Composition of a high diversity leaf litter ant community (hymenoptera: Formicidae) from an ecuadorian pre-montane rainforest

The pre-montane forest of the northern Andes is considered one of the most biodiverse regions in the world. Tools for rapidly assessing biodiversity inventories are currently being developed and may aid conservation efforts. Here, we focus on the use of the Ants of the Leaf Litter (ALL) protocol as such a tool and describe the composition of an Ecuadorian pre-montane leaf litter ant community. Two 200-m transects (i.e. two complete replications of the protocol) with a total of 40 winkler sacs and 39 pitfall traps were analyzed. In total, we collected 4 875 specimens from 103 species, 37 genera and 9 subfamilies. The abundance-based coverage estimator (ACE), an asymptotic estimator of species richness, predicted a total of 109 ant species for the forest floor, making this ant community one of the most diverse recorded in tropical mid-altitude forests. Subsets of the community sampled by winkler sacs and pitfall traps differed significantly. Winkler sacs were more efficient than pitfall traps at capturing individual ants (226% more) and species (129% more). Relative to pitfall traps, an analysis of morphology suggested that winkler sacs collected a subset of the ant community that was smaller, less mobile and with smaller eyes (e.g. more subterranean). Finally, we present the first published records of the ant species Acanthognathus teledectus Brown & Kempf 1969, Hypoponera distinguenda (Emery 1890), Prionopelta amabilis Borgmeier 1949, Pachycondyla chyzeri (Forel 1907) and Procryptocerus mayri Forel 1899 for Ecuador.