William Atkins
Wednesday, 17 September 2008 23:32
Science -
Biology
Page 1 of 3
A new species of ant, so different from other living ants that it has been nicknamed the “Ant from Mars,” has been discovered in the Brazilian rainforest.
The announcement of the discovery of the new ant species was announced on Tuesday, September 16, 2008.
An image of the recovered ant is found on the National Geographic website “
Photo: Blind "Ant From Mars" Found in Amazon.”
The German-American discovery team states in their journal article,
“Here, we report the discovery of a new ant that appears to represent the sister lineage to all extant ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). The phylogenetic position of this cryptic predator from the soils of the Amazon rainforest was inferred from several nuclear genes, sequenced from a single leg. Martialis heureka (gen. et sp. nov.) also constitutes the sole representative of a new, morphologically distinct subfamily of ants, the Martialinae (subfam. nov.)."
The blind, subterranespecies of ant has been scientifically named Martialis heureka—“
Martialis" means “of mars” and “
heureka” because it was a “surprising discovery.”
American biologist Christian Rabeling, from the University of Texas (Austin, Texas, U.S.A.), made the discovery in 2003 while searching through dead plant material on the tropical soils within the Amazon rainforest.
Specifically, Rabeling’s team was performing research in the Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária (
EMBRAPA, or in English: Brazilian Enterprise for Research on Farming and Cattle Raising), located in Manaus, Brazil.
The EMBRAPA is a state-owned agricultural research company tied with the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture.
How did the ant species come to be called the "Ant from Mars." Please read on.
