Myrmelachista
Last week I worked on my Myrmelachista. And let me tell you, those suckers are terrible! At first I was very excited because there is a nice revision with key available for the Myrmelachista of Costa Rica. In fact, I was a little puzzled as to why I had left this genus alone for so long when there was such a nice key available. Then I realized that it was published in 2006 and it had been so long since I had first gone through my collection that someone had published a key in the meantime. Which makes me feel like I have been in grad school way too long. But anyway, I digress. So it's a great key.... if your ants are from Costa Rica. Not so great for me. Most of my ants have 10-segmented antennae, and there appear to be only two ants in Costa Rica with 10-segmented antennae, and neither one looks like any of mine. And none of the 9-segmented ants seem right, either. So.... I'm kind of on my own here. After much thought and consideration, I have come up with 9 morphospecies from 43 specimens. Two were collected with bait, one was hand collected from a nest in a twig, and one was hand collected from a live tree stem (this last one includes queens). The rest were all collected from canopy fogging.
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