3334
QUESTIONS OF NOMENCLATURE CONNECTED
WITH THE ANT GENUS LASIUS
AND ITS SUBGENERA.
By WILLIAM MORTON WHEELER.
[Reprinted from PSYCHE, Vol. XXIII, No. 6]
168 Psyche [December
QUESTIONS OF NOMENCLATURE CONNECTED WITH
THE ANT GENUS LASIUS AND ITS SUBGENERA.
BY WILLIAM MORTON WHEELER,
Bussey Institution, Harvard University.
There seems to be no end to the nomenclatorial cataclysms pre-
cipitated by men who delight in resuscitating and reediting musty
entomological documents that have been unfortunately spared by
the tooth of time to plague those among us who wish to see taxon-
omy rapidly stabilized so that we may be able to give all our atten-
tion to more interesting and important matters. Just as we were
beginning to flatter ourselves that a few common insect names in
universal use for the greater part of a century must at last be
immune from the inroads of the resuscitators we are informed by
Morice and Durrant 1 that our familiar generic name Lasius,
which has been borne so long by the common garden ant, probably
the most abundant insect of the northern hemisphere, must be
consigned to the synonymic limbo and replaced by a new name.
The case is so clearly stated by Donisthorpe in his excellent mono-
graph of British ants 2 that I shall quote his account of it. "Fab-
ricius (Syst. Piez., 415, 1804) published a heterotypical genus
Lasius for the reception of ten species of ants, but this use of the
name is invalid since Lasius (Type Apis quadrimaculata Panz.)
had already been used by Jurine for a genus of bees . [Erlangen
Litteraturzeitg., 1, 164, No. 33, 1801: Nouv. Meth. Hym., 235-
238, No. 33, Pf. 4, 33, 11.33. 1807]. Latreille, Gen. Crust.
1 The authorship and first publication of the "Jurinean" Genera of Hymenoptera : being a
reprint of a long-lost work of Panzer, with a translation into English, and Introduction and
Bibliographical and Critical Notes. Trans. Ent. Soc., London, 1914 (1915), pp. 339^36.
' British Ants, Their Life History and Classification. Plymouth, Wm. Brendon and Son,
Ltd., 1915, p. 186.
1916] Wheeler The Ant Genus Lasius and its Subgenera 169
Ins. 4.126 (1809) sunk Lasius F. as a synonym of Formica, and
the Fabrician name ceased to be used till 1861, when Mayr (Europ.
Formicid., 49, 1861) revived and recharacterized Lasius F.,
adopting niger L. as his type. Bingham Faun. Brit. India. Hym.
2, 338 (1903) and Wheeler Ann. New York Acad. Sc., 21, 165
(1911), also cite niger as the type. This species was also adopted
as the type by Morice and Durrant Trans. Ent. Soc., London,
1914, 9, 421-423 (1915), who gave the following reasons for the
change of the name: "In the Systema Piezatorum Fabricius made
use of Jurine's name Lasius but applied it to a genus of ants which
he separated from Formica L. and later authors have ignored
Jurine's Lasius, no doubt because the publication of the Pieza-
torum (1804) antedates that of the Nouvelle Methode (1807).
But the real date of Lasius Jrn. as we now learn, is May 30, 1801
(Erlangen list), Lasius F. (1804) therefore sinks as a homonym
of the earlier Lasius Jrn. A new name for Lasius F. is necessary;
there being apparently no existing synonym, we therefore propose
that it be called Donisthorpea in recognition of Mr. H. St. J. K.
Donisthorpe's careful investigations into the bionomics of this and
other Heterogynous genera."
A study of Morice and Durrant shows that the article which
they unearthed in the Erlangen Litteraturzeitung of 1801 was
published anonymously, but that in a footnote to page 7 of the
Kritische Revue of 1806 Panzer admitted that he was its author.
It is clear, furthermore, that Panzer cited Lasius and several other
Hymenopterous genera as Jurine's. My friend Professor Cockerel]
writes me that he regards the Panzer article as having no taxo-
nomic status both because it was published anonymously and be-
cause it did not appear in a scientific journal. I incline to agree
with him, though I am compelled to admit that the publication
of the genera as Jurine's and not as those of the anonymous
author may put a different construction on the matter. This
evidently determined Morice and Durrant to accept Lasius and
certain other genera as being valid and as antedating those of
Fabricius. So far as I am able to learn, cases of this kind are not
specifically provided for in our various nomenclatorial codes.
Accepting for the moment the correctness of Morice and Dur-
rant contention that Lasius Jurine must supplant Anthophora
among the bees and that the genus Lasius Fabr. must be renamed,
170 Psyche [December
we may next inquire whether the introduction of the name Donis-
thorpea was justified. Little study of the history of the ant genus
Lasius is needed to establish the fact that there are at least three
other names, each of which would take precedence of the one sug-
gested by the authors under consideration. In 1840 Shuckard 1
gave the name Formicina to a genus, which according to his state-
ment contained what we now call Formica rufa and Lasius flavus,
so that if no resuscitator succeeds in exhuming some other name
suggested between 1807 and 1840, Formicina should be chosen to
replace Lasius Fabr., with L. flavus as the type. Shuckard evi-
dently selected the large Formica herculeana L..as the type of his
genus Formica (our present Camponotus) and placed the smaller
species, which we now assign to Formica and Lasius, in his genus
Formicina. A second name Acanthomyops, was proposed by Mayr
in 1862 2 for the North American Lasius claviger Roger. This name
has since been retained as that of a subgenus characterized by
three-jointed instead of six-jointed maxillary palpi in the worker
and female. Ruzsky, 3 in 1913, recognized two additional sub-
genera: Dendrolasius and Chthonolasius, the type of the former
being L. fuliginosus Latr. ; that of the latter, L. flavus L. Chthono-
lasius, therefore, falls as a synonym of Formicina Shuckard, but
even Dendrolasius would take precedence of Donisthorpea. If,
however, Formicina takes the place of Lasius as a generic name, the
genotype must be shifted to L. flavus, a species belonging to what is
now a different, subgenus, so that Donisthorpea could be retained
as the name of a subgenus with L. niger as the type. The genus
would then have the following composition :
Genus Formicina Shuckard ( = Lasius Fabr.).
Genotype: Formica flava L.
Subgenus Formicina Shuckard ( = Chthonolasius Ruzsky) .
Subgenotype: same as the genotype.
Subgenus Donisthorpea Morice and Durrant ( = Lasius auct).
Subgenotype : Formica nigra L.
Subgenus Dendrolasius Ruzsky.
Subgenotype: Formica fuliginosa Latreille.
'In Swainson and Shuckard's "On the History and Natural Arrangements of Insects,"
Longman, Orme, etc., London, 1840.
Verh. zool. hot. Ges. Wien, 12, 1862, p. 699.
Myrmekologische Notizen. Arch. f. Naturg., 79, 1913, pp. 58-63, 3 figs.
1916] Wheeler The Ant Genus Lasius and its Subgenera 171
Subgenus Acanthomyops Mayr.
Subgenotype : Lasius claviger Roger.
While discussing Morice and Durrani's work in a recent paper 1
Forel contends that Acanthomyops Mayr. should replace Lasius
Fabr. He therefore cites the genus and its subgenera thus :
"Genre Acanthomyops Mayr. (1862).
= Lasius F. 1804 (non Jurine 1801).
= Donisthorpea Morice et Durrant.
Type: claviger Roger.
Subgen. : Chthonolasius Ruzsky.
Type : niger L. (flavus ex Ruzsky) .
Subgen.: Dendrolasius Ruzsky.
Type: fuliginosus Latr."
This arrangement seems to me to be inadmissible, first, because
Forel has no right to change the type of the subgenus Chthonolasius
from L. flavus to L. niger, and second, because these two forms,
in my opinion, represent distinct subgenera, Chthonolasius ( = For-
micina) being sufficiently characterized by the shape of the maxil-
lary palpi of the female and worker, the vestigia] eyes of the worker
and the hypogseic mode of life. In the two latter characters the
species of Chthonolasius resemble those of Acanthomyops and not
niger and its allies. As an after-thought, however, Forel appends
the following postscript: "Mr. Emery m'ecrit qu'a son avis il
vaudrait mieux prendre pour Lasius le noni nouvellement deterre
par Wheeler de Formicina Shuck., nom en partie base sur le Lasius
flavus. Je n'ai rien a y opposer, pourvu qu'on finisse une bonne
fois avec ces demenagements perpetuels des anciens noms." I
infer, therefore, that he now favors an arrangement like that given
above (p. 170) with Formicina&s the genus, but with Donisthorpea
eliminated and its species included in the subgenus Formicina.
For the present I propose to be conservative and to retain Lasius
Fabr., because the status of Panzer's Erlangen list seems to me
to be very dubious and because I sympathize with those entomolo-
gists who decline to abolish generic names in universal use for more
1 Fourmis du Cogo et d'autres provenances lecoltees par M. M. Hermann Kohl, Luja, Mayne,
etc. Rev. Suisse Zool. 24, 1916. p. 460.
172 Psyche [December
than half a century. I therefore suggest the following as a satis-
factory arrangement of our North American forms of Lasius: 1
Genus Lasius Fabr.
Subgenus Lasius Fabr. ( = Donisthorpea Morice and
Durrant)
niger L. var. sitkaensis Pergande.
Var. neoniger Emery.
Subsp. alienus Forster var. americanus Emery.
Subgenus Formicina Shuckard ( = Chihonolasius Ruzsky) .
fiavus L., subsp. nearcticus Wheeler.
Subsp. claripennis Wheeler (in MS.) .
brevicornis Emery.
Subsp. microps Wheeler (in MS.).
umbratus Ny lander subsp. subumbratus Viereck.
Subsp. mixtus Nyl. var. aphidicola Walsh.
Subsp. vestitus Wheeler.
Subsp. speculiventris Emery.
Subsp. minutus Emery.
humilis Wheeler (in MS.)
Subgenus Acanthomyops Mayr.
claviger Roger.
Subsp. subglaber Emery.
inter jectus Mayr.
Subsp. mexicanus Wheeler.
Subsp. coloradensis Wheeler (in MS.).
Subsp. arizonicus Wheeler (in MS.) .
Subsp. californicus Wheeler (in MS.).
occidentalis Wheeler.
murphyi Forel.
latipes Walsh.
POSTSCRIPT.
Since the preceding article was sent to the Editor of PSYCHE, I
have received from Professor Emery a paper (Formiche d'ltalia
nuove o critiche. Rend. R. Accad. Sc. 1st. Bologna 12 Marzo,
x The Subgenus Dendrolasius, which should include besides the subgenotype L. fuligin*
the peculiar Japanese L. spathepus Wheeler, is confined to Eurasia and is therefore omitte
IOSUS,
itted
1916] Wheeler The Ant Genus Lasius and its Subgenera 173
1916, pp. 53-66, 7 figs.) in which he discusses the synonymy of
Lasius and its subgenera. He accepts Jurine's Lasius as valid
and substitutes Formicina Shuckard for Lasius Fabricius, present-
ing the same arrangement of the subgenera and their types as I
have given on page 170. I am still unable to take this view of
the matter, because I am not convinced that the generic name of
another author (in this case Jurine) is valid when cited in an
anonymous paper which itself has no taxonomic status. It would
seem that if an anonymous author later acknowledges the author-
ship of his paper, the validity of the latter should date only from
the time of this acknowledgment. If this rule were followed,
Lasius Jurine would date from 1806 and could not replace Lasius
Fabricius of 1804.
