Additions to the Ant Fauna of Turkey (Hymenoptera, Formicidae)

ABSTRACT Based on material collected between the years 1988-2015 numerous new province and country records of ants from Turkey are given. A total of 143 ant species were listed of which six: Cataglyphis machmal Radchenko & Arakelian, 1991, Lasius illyricus Zimmerman, 1935, Monomorium barbatulum Mayr, 1877, Myrmica caucasicola Arnol'di, 1934, Temnothorax clypeatus (Mayr, 1853) and Temnothorax rogeri Emery, 1869 are new for Turkish ant fauna. Based on most recent taxonomic data and studies on distributional patterns we also excluded from Turkish ant fauna fifteen species: Bothriomyrmex corsicus Santschi, 1923, Anoplolepis gracilipes (F. Smith, 1857), Cataglyphis cursor (Fonscolombe, 1846), C. rubra (Forel, 1903), Lasius paralienus Seifert, 1992, Plagiolepis pallescens maura Santschi, 1920, Proformica nasuta (Nylander, 1856), Aphaenogaster semipolita (Nylander, 1856), A. testaceopilosa (Lucas, 1849), Crematogaster auberti Emery, 1869, C. scutellaris (Oliver, 1792), Solenopsis geminata (Fabricius, 1804), Temnothorax nylanderi (Förster, 1850), T. crassispinus (Karavaiev, 1926) and Tetramorium semilaeve André, 1883. Taxonomic position and new species names which were given in publications following the first Turkish checklist in 2012 are also discussed. The available faunal data showed that the ant fauna of Turkey is represented currently with 362 taxa.


INTRODUCTION
According to the first and the only checklist on Turkish ant fauna (Kiran & Karaman 2012), the current number of ant taxa represented in Turkey is evidently higher than in the neighbouring countries. The nearest most diverse ant fauna is that of Greece with 315 species (Salata & Borowiec 2018b), followed by Iran with more than 250 species (Rad et al. 2018;Khalili-Moghadam et al. 2019), Bulgaria with 186 species (Lapeva-Gjonova et al. 2010;Lapeva-Gjonova et al. 2014;Kiran et al. 2017;Borowiec et al. 2019), and Georgia with 145 species (Gratiashvili et al. 2010;Salata & Borowiec 2018a). One can explain, at first glance, such a substantial species number by comparatively larger land surface area of the country. But the geographical position of the country, as a junction point of European and Asian continents, and its latitudinally and longitudinally different climatic conditions may also be responsible for the diverse ant fauna. On the other hand, the high species number does not mean that Turkey has been thoroughly investigated with intense faunal studies. For instance, the recent checklist of Turkey revealed that no ant records were reported for nine of the 81 provinces and that 29 provinces were represented in the list with only one to five species (Kiran & Karaman 2012).
In this study, we update distribution data of taxa previously recorded from Turkey and provide new faunistic records of species hitherto unknown for the country.

MATERIAL AND METHODS
The material included in the study was collected from 1988 to 2015 by the authors and various other researchers whose names were indicated in the result section. The material is deposited in the Entomological Museum of Trakya University, Edirne, Turkey (EMTU) and three specimens of some new records for Turkey (Lasius illyricus Zimmerman, 1935, Monomorium barbatulum Mayr, 1877, Myrmica caucasicola Arnol'di, 1934and Temnothorax rogeri Emery, 1869 are also deposited in the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle (MNHN), Paris, France.
The results are given alphabetically beginning from the higher taxa. Bolton (2019) was used for current classification of ant taxonomy considering Seifert et al. (2016). The locality, elevation, collection date, coordinates (if any) of each taxon and their collectors are given. Taxonomic comments are added for some species.
Provinces of Turkey are indicated by bold in the material examined.

remArks
In the former studies, three taxa of the C. albicans group were reporter from Turkey C. livida, C. viaticoides (André, 1881) and C. rubra (Forel, 1903). But our studies revealed that there are only two species. One of them is uniformly bright yellow and the other is distinctly bicolored. The occurrence of C. rubra is based on Radchenko's papers (Radchenko 1997a(Radchenko , 1998, who determined distinctly bicoloured specimens as C. rubra (Radchenko 1997a). His assumption was probably based on confusion related with the type labels of C. livida and C. viaticoides, which was explained by Bračko et al. (2016). After solving the mislabelling of the type specimens of C. livida and C. viaticoides, C. rubra was removed from the ant fauna of Turkey considering its North African, Central and South Middle East distribution (Borowiec 2014 remArks Cataglyphis machmal has been known so far as an endemic species in Armenia. Expansion of its distribution, by its present records, to North-western Turkey is an important finding. This species shows almost exactly similar taxonomic characters as C. nodus (Brullé, 1833). However, the long hair on the head and mesosoma in the C. nodus is extremely sparse, while in C. machmal it is very abundant. We believe that distributional range of C. machmal in Turkey covers a wider area than known. We strongly suggest re-evaluation of former records of C. nodus, because due to its similarity with C. machmal, both taxa could be misidentified.   Lasius platythorax Seifert, 1991 Lasius (

Genus Lepisiota Santschi, 1926
Lepisiota dolabellae (Forel, 1911) Salata, Borowiec & Radchenko, 2018 Plagiolepis perperamus Salata, Borowiec & Radchenko, 2018 remArks Bračko et al. (2016) stated that all species identified as P. pallescens sensu Radchenko should be considered as a different species. This taxonomical problem was resolved two years later by . The authors stated that all specimens previously determined as P. pallescens sensu Radchenko should be designed to P. perperamus. None of the specimens hitherto identified as P. pallescens in Turkey was clearly given as sensu Radchenko. Therefore, in our opinion all the specimens identified so far as P. pallescens from Turkey should remain in P. pallescens sensu . (Latreille, 1798)
Temnothorax dessyi (Menozzi, 1936) Leptothorax (Leptothorax)  remArks After redescription and lectotype designation of T. semilaeve André, 1883 recent studies showed that distribution of this species is restricted to the Western Mediterranean area (Borowiec et al. 2015). Borowiec et al. (2015) also confirmed that T. galaticum is a distinct species from the T. semilaeve, and suggested that probably most of T. semilaeve records from North-eastern part of Mediterranean basin refer to T. galaticum or other species of the T. semilaeve complex. Bothriomyrmex corsicus is unlikely to occur in Turkey according to Seifert (2012b). He mentioned that the distribution of the species is limited between 41.5 and 49.4° N. Salata et al. (2019) stated that Greek records of Anoplolepis gracilipes are based on Fauna Europea (Radchenko 2007) without any confirmed material. The lack of material is also seen in Turkish A. gracilipes record. Cataglyphis cursor is distributed only in South-western part of Europe, and the representative of the "cursor" group in the Balkans and Turkey is C. aenescens. Plagiolepis pallescens maura was described from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia (Santschi 1920), therefore the presence of the species in Turkey is doubtful. According to Boer (2013), Aphaenogaster semipolita distributes only in southern Italy, and A. semipolita records of Emery (1908b) from Turkey are most probably belong to A. ionia which was a variety of A. semipolita. Aphaenogaster testaceopilosa is limited to Algeria and the other records in Mediterranean basin belong to other species in A. testaceopilosa species group (Boer 2013). Crematogaster auberti distributes only in western part of the Mediterranean region, therefore the records of the species from Turkey are doubtful. Although Borowiec & Salata (2012) gave the distribution of Solenopsis geminata to include Turkey without giving an exact locality, most recently Salata et al. (2019) gave the distribution of the species as only Cyprus, Italy mainland, United Arab Emirates and Greece, because of their previous Turkish record based on Fauna Europea (Radchenko 2007) without any confirmed material (Lech Borowiec; personal communication).
Eventually we estimated that the Turkish ant fauna is currently represented by 362 species (except with uncertain taxa, see Appendix) ( Table 1).
As shown in Figure 1, western part of Turkey is the most intensively studied region of this country. Within this region, where most of the ant data of Turkey originated, Bursa (with 103 species), İstanbul (with 89 species) and Kırklareli (with 87 species) are the most species rich provinces in Turkey. However, it is hard to classify other provinces as species-poor considering limited resources providing data on their biodiversity. These provinces are places where more studies are needed to obtain a clearer picture of their ant fauna. When the current ant diversity of the well-studied regions is considered, one might expect more species also from these less studied. For this purpose, two successive studies were performed in order to determine the ant fauna of Central Anatolia and Eastern Black See regions, and the data obtained within these studies is in preparation (Kiran et al. unpublished data).
The distributions of some ant species in Turkey included many gaps until the present study. The East Mediterranean ant species Messor wasmanni, for example, was known only from Ankara, İstanbul and İzmir. It was difficult, based on the former data, to explain the discontinuous distribution of this species. Our present study clearly showed that such cases based on incomplete data and the real distributions cover almost the whole Turkey. This issue also applies to some other species in Turkey and the records given in our study covers the distribution gaps of some species and their distributions can be interpreted more meaningfully.
Four European species, among the species given in this study, Messor hellenius, Tapinoma subboreale, Temnothorax clypeatus and Tetramorium hungaricum are recorded for the first time from Asia (see Appendix) ( Table 1).