Amazon Rainforest Ant-Fauna of Parque Estadual do Cristalino: Understory and Ground-Dwelling Ants

Ants are ecologically dominant and have been used as valuable bio-indicators of environmental change or disturbance being used in monitoring inventories. However, the majority of inventories have concentrated on ground-dwelling ant fauna disregarding arboreal fauna. This paper aimed to list the ant species collected both on the ground and in the vegetation of the Parque Estadual do Cristalino, an important protected site in the center of the southern Amazon. Moreover, we compared the composition of the ground dwelling and vegetation foraging ants. Two hundred and three (203) species distributed among 23 genera and eight subfamilies were sampled, wherein 34 species had not yet been reported in the literature for Mato Grosso State. As expected, the abundance and richness of ants was higher on the ground than in the understory. Also, the composition of the ant assemblages was different between these habitats (with only 20% occurring in both) indicating that complementary methods which include arboreal and terrestrial ants are indicated for efficient inventory. This study provides an inventory of the arboreal and ground ant fauna contributing to the knowledge and conservation of Amazonian ant fauna.