Alien ants spreading through Europe: and in Italy.

The number of known alien ant species throughout Europe has been steadily increasing during the last few decades and Italy has been no exception, with four new taxa reported in the last five years. Here, we document new data on the Asian needle ant (Emery, 1895), an invasive alien species whose first establishment in Europe was detected in the southern Italian city of Naples in 2022 and which has now been found near Lake Como in northern Italy, representing the second European record, about 730 km distant from the first. Furthermore, we report for the first time the presence of (Nylander, 1846) in the country, based on specimens collected both in Rome and near Lake Como.