Geographic spread of Vollenhovia emeryi (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)

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Borneo, fANTastique!

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Toward understanding the predatory ant genus Myopias (Formicidae: Ponerinae), including a key to global species, male-based generic diagnosis, and new species description

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Insights Into the Chinese Pangolin's (Manis pentadactyla) Diet in a Peri-Urban Habitat: A Case Study From Hong Kong

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The global spread and invasion capacities of alien ants

Many alien species are neither cultivated nor traded but spread unintentionally, and their global movements, capacities to invade ecosystems, and susceptibility to detection by biosecurity measures are poorly known.1,2,3,4 We addressed these key knowledge gaps for ants, a ubiquitous group of stowaway and contaminant organisms that include some of the world’s most damaging invasive species.5,6,7,8,9,10 We assembled a dataset of over 146,000 occurrence records to comprehensively map the human-mediated spread of 520 alien ant species across 525 regions globally. From descriptions of the environments in which species were collected within individual regions—such as in imported cargoes, buildings, and outdoor settings—we determined whether different barriers to invasion had been overcome11 and classified alien ant species under three levels of invasion capacity corresponding to increasing biosecurity threat. We found that alien species of different invasion capacities had different sources and sinks globally. For instance, although the diversity of indoor-confined species peaked in the Palearctic realm, that of species able to establish outdoors peaked in the Nearctic and Oceanian realms, and these mainly originated from the Neotropical and Oriental realms. We also found that border interceptions worldwide missed two-thirds of alien species with naturalization capacity, many associated with litter and soil. Our study documents the vast spread of alien ants globally while highlighting avenues for more targeted biosecurity responses, such as prioritizing the screening of imports from regions that are diversity hotspots for species of high invasion capacity and improving the detection of cryptic alien invertebrates dwelling in substrates.journal articl

The Global Ant Biodiversity Informatics (GABI) database: synthesizing data on the geographic distribution of ant species (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)

The global distribution patterns of most vertebrate groups and several plant groups have been described and analyzed over the past few years, a development facilitated by the compilation of important databases. Similar efforts are needed for large insect groups that constitute he majority of global biodiversity. As a result of this lack of information, invertebrate taxa are often left out of both large-scale analyses of biodiversity patterns and large-scale efforts in conservation planning and prioritization. Here, we introduce the first comprehensive global database of ant species distributions, the Global Ant Biodiversity Informatics (GABI) database, based on the compilation of 1.72 million records extracted from over 8811 publications and 25 existing databases. We first present the main goals of the database, the methodology used to build the database, is well as its limitations and challenges. Then, we discuss how different fields of ant biology may benefit from utilizing this tool. Finally, we emphasize the importance of future participation of myrmecologists to improve the database and use it to identify and fill holes in our knowledge of ant biodiversity.published_or_final_versio