Ant Taxonomy SubFamily- Martialinae

Ant Mania > Family > SubFamily (Martialinae)

About SubFamily Martialinae

Martialinae

The subfamily Martialinae contains the only genus Martialis with only one species, Martialis heureka. The ant was located in 2000 in the Amazon rainforest close to Manaus, Brazil. As illustrated in 2008, the ant pertains to the oldest distinct brood split from the ancestors of all other Formicidae.

Scientific classification of Genus Martialinae

• Kingdom: Animalia
• Phylum: Arthropoda
• Class: Insecta
• Order: Hymenoptera
• Family: Formicidae
• Subfamily: Martialinae
• Diversity
• One genus
• One species

Martialis heureka (Recognized as the ant from Mars due to its distinctive attributes and stunning discovery) is a genus of ants found in the Amazon rainforest close to Manaus, Brazil. Two samples were initially discovered by Manfred Verhaagh of the Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde, Germany, in 1998. Yet, they were examined and broken before being studied, so demonstrating a new species was impossible. It wasn’t until a recent sample was located in 2003 by Christian Rabeling, a graduate investigator at the University of Texas, that the discovery came to light.

Name

While the generic name refers to the planet Mars, alluding to the strange features that seem to come out of nowhere, the species name comes from the Ancient Greek ηὕρηκα (“I found it”), echoing Archimedes’ famous exclamation.

Description of Martialinae Genus

Known only from these three specimens, this species is classified into a monotypic genus, and a new subfamily (Martialinae) cladistically sister to all other living ants and is the first ant subfamily discovered since 1923.

These ants do not have eyes, are pale in color, underground and predatory. This does not mean that the ancestors of all ants were blind and subterranean, but rather that these features evolved early in ant history and have persisted over time in a stable environment such as the rainforest floor. They have unusually elongated jaws and display distinctly primitive features. Like all basal (primitive) ants, this species has a stinger.

Importance of Martialinae Genus

The importance of this species is that its lineage appears to be particularly ancient and that it is probably the last surviving species of a lineage that diverged from the other ants early in the evolution of this group. Genetic samples obtained from one leg of the specimen appear to place the appearance of this species at approximately 50 million years ago, and the appearance of its lineage only sometime after ants diverged from wasps nearly 120 million years ago.

Although the first ants were originally believed to live on the surface as wasps, a modern view proposes that ants appeared on the surface 125 million years ago, following the evolution of flowering plants.

[FULL LIST OF Martialinae GENUS]

Subfamilies Of Ants