Amazon Alive: A Decade of Discoveries 1999-2009 - WWF

10a.
The bluefang (Ephebopus cyanognathus) is a remarkable-looking spider.
Discovered in French Guiana in 2000, the species is entirely brown except for
two vivid blue fangs 75 . Both Avicularia and Ephebopus spiders are considered
to be bird eaters.
© Keegan Rowlinson
© Christian Rabeling
10b.
The Amazon rainforest is also famous for its many ant species. Some
scientists estimate that 15% of the animal biomass of the Amazon is made
up of ants 76 . A single Amazonian tree was found to have 43 species of ants,
roughly the same number of ant species as all of Germany 77 .
A new species of blind, subterranean, predatory ant was described from the
Brazilian Amazon in 2008. It belongs to the first new genus of living ants
discovered since 1923, and is likely to be a direct descendant of one of the
very first ants to evolve on Earth, over 120 million years ago 78 .
Dr Christian Rabeling, a scientist from the University of Texas at Austin,
collected the only known specimen of the new ant species in 2003 from leaf
litter at the Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária area in Manaus,
Brazil. An account of the discovery is given in primatologist Jane Goodall’s
latest book:
He found the pale, eyeless ant by pure chance. One evening, when it was nearly dark,
he was sitting in the forest getting ready to go home. He saw a strange white ant
walking over the leaf litter and, not recognising it, popped it into preservative in one
of the small vials that he always carried and put it into his pocket. When he got back
home, he was tired and had quite forgotten about it. Three days later, he found the
specimen in the pocket of his pants. It was then that he realised he had found
something extraordinary 79 .
The new ant was named Martialis heureka, which translates roughly as ‘ant
from Mars’, because it has a combination of characteristics never before
recorded. It is adapted for dwelling in the soil, is two to three millimetres long,
pale, has no eyes, and has large mandibles, which Dr Rabeling and his
colleagues suspect it uses to capture prey.
According to scientists, this discovery hints at a wealth of species, possibly of
great evolutionary importance, still hidden in the soils of the remaining Amazon
rainforest. Rabeling says his discovery will help biologists better understand
the biodiversity and evolution of ants, which are abundant and ecologically
important insects 80 .
32 amazon alive! I a decade of discovery 1999-2009