New distributional records for ants and the evaluation of ant species richness and endemism patterns in Mexico

Abstract

Ants (Formicidae) in Mexico have usually been undersampled despite their ecological significance and their utility as environmental service providers and bioindicators. This study estimates the species richness and the narrow endemic species number of ants across Mexico. It also documents the presence of one species newly recorded in Mexico and 19 new state-based records of 14 species from central and north Mexico. No surveys have been performed in most of the localities where we report those records, suggesting the need for a higher sampling effort across the country. We present an ant species richness estimation and a narrow endemic ant species estimation in a grid of 0.5 degrees in Mexico. Stenamma schmitii is recorded for the first time from Mexico. Additionally, new state-based records of Azteca velox, Dorymyrmex insanus, Camponotus coruscus, Camponotus striatus, Formica propatula, Lasius latipes, Neivamyrmex melanocephalus, Neivamyrmex rugulosus, Syscia augustae, Atta texana, Cephalotes scutulatus, Crematogaster crinosa and Temnothorax andrei are recorded.

Diversity patterns of Mexican land and freshwater snails: a spatiotemporal approach

“…The number of species recovered in this paper in the Neotropical region (5 times greater than the Nearctic region and 2.5 times higher than the MTZ) were also recovered in other biological groups such as different phyla of freshwater organisms (Quiroz-https://doi.org/10.22201/ib.20078706e.2022.93.3966 Martínez et al, 2014 and mammals (Gómez-Ortiz et al, 2017), supporting that the Neotropical region comprises the higher diversity in Mexican fauna. Additionally, the results of this study highlight the complexity of the MTZ (Corona et al, 2009;Escalante et al, 2018;Halffter & Morrone, 2017) that has been considered either as a high richness species area (Aguilar-Méndez et al, 2021) or as an area of high phylogenetic diversity, (Gómez-Ortiz et al, 2017) that are reflected in the high number of total (343) and endemic (284) species of continental gastropods. Thus, the Mexican Transvolcanic Belt provide a set of factors that are related with high speciation rates in land snails such as a topographic mosaic, rain shadow effects, heat budget differences, vegetation cover and effective refugia from floods that serve as shelter areas (Solem, 1984).…”

Effects of Peri-Urbanization on Coastal Sage Scrub Ant Species in Baja California

“…However, an in depth literature review in 2010 found only 14 publications that even mention ants in the Baja Peninsula [29]. Only three additional papers on this topic have been published since 2013 [35,36]. It is, therefore, important to document the ant assemblages in this unique region and their relationships to the environments they inhabit.…”