科研成果详情

Ponera kohmoku is a species described in 1996 from Yaku-shima Island, and all known records to date have been limited to the southern portion of Japan. Here, new records of P. kohmoku are reported from Guangdong, Guangxi and Hong Kong in China, adding a fourth Ponera species to Hong Kong and Guangxi as well as the first nominal record of this genus to the Guangdong myrmecofauna. By integrating ecological information from past literature records of P. kohmoku with these new records from Southeast China, P. kohmoku is suggested to be a forest understory generalist in terms of habitat preference. The disjunct distribution of the species in southern Japan, Guangdong, Guangxi and Hong Kong raises the question about the biogeographic history of the species and the genus. Here, we propose and evaluate two hypotheses for such disjunct distribution: 1) the extinction of population from most parts of eastern mainland China, and 2) knowledge gap caused by the under sampling of cryptobiotic ants in mainland China.