Ants of the Hengduan Mountains: a new altitudinal survey and updated checklist for Yunnan Province highlight an understudied insect biodiversity hotspot

Abstract

China’s Hengduan Mountain region has been considered one of the most diverse regions in the northern hemisphere. Its stunning topography with many deep valleys and impassable mountain barriers has promoted an astonishing diversification in many groups of organisms including plants, birds, mammals, and amphibians. However, the insect biodiversity in this region is still poorly known. Here, the first checklist of ant species from the Southern Hengduan Mountain region is presented, generated by sampling ant diversity using a wide array of collection methods, including Winkler leaf litter extraction, vegetation beating, and hand collection. 130 species/morphospecies from nine subfamilies and 49 genera were identified. Among them, 17 species from 13 genera represent new records for Yunnan province, and eight species are newly recorded for China. Moreover, we believe 41 novel morphospecies (31% of the total collected taxa) will prove to be new to science. These results highlight the rich ant fauna of this region and strongly support its status as a biodiversity hotspot. The current ant species checklist for the whole of Yunnan Province was updated by recording 550 named species from 99 genera. Taken together, our results suggest that the Yunnan ant fauna still remains under-sampled, and future sampling will likely yield many more species, among them many undescribed ones.