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Linepithema of Costa Rica

This genus was thoroughly revised by Wild (2007). The full revision is available at http://repositories.cdlib.org/ucpress/ucpe/vol_126. The contents of the Ants of Costa Rica web pages are largely extracted from the revision.

Linepithema is native to the Neotropics, with 19 currently recognized species. One of these is famous: L. humile, the Argentine ant, has become an invasive pest ant in Mediterranean climates around the world. The other 18 are not famous. They are barely known to anyone but myrmecologists.

The center of diversity is southern South America, but there are five species known from Costa Rica. In Costa Rica the greatest density is in mid to upper elevation suburban and agricultural areas, but colonies can be found just about anywhere ants occur in the country, from sea level to over 2000m. These are truly enigmatic ants because they are rare. They have all the aspects of dominant dolichoderines: very large colony sizes, workers that are generalized omnivores, and conspicuous foraging on the ground and in the vegetation. Ants like these typically dominate the areas where they occur and are conspicuously common. Yet encountering Linepithema in Costa Rica is a relatively uncommon occurrence, especially in lowland areas.

So far, the pest ant L. humile has not been recorded from Costa Rica.

Literature Cited

Wild, A. L. 2007. Taxonomic Revision of the Ant Genus Linepithema (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, USA.


Page authors:
Alex Wild alexwild@email.arizona.edu
John T. Longino longinoj@evergreen.edu
Date of this version: 11 May 2007.

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