SOME SYNONYMIES IN THE 
ANT GENUS CAMPONOTUS 
By William L. Brown, Jr. 
Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University 
Ant specialists have long since “lost control” of the 
ants genus Camponotus Mayr. Somewhere between one 
and two thousand names of species, subspecies and varie- 
ties currently stand in the books, and the fifty or so 
subgeneric names in use are probably not all familiar to 
any single pair of myrmecological ears. Small samplings 
of different parts of the world fauna, and the few larger 
works like Creighton’s book on the ants of North America, 
reveal that the taxonomy of the genus is in a very con- 
fused state. It appears that a great many, perhaps a 
majority, of the subspecies and varieties are straight 
synonyms, as are also a goodly percentage of the full 
species. Other varieties and subspecies are certainly good 
species in the biological sense, even though morphological 
differences separating them may be relatively weak in 
conventional terms. The job of revising Camponotus is 
probably too great for one man to attempt, even if any 
specialist were game enough to try, during a normal life 
span; there are just too many names to deal with. A 
piecemeal attack therefore seems to afford the best chance 
of reducing the genus to a reasonable number of species, 
a number small enough to attract revisers of the future. 
One class of synonymies especially should be published 
as soon as detected; I refer to the cases where types of 
two forms can be compared directly. At the Museum of 
Comparative Zoology, which now houses the largest and 
most complete collection of ants in existence, the con- 
stant accession of types by exchange, and examination of 
still others by loan, permits the certain detection of many 
obvious synonyms that would otherwise be very uncertainly 
identified from their descriptions. It seems wise to have 
such synonymies enter the published record as they are 
made, even if the record consists of short notes. If properly 
set up, such notes will be caught and listed, with their 
new synonymy, in the Zoological Record, and will thus 
become even more widely disseminated. Every certain 
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