Graduate Student Towson University Paramus, New Jersey
The Acropyga are a group of ants known for their exceptionally small size, yellow color, and more importantly, their mutualistic relationship with root mealybugs. This symbiotic relationship is especially interesting due to its obligatory nature. Acropyga can be found in various parts of the world, including in Asia, Australia, Africa and the Americas. My taxonomic revisionary work focuses on the Acropyga species from Africa, where only 4 species of Acropyga are known to exist. African Acropyga specimens were examined through two "lens." The first lens used traditional qualitative and quantitative morphological characters. This included measurements such as head width, head length, mesosoma length, eye width and eye length. Qualitative characters such as body coloration, mandibular teeth count and antennal segment coun were also examined. I then compared the results from the traditional analysis with a geomorphometric shape analysis to examine how these two different methods for analyzing morphological data compared to each other. I was able to form species hypotheses using both traditional morphological data paired with the shape analysis done by the geomorphometric morphometrics. This allowed me to conclude that there are in fact more than 4 species of Acropyga present in Africa.
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