Simopelta paeminosa

Workers have been collected from leaf litter. Longino - This species occurs in mature montane forest habitats, generally above 1000m elevation. I know it from the upper Peñas Blancas Valley, the 1100m site on the Barva transect in Braulio Carrillo National Park, Wilson Botanical Garden near San Vito, and the Bocas del Toro area of Panama. I also have one collection given to me by Bill Brown from Valle, Colombia. He identified it as an undescribed species, but it matches my concept of paeminosa. For one collection (JTL0863) I observed workers and brood caches in the leaf litter. The larvae were of uniform size, and closely matched the "young larva" illustrations in Wheeler and Wheeler (1986, Figs. 11b, 13a, 14c). Another collection (JTL4360) was a colony in a clump of dirt in the middle of a recent clearing in mature forest. I tried excavating it and found workers and larvae scattered in the dirt mound, but I never found a queen.

Distribution
Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia.

Distribution based on Regional Taxon Lists
Neotropical Region: Costa Rica, Panama.

Habitat
Wet montane tropical and cloud forest, 1050 - 1150m. Costa Rica: montane sites from Cordillera de Tilarán southward.

Castes
Known only from the worker caste.

Nomenclature

 *  paeminosa. Simopelta paeminosa Snelling, R.R. 1971b: 17, fig. 1 (w.) COSTA RICA. Combination in Belonopelta: Baroni Urbani, 1975b: 300; in Simopelta: Bolton, 1995b: 383. See also: Mackay & Mackay, 2008: 315.