Complex

Andersen,

Brassard,

Hoffmann

2024

Diversity

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“…These scientific advances are presumably an effect of the increased availability of resources for identifying ants in recent decades [19,33,38], in addition to the consequences of a period of high investment by the Brazilian government in the expansion of educational and research institutions between 2004 and 2016 [55]. Also, the increasing collaboration between ant researchers from different knowledge areas and taxonomists [14,30] contributed to these advances in Brazil. However, the collaboration between areas is way beyond the simple recognition of taxonomic work [52].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In another example, a recent survey demonstrated that around 7.5% of the ecological studies dealing with Brazilian ant diversity published from 1970 to 2021 presented inconsistencies in their species lists regarding the validity of taxonomic names and geographically implausible taxa records. Some of these taxonomically spurious names have been propagated by subsequent studies, causing non-existent species to compose local lists of taxa or even support conclusions about ant diversity patterns in Brazil [ 14 ]. In this sense, precision regarding identification methods and taxon concepts is fundamental to avoid errors from species-specific findings to community-level hypotheses.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From species descriptions to diversity patterns: the validation of taxonomic data as a keystone for ant diversity studies reproducibility and accuracy

et al. 2023

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Research findings in natural sciences need to be comparable and reproducible to effectively improve our understanding of ecological and behavioural patterns. In this sense, knowledge frontiers in biodiversity studies are directly tied to taxonomic research, especially in species-rich tropical regions. Here we analysed the taxonomic information available in 470 studies on Brazilian ant diversity published in the last 50 years. We aimed to quantify the proportion of studies that provide enough data to validate taxonomic identification, explore the frequency of studies that properly acknowledge their taxonomic background, and investigate the primary resources for ant identification in Brazil. We found that most studies on Brazilian ant diversity (73.6%) explicitly stated the methods used to identify their specimens. However, the proportion of papers that provide complete data for the repository institutions and vouchered specimens is vanishingly small (5.8%). Additionally, only 40.0% of the studies consistently presented taxon authorities and years of description, rarely referencing taxonomic publications correctly. In turn, the number of specialists and institutions consulted for ant identification in Brazil has increased in the last years, along with the number of studies that explicitly provide their taxonomic procedures for ant identification. Our findings highlight a shift between generations regarding the recognition of taxonomy as fundamental science, deepening our understanding of biodiversity.

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“…We searched for papers regarding ant diversity and seasonality in Brazilian biomes using the database from the Ants of Brazil Project (Projeto Formigas do Brasil, http://www.formi gasdo brasil.com) (Feitosa et al, 2022;Schmidt et al, 2022) and the search engines Web of Science, SciELO, and Scopus. Our search encompassed papers from 1945 to 2020.…”

Section: Me Thodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ant diversity decreases during the dry season: A meta‐analysis of the effects of seasonality on ant richness and abundance

et al. 2022

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Tropical studies traditionally describe insect diversity variation throughout the year. The temporally structured responses of insect assemblages to climate seasonality vary across ecosystems due to gradients of resource availability and limiting ecological factors. These idiosyncratic responses might be particularly true across the vast geographical range of the Brazilian territory, including various environments that harbor one of the most diverse ant faunas worldwide. This study addressed the relationship between ant diversity and climatic seasonality, performing a quantitative review of the published data on ant diversity collected in Brazil. We investigated the seasonality effect on ant abundance and richness described in the literature in 47 papers published between 2000 and 2018. These studies were developed mainly in the Atlantic Forest biome and collected ants with pitfall traps on the soil/litter stratum. We initially carried out a vote‐counting procedure by comparing the number of significant results describing seasonal differences in the ant assemblage. We found that most papers described a similar pattern of ant abundance, richness, and species composition between seasons. However, when we performed a meta‐analysis, we observed a clear pattern of higher ant abundance and richness in the wet/summer season compared with the dry/winter season. Our meta‐analysis reveals that the ant diversity decreases in the dry season, strongly in the Cerrado biome. Additionally, we point out differences in the sampling effort across biomes, indicating the need for further investments in studies focused on temporal diversity patterns, including seasonal effects, on the insect assemblage in biomes less investigated so far. Abstract in Portuguese is available with online material.

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Ants of Brazil: an overview based on 50 years of diversity studies

Cited by 17 publications

References 69 publications

Unrecognised Ant Megadiversity in the Australian Monsoonal Tropics III: The Meranoplus ajax Forel Complex

Unrecognised Ant Megadiversity in the Australian Monsoonal Tropics III: The Meranoplus ajax Forel Complex

From species descriptions to diversity patterns: the validation of taxonomic data as a keystone for ant diversity studies reproducibility and accuracy

Ant diversity decreases during the dry season: A meta‐analysis of the effects of seasonality on ant richness and abundance

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