A new species of Proceratium on Samoa, found and described by the very talented ant researcher Liu Cong.
Original publication can be found here
Category: Research
Takamine Ant Collection Donated to OIST
Image attribution: OIST
Mr. Hidetsune Takamine is a well-known Okinawan ant expert who has been collecting ants in Okinawa for around 40 years. His collection includes 116 species, 30 of which are endemic to Okinawa.
On November 26, 2015, Mr. Takamine donated his ant collection to OIST at a handover ceremony that took place at the Biodiversity and Biocomplexity Unit and will be stored in the unit’s specimen shelf as the Takamine Collection.
Dr. Masashi Yoshimura and Prof. Evan Economo expressed their gratitude towards Mr. Takamine, emphasizing how much this donation would contribute to academic research and more specifically how it would improve the scientific research on Okinawan biodiversity and help us understand how the diversity of Okinawa fits into the broader picture.
New paper on fossil ant biodiversity
New paper by Benoit combining fossil biodiversity data with modern data. Some major things have changed but others not as much in the last 60 million years.
News article here:
https://www.oist.jp/news-center/news/2015/10/7/tropical-ants-europe
New door-head ants from Africa.
New paper out in ZooKeys, led by Georg, making some sense of phragmotic ants in Africa!
New Pheidole paper in J. of Biogeography
We have a new paper on Old World Pheidole out in Journal of Biogeography. It includes a bunch of fun stuff including phylogenies, network analysis, and taxon cycles.