Oxyepoecus ephippiatus Albuquerque & Brandao 2004

Oxyepoecus ephippiatus Albuquerque & Brandão, 2004 Materials Type status: Other material. Occurrence: catalogNumber: LEUA- 00000066491; recordedBy: Kenna Martinez; individualCount: 1; sex: female; occurrenceID: 68EE000B-4A46-5F36-9032-80084D733F2D; Taxon: scientificName: Oxyepoecus ephippiatus; kingdom: Animalia; phylum: Arthropoda; class: Insecta; order: Hymenoptera; family: Formicidae; genus: Oxyepoecus; specificEpithet: ephippiatus; scientificNameAuthorship: Albuquerque & Brandão, 2004; Location: continent: South America; country: Colombia; countryCode: CO; stateProvince: Caquetá; county: Florencia; locality: Vda. San Luis, Fca. El Carmen 1; verbatimElevation: 433 m; locationRemarks: Collected in leaf Litter; verbatimCoordinates: 01°40'34.2"N 75°37'39.2"W; verbatimCoordinateSystem: WGS 84; Event: samplingProtocol: Monolite / TSBF; eventDate: 2022-12-20; Record Level: language: es; collectionID: RNC: 270; institutionCode: Universidad de la Amazonia (UDLA); basisOfRecord: PreservedSpecimen Diagnosis This species is recognised by the following characteristics: dorsum of mesosoma smooth and shiny, irregularly reticulate sculpture absent; length of head not clearly greater than width; pronotum convex and rounded above, propodeum and metapleuron with well-marked costulae; propodeum saddle-shaped; posterior border of the katepisternum and posterior face of the postpetiole smooth and shining; petiole anteroposteriorly compressed, scale-like (Fig. 13) (Albuquerque and Brandão 2004). Distribution This species is rarely collected, with only a few records from the Amazon rainforest (Albuquerque and Brandão 2004). This is the first report of the species in Colombia and the second report of the genus in the country, which was previously known from only a single record in the Department of Meta. In the Neotropical Region, the species has also been recorded in Brazil, Ecuador and French Guiana (Albuquerque and Brandão 2004, Salazar et al. 2015, Franco et al. 2019). Biology The only specimen of Oxyepoecus ephippiatus was collected in leaf litter in the Andean-Amazonian transition zone, in the lower cloud forest of the Hacha River Basin.