Lasius umbratus

Lasius umbratus, colloquially known as the yellow shadow ant and yellow lawn ant,[2] is a palearctic species of parasitic ant distributed across Eurasia and the Maghreb region of Africa.[3] It was once thought that this species occurred in North America as well, by comparative genomic studies indicate the Afro-Eurasian and American populations are discrete and not closely related enough to represent a true species. The North American populations are now treated as a different species, Lasius aphidicola.[4]

Lasius umbratus
Lasius umbratus worker ant from North Brabant, Netherlands
Scientific classification
Kingdom:
Animalia
Phylum:
Arthropoda
Class:
Insecta
Order:
Hymenoptera
Family:
Formicidae
Subfamily:
Formicinae
Genus:
Lasius
Species:
L. umbratus
Binomial name
Lasius umbratus
(Nylander, 1846) [1]

The queens of this species seek out a Lasius niger worker ant, to first kill in order to gain the worker ant's scent and then to discreetly sneak inside a Lasius niger nest. Once inside the Lasius umbratus queen finds the Lasius niger queen, and kills her. The worker ants will care for the new queen's larvae and slowly the colony will be made up of only Lasius umbratus individuals.[5]

They are sometimes confused with Lasius flavus (yellow meadow ant) but unlike L. flavus they forage for food on the surface.

References
  1. "Lasius umbratus". Integrated Taxonomic Information System.
  2. Cole, Theodor C. H. (2016). Wörterbuch der Wirbellosen / Dictionary of Invertebrates: Latein-Deutsch-Englisch (1st ed.). Berlin: Springer-Verlag. p. 574. doi:10.1007/978-3-662-52869-3. ISBN 9783662528693.
  3. Guénard, Benoit; Weiser, Michael; Gómez, Kiko; Narula, Nitish; Economo, Even P (February 2017), "The Global Ant Biodiversity Informatics (GABI) database: a synthesis of ant species geographic distributions", Myrmecological News (24): 83–89, ISSN 1997-3500
  4. Schär, Sämi; Talavera, Gerard; Espadaler, Xavier; Rana, Jignasha D.; Andersen, Anne Andersen; Cover, Stefan P.; Vila, Roger (June 2018), "Do Holarctic ant species exist? Trans‐Beringian dispersal and homoplasy in the Formicidae", Journal of Biogeography, 45 (8): 1917–1928, doi:10.1111/jbi.13380
  5. "Insects and other Arthropods".
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