It may not sound much, but two new species of ants have been identified for the first time in Portugal in the Lower Alentejo.
The discovery that could so easily pass unnoticed on the sole of someone’s shoe now brings the country’s list of ant species up to 126.
The find was registered by agronomer Cláudia da Silva Gonçalves, working on a project to gauge the effect of the cultivation of olive groves on local ant populations.
According to Lusa news agency, Gonçalves tagged a total of 42.864 ants during her seven-month-long project, and found 16 ‘types’ from 34 species – two of which had not been cited in continental Portugal before.
Their names are: Strongylognathus caeciliae and Temnothorax tyndalei. Both species were first identified in the late 19th/ early 20th century by Switzerland’s Auguste-Henri Forel – an extraordinarily gifted man notable for his investigations not only of ants, but into the structure of the human brain.
