First record of a new world ant species (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), strumigenys eggersi emery, 1890 in the old world

Abstract

The Neotropical ant Strumigenys eggersi is recorded for the first time in the Old World, specifically from Singapore. Six queens and 10 workers in total were collected from Malaise trap (4 queens) and leaf litter samples (2 queens, 10 workers) respectively, on the National University of Singapore (NUS) campus. DNA barcodes (COI, 313 bp) amplified from these specimens closely matched those of S. eggersi on NCBI GenBank and BOLD databases, in agreement with morphology. Implications of this discovery are briefly discussed.