PSYCHE 



VOL. XXVII AUGUST. 1920 No. 4 



EUPONERA GILVA (ROGER), A RARE NORTH 

 AMERICAN ANT. 



By W. M. Wheeler and F. M. Gaige, 

 Bussey Institution, Harvard University andUniversity of Michigan. 



In 1863 Julius Roger described, among other North American 

 Formicidae, Ponera gilva and Discothyrea testacea, two species which 

 the senior author has vainly sought for the past twenty years, 

 both in the field and in the numerous collections sent him for iden- 

 tification. " Nordamerika " was the only locality appended to the 

 descriptions, and as the other species of the two genera are tropical 

 or subtropical it was natural to infer that Roger's types were 

 taken somewhere in Mexico. The Discothyrea is still to be redis- 

 covered, but recently the junior author succeeded in taking four 

 workers of gilva in northwestern Tennessee. 



In his most recent revision of the Ponerinse (1910) Emery refers 

 this species to the subgenus Trachymesopus of the genus Euponera. 

 He divides the species of the subgenus into three groups: those 

 with small, but developed eyes in the worker (stigma group), those 

 with very minute, vestigial eyes in the same caste (ochracea group), 

 and those known only from female specimens {darwini group). 

 The first group comprises several species of which the best-kno"v\Ti, 

 E. stigma Fabr., is common throughout tropical America and even 

 has a variety, qitadridentata Smith, in the Indomalayan and Papuan 

 Regions. The typical form of the species occurs also in Florida, 

 since Father J. Schmitt many years ago gave the senior author a 

 worker captured at Fort Worth. To the ochracea group Emery 

 assigns three species: gilva Roger, ochracea Mayr of the Mediter- 

 ranean Region (according to Forel with a subspecies, guafemalensis, 

 in Guatemala!) and sauteri Wheeler of Japan. To the group known 

 only from female specimens two species are assigned: darwini 

 Forel, which occurs in Northern Australia, India, Indonesia, 

 Madagascar and the Congo, and crassicornis Emery from New 



