Shadow ants: a phylogenomically informed revision of the Gnamptogenys mordax clade (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)

The Gnamptogenys mordax (F. Smith 1858) clade is a set of rare Neotropical ants that are mostly found in leaf litter and rotten wood in mature forest habitats. We refer to them as “shadow ants” because they are either nocturnal hunters or cryptic inhabitants of litter, rotten wood, and soil, never venturing on the surface during the day. We combined morphological examination and Ultra-Conserved Element phylogenomics to produce a thorough phylogeny and revised taxonomy of the clade. Our phylogeny contains 77 in-group samples, 58 of which are newly published here. We also examine a tree from 268 COI barcode sequences extracted from UCE data and downloaded from BOLD Systems. We increase the number of known species from 9 to 39. We provide keys to species and individual species accounts. The following species have revised status as valid species: exarata (Emery 1901), nodosa (Latreille 1802), purensis (Forel 1912), and sebastiani (Borgmeier 1937). The following new species are described (authors Longino et al. for all): altaquer, andina, apektogaster, brygma, cisin, cofan, cyclopegma, gomesnunesorum, histion, kilambe, musun, nanostria, nouragues, parvispiraculum, pereirai, quadraticlypeus, quetzal, scimitar, talamanca, tarma, ticae, tilaran, tuxtla, tuysinik, xalapa, and xulkiche. A new synonym is established: Gnamptogenys continua panamensis (Santschi 1931) = Gnamptogenys regularis (Mayr 1870).