ATLANTIC ANTS: a data set of ants in Atlantic Forests of South America.

Ants, an ecologically successful and numerically dominant group of animals, play key ecological roles as soil engineers, predators, nutrient recyclers, and regulators of plant growth and reproduction in most terrestrial ecosystems. Further, ants are widely used as bioindicators of the ecological impact of land use. We gathered information of ant species in the Atlantic Forest of South America.

Taxonomic revision of the Neotropical Myrmicinae ant genus Blepharidatta Wheeler.

We revise the taxonomy of the exclusively Neotropical Myrmicinae ant genus Blepharidatta (Attini), redescribing the known species (B. brasiliensis and B. conops), and describing two new species, B.

Mimicry and eavesdropping enable a new form of social parasitism in ants.

Social parasitism is defined by the exploitation of the social mechanisms of one society by another whole society. Here, we use quantitative ecological data and experiments to identify the components of a new form of social parasitism by the recently discovered "mirror turtle ant," Cephalotes specularis. We show that C.

Description of Cephalotes specularis n. sp. (Formicidae: Myrmicinae)-the mirror turtle ant.

We describe here Cephalotes specularis n. sp. (Hymenoptera: Formicidae: Myrmicinae: Cephalotini) based on minor and major workers, gynes and larvae from Uberlândia, Minas Gerais state, Brazil.

Ecosystem-wide morphological structure of leaf-litter ant communities along a tropical latitudinal gradient.

General principles that shape community structure can be described based on a functional trait approach grounded on predictive models; increased attention has been paid to factors accounting for the functional diversity of species assemblages and its association with species richness along environmental gradients. We analyze here the interaction between leaf-litter ant species richness, the local communities' morphological structure and fundamental niche within the context of a northeast-southeast latitudinal gradient in one of the world's most species-rich ecosystems, the Atlantic Forest, representing 2,700 km of tropical rainforest along almost 20° of latitude in eastern Brazil. Our results are consistent with an ecosystem-wide pattern in communities' structure, with relatively high species turnover but functionally analogous leaf-litter ant communities' organization.