New Species of the Ant Genus Myopias (Hymenoptera: Formicidae: Ponerinae)

The work reported upon here began in the early 1950’s as a revision of genus Myopias, including as a synonym Trapeziopelta. For a year or more it served as the trial focus of RBW’s doctoral thesis research, until his interests shifted into other channels, and he laid the revisionary work aside. Meanwhile, WLB’s interest in the revision continued, but he had no opportunity at that time to do much more than supervise the drafting of a set of illustrations by artist Nancy Bufflermmany of which are now offered heremand to make some of the dissections of mouthparts, etc. As WLB’s work on the reclassification progressed for over 25 years through the tribes of subfamily Ponerinae, much new material was added to what had been available for the original Myopias study, and additional new synonymies and new species were discovered, as well as valuable information on the larvae, males, distribution and bionomics of species new and old. Even the status of Myopias as a genus apart from Pachycondyla came into question. Although in some ways it would be best if the old findings to which we both contributed could simply be incorporated in the reclassification part dealing with tribe Ponerini s. str., there seemed in this course no convenient way to recognize the legitimate claim of RBW to authorship based on the considerable amount of work he had done on Myopias in 1955. The compromise reached sees the larger Myopias review, with keys to species and discussions of synonymy, biology, etc. to be included in Brown’s forthcoming Part VII of "Contributions toward a Reclassification of the Formicidae," while descriptions of the new species included in various drafts of our joint manuscript of the