Check List 16(6): 1621-1625, doi: 10.15560/16.6.1621
First record of the rarely collected ant Protanilla gengma Xu, 2012 (Hymenoptera, Formicidae, Leptanillinae) from the Indian subcontinent
Punnath Aswaj‡, Karunakaran Anoop‡, Dharma Rajan Priyadarsanan‡‡ Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bengaluru, India
Corresponding author: Dharma Rajan Priyadarsanan ( priyan@atree.org ) Academic editor: Gabriela P Camacho © Punnath Aswaj, Karunakaran Anoop, Dharma Rajan Priyadarsanan. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Citation:
Aswaj P, Anoop K, Priyadarsanan DR (2020) First record of the rarely collected ant Protanilla gengma Xu, 2012 (Hymenoptera, Formicidae, Leptanillinae) from the Indian subcontinent. Check List 16(6): 1621-1625. https://doi.org/10.15560/16.6.1621 |  |
Abstract
Protanilla gengma Xu, 2012 is recorded for the first time from the Indian subcontinent. This rarely collected ant species was previously known only from Yunnan Province, China. Two workers of P. gengma were collected from the Lengteng Wildlife Sanctuary, Mizoram, Northeast India, using the Winkler extraction method. This find also represents the first record of the subfamily Leptanillinae from Northeast India and the third species of the genus Protanilla Taylor, 1990 from India. We present an updated distribution map for the genus and comment on morphological variation of the worker caste of P. gengma.
Keywords
Eastern Himalayas, Indian ant fauna, Mizoram, Northeast India, Winkler extractor