Tapinoma nigerrimum as safeguard for Italian myrmecofauna against Argentine ant

Asthma is the most common chronic disease in pediatrics.Most data on the prevalence of childhood allergic diseasescome from the International Study of Asthma and Allergiesin Childhood (ISAAC) phase II held in 1995 and phase III from2002. ISAAC created a methodology for studying two agegroups 6---7 and 13---14 years old.1In 2002, according to thedata gathered in the phase III of ISAAC, the prevalence ofasthma among Portuguese children from 6 to 7 years old was9.4%, 29.1% for rhinitis and 28.1% for wheezing.2In the last decade, little information on the prevalenceof childhood asthma and rhinitis in Portugal has been docu-mented, and to the best of our knowledge, none in Coimbra.In 2002, 5 centers from 5 Portuguese cities joined the ISAACproject: Lisbon, Oporto, Coimbra, Portimão and Funchal.The Coimbra research center only studied 13---14 years oldadolescents.2The district of Coimbra, with a total area of 3974 km2,is located in central Portugal and has 434,311 inhabitants.Coimbra is the biggest city in the central region, and the 6thlargest in Portugal

Could Linepithema humile (Hymenoptera Formicidae) influence ant community composition? A preliminary study in a natural area in Italy

The Argentine ant, Linepithema humile, is an invasive species widespread in the Mediterranean climatic regions of the world, which is well demonstrated to have a negative impact on native ants and on the community structure. At the beginning of the twentieth century its presence was recorded for the first time in Italy and currently is mainly found along the Tyrrhenian coast, where it locally shows a patchy distribution. In our study we investigated an environmentally homogenous transect including an invaded area and a control zone inside the Presidential Estate of Castelporziano, to evaluate possible impact of the Argentine ant on the native species and differences in ant community composition. For our purpose we used pitfall traps and an active field sampling along the transect, with six replicates from April to August 2015. The sampling indicated a significant reduction of the number of species in the invaded area, while the multivariate analysis and the percentage of species in both the zones showed a different ant community composition between invaded and uninvaded areas. These findings were also supported by very different values of the diversity indices calculated for each zone and the lower number of functional groups found in the invaded area. According to literature, we conclude that L. humile could be the species mainly responsible for this arrangement. Future study using a higher spatial scale and covering a larger variety of habitats is certainly required

Four species within the supercolonial ants of the Tapinoma nigerrimum complex revealed by integrative taxonomy (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)

The West and Central Mediterranean ants known for 5 0 years under the name Tapinoma nigerrimum (NYLANDER, 1856) have attracted attention because of their efficient chemical weapons, impressive supercolonies and potential to limit the spreading of the Argentine Ant Linepithema humile (MAYR, 1868). The paper shows that the T. nigerrimum complex consists of at least four clearly separable species which differ in morphology of all castes, colony demo-graphy, geographic distribution, invasive potential and mtDNA data. Species delimitation by means of Nest Centroid Clustering, considering 20 quantitative phenetic characters in 159 nest samples, resolved four coincident clusters in both female and male castes which are classified as T. nigerrimum, T. magnum MAYR, 1861, T. ibericum SANTSCHI, 1925, and T. darioi sp.n. The exploratory data analyses NC-Ward clustering and NC-k-means clustering showed a mean dis-agreement from the final species hypothesis between 0 and 2.7% in workers on the nest sample level, whereas the classification error of a linear discriminant analysis was 4.2% in 533 worker individuals. The four phenetic clusters were basically confirmed by analysis of the COI segment of mtDNA with the smallest mean K2p genetic distance of 1.8% observed in T. darioi sp.n. against T. magnum, and the largest one of 4.0% in T. igerrimum against T. ibericum. These data suggest a species divergence between late Pliocene and early Pleistocene (3.3 - 1.5 Ma). The mtDNA haplotypes of nine phenotypically ideal T. darioi sp.n. upercolonies, found at three sites in southern France, and Italy were placed within the T. magnum cluster. Among four alternative scenarios discussed for these mismatches, hybridization events in the younger evolutionary history with subsequent unidirectional genomic purging of nuDNA was proposed to be the most likely explanation. Tapinoma nigerrimum is monodomous to moderately olydomous with aggression between neighbouring colonies, whereas T. magnum, T. ibericum, and T. darioi sp.n. are supercolonial with a potential to become invasive pest ants through introduction by human commerce. For Europe north of 48° N, T. magnum could establish populations in nine cities in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, whereas T. ibericum is known so far from one site in South England only, and T. darioi sp.n. from one city in the Netherlands. The differential zoogeography and biology of the four species and ways of species delimitation are outlined and discussed. Tapinoma darioi sp.n. is described as new