NEW SPECIES OF THE ANT GENUS MYOPIAS 
(HYMENOPTERA: FORMICIDAE: PONERINAE) 
By Robert B. Willey' and William L. Brown, Jr.^-^ 
The work reported upon here began in the early 1950’s as a 
revision of genus Myopias, including as a synonym Trapeziopelta. 
For a year or more it served as the trial focus of RBW’s doctoral 
thesis research, until his interests shifted into other channels, and he 
laid the revisionary work aside. Meanwhile, WLB’s interest in the 
revision continued, but he had no opportunity at that time to do 
much more than supervise the drafting of a set of illustrations by 
artist Nancy Buffler — many of which are now offered here — and to 
make some of the dissections of mouthparts, etc. 
As WLB’s work on the reclassification progressed for over 25 
years through the tribes of subfamily Ponerinae, much new material 
was added to what had been available for the original Myopias 
study, and additional new synonymies and new species were discov- 
ered, as well as valuable information on the larvae, males, distribu- 
tion and bionomics of species new and old. Even the status of 
Myopias as a genus apart from Pachycondyla came into question. 
Although in some ways it would be best if the old findings to which 
we both contributed could simply be incorporated in the reclassi- 
fication part dealing with tribe Ponerini 5 . str., there seemed in this 
course no convenient way to recognize the legitimate claim of RBW 
to authorship based on the considerable amount of work he had 
done on Myopias in 1955. 
The compromise reached sees the larger Myopias review, with 
keys to species and discussions of synonymy, biology, etc. to be 
included in Brown’s forthcoming Part VII of “Contributions toward 
a Reclassification of the Formicidae,’’ while descriptions of the new 
species included in various drafts of our joint manuscript of the 
'The University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, Biological Sciences, P.O. Box 4348, 
Chicago, IL 60680. 
^Department of Entomology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853. (Address cor- 
respondence here.) 
3A report of research from the Cornell Agricultural Experiment Station. Research 
supported by National Science Foundation Grant DEB-8003722. 
Manuscript received by the editor March 15, 1983 
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