Messor ebeninus

At Rawdhat Khorim, Saudi Arabia, worker activity has two peaks of abundance, in April and December, decreasing from July through October (Sharaf et al., 2013).

Distribution based on Regional Taxon Lists
Afrotropical Region: Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates. Palaearctic Region: Greece, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Lebanon, Montenegro, Oman.

This species is known to occur in the Middle East (Abdul-Rassoul et al. 2013) and is widely distributed throughout the Arabian Peninsula (Collingwood, 1985, Collingwood and Agosti, 1996) (Sharaf et al., 2013).

Nomenclature

 *  ebeninus. Messor semirufus var. ebeninus Santschi, 1927c: 229 (w.) LEBANON. [First available use of Messor barbarus subsp. semirufus var. ebenina Forel, 1910a: 10; unavailable name.] Finzi, 1936: 160 (q.). Raised to species: Tohmé, G. 1971: 569. Junior synonym of semirufus: Baroni Urbani, 1974: 227. Revived from synonymy: Tohmé, G. & Tohmé, H. 1981: 142; Collingwood, 1985: 249. See also: Tohmé, G. 1975: 171.

Additional References

 * Abdul-Rassoul, M.S., Ali, H.B. & Augul, R.SH. 2013. New Records of Unidentified Ants worker (Hymenoptera: Formicidae: Myrmicinae) stored in Iraqi Natural History Museum with key to Species. Adv. Biores., Vol 4 (2): 27-33.