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Encyclopedia of Social Insects pp 1–6Cite as

Subterranean Ants

One of the most conspicuous ecological patterns in ants, especially in tropical regions, is their vertical stratification into distinct arboreal, ground-surface, and subterranean assemblages. The latter are perhaps the least well studied, regarded by some as a frontier in the study of ant diversity [18]. Subterranean ant assemblages harbor a diversity of species with distinct ecologies, including several groups (e.g., Amblyoponinae, Leptaniliane, Martialinae, Proceratiinae) that are evolutionarily distinct from the 90% of species in the formicoid complex [21] and which are important for understanding the early evolution and diversification of ants after the Cretaceous period [10]. Nonetheless, such formicoid taxa as Acropyga (Formicinae), Carebara (Myrmicinae), and Solenopsis (Myrmicinae) are also well represented among subterranean ants with many hypogaeic species (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Schematic representation of the constituents of subterranean ant assemblages with respect to those of...

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Fig. 1
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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Mark K. L. Wong

  2. School of Biological Sciences, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

    Benoit Guénard

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  1. Mark K. L. Wong
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Correspondence to Benoit Guénard .

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  1. University of the West Indies, Department of Life Sciences University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago

    Dr. Christopher Starr

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Wong, M.K.L., Guénard, B. (2020). Subterranean Ants. In: Starr, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Social Insects. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90306-4_180-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90306-4_180-1

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