AntGeM
The genetic map of European ants
A DNA barcode reference library for the whole European ant fauna, built so that anyone working on these animals can put a name to a specimen, see where species boundaries actually fall, and catch the ones that have arrived from somewhere else.
Read it
The paper and the atlas
Atlas V1.0
The Mitochondrial Genetic Diversity Maps of European Ants. Diversity and specimen maps for 384 species, haplotype networks for 289, and 52 genus-level trees, one species to a page.
DownloadFull resolution on OSF
Supporting Information 1b is the same atlas in a palette tested for the most common types of colour blindness, with elevation added to the specimen maps and each sequence marked as new or retrieved, identified or cf., and type or faunistic novelty. Download on OSF, 218 MB
Sequences, collection data, vouchers, GenBank and BOLD accessions, the checklist, the trees and the R scripts are all on OSF, and the sequences are in the BOLD dataset DS-ANTEU.
Why ants
Three reasons, and one that is not a reason at all
Diversity
Ants are among the most successful animals on the planet. A hundred and twenty million years of history and a complex social life have carried them to more than 14,000 described species, and the real figure is probably closer to 20,000 or 30,000.
Their richness broadly follows latitude, rising towards the equator, but Europe is far from uniform. The Balkan, Iberian and Italian peninsulas hold the most, and islands such as Crete and Sicily carry high numbers alongside their own endemics. New species are still being found here every year.
Ecology
Ants hold up much of what happens in terrestrial ecosystems. Their biomass peaks in equatorial forest, but they matter just as much in temperate ground, from woodland to farmland to the middle of a city.
They are among the most abundant generalist predators of other arthropods and sometimes keep a pest in check. They turn and aerate soil and move nutrients through it. They carry the seeds of some plants and eat those of others. They keep involved mutualisms going with other insects, with plants and with fungi. And they are food themselves, for a long list of vertebrates and invertebrates.
Behaviour
It is hard to think about ants without thinking about their social life, which is where their success is rooted. Generations of biologists have used them to work out how colonies are organised, how animals signal to each other, and how a group decides where to feed.
European species alone run the whole range. Some live in single-queen colonies of a few dozen; others form supercolonies of tens of millions with hundreds of queens. Some are social parasites that take over another species' nest, either living quietly as guests or raiding it for workers. There are ants that never leave the canopy and ants that never see daylight at all. Some bite, sting or spray; some bluff by mimicking species that do; one curls into a ball and rolls away downhill. For most of these behaviours we still do not know how many times they evolved.
And most of all, because we love them.
Photographs by the iNaturalist users Konstantinos Kalaentzis, Piergiorgio Di Pompeo, vyacheslavluzanov, melodi_96, jarvo, powaalife, alexis_orion, martin_galli, zmrdk, juanvi, janofonsagrada and thepalmproject.
The project
Two things built out of one collection
A barcoding library
Covering native and introduced species alike, with the variation inside each species measured rather than assumed.
A tool for
Alpha taxonomy
Unveiling cryptic species
Detecting introduced species
A comprehensive phylogeny
Bringing ultraconserved elements together with Sanger data, so the tree and the library rest on the same specimens.
A tool for
Evolutionary research
Macroecological studies
Ecosystem research
Sampling
Getting hold of 650 species
The plan was to sequence 80% of the European ant fauna, and to do it across each species' range rather than from one convenient population, because that is the only way to measure the variation inside a species and to notice when what looks like one species is really two.
That meant going to the places where the answers are: islands, mountain chains, glacial refugia. It meant collecting the common species as carefully as the rare ones, since no species is trivial in a reference library. It meant working the type localities to find the real thing rather than something that has been going under its name. And it meant a great many hours over a Winkler extractor, which is the only way to reach the small soil-dwelling species that never come to the surface.
The library reached 506 species, 77.8% of the fauna and at least one representative of every genus, which is essentially the target we set at the start.
Team
Who is behind it
Mattia MenchettiMarie Skłodowska-Curie fellowMuseum für Naturkunde, Berlin, Germany
Roger VilaPrincipal investigator, Butterfly Diversity and Evolution LabInstitute of Evolutionary Biology (CSIC-UPF), Barcelona, Spain
Leonardo DapportoZEN LabUniversity of Florence, Italy
Enrico SchifaniMyrmecology LabUniversity of Parma, Italy
Sämi SchärSwitzerland
Paul D. N. HebertCentre for Biodiversity GenomicsUniversity of Guelph, Canada
Sebastian SalataUniversity of Wrocław, Poland
Lech BorowiecUniversity of Wrocław, Poland
Kiko GómezBarcelona, Spain
Fede GarcíaBarcelona, Spain
José Alberto Tinaut RaneraDepartment of ZoologyUniversity of Granada, Spain
Francisca RuanoDepartment of ZoologyUniversity of Granada, Spain
Tomasz SuchanW. Szafer Institute of BotanyPolish Academy of Sciences, Kraków, Poland
Albena Lapeva-GjonovaSofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski"Sofia, Bulgaria
José María Gómez DuránMadrid, Spain
Bonnie BlaimerCenter for Integrative Biodiversity DiscoveryMuseum für Naturkunde, Berlin, Germany
Everyone who helped
A reference library is only as good as the specimens behind it, and these are the people and institutions who collected them, sent them, identified them or opened their collections to us.
Antonio Alicata, Leonardo Ancillotto, Anne Andersen, Javi Arcos, I. Arrieta, Manuel Baena, Pau Balart, Alfonso Balmori-de la Puente, Margherita Bandini, Sean Bek, Rostislav Bekchiev, Michele Bertoncini, Luca Bertoni, Rumsaïs Blatrix, Daniel Blyton, Marek Borowiec, Luca Bosetti, Giacomo Bruni, Bernat Burriel Carranza, Vincent Byström, Alessandro Canzi, João Pedro Cappas, Chema Catarineu, Massimiliano Centorame, CEP, Xim Cerdá, M. Chatzaki, Sara Chiarello, Fabio Cianferoni, Alessandro Cini, Anastasia Colomeet, Simone Costa, Nicolò Crosato, Antonio David Cuesta-Segura, Sylvain Cuvelier, D. Fernández Ortíz, Mattia Francesco D.'Amato, Matteo D.'Ambrosio, Panagiotis Dalagiorgos, Elia De Lisi, Antonino Dentici, Piergiorgio Di Pompeo, Vila Diana, Desi Dimitrova Schär, Valerio Dolci, David Drinic, Ent. Stud. Soc, Ghila Eskinazi, Xavier Espadaler, Paola Ferruzzi, Formicarium.it, Alexandros Fotopoulos, Emiliano Franci, Giacomo Francini, M. Funk, G.E.V. (Grupo Espeleología de Villacarillo), Christophe Galkowski, Mirko Galuppi, Eva García Esquivel, Mireia Garreta, Aurélien Gaunet, Emanuele Genduso, Giachino, Dario Giambra, J. D. Gilgado, Tommaso Giorgi, A. Gómez, U. Gómez, Emilio González Miras, Francesca Graziani, Elia Guariento, Makranczy Gyorgy, Matthew T. Hamer, Juan Hernández Roldán, Carlos Herrera, Cathal Hilliard, Joan Carles Hinojosa, Roberto Huertas, A. Illum, Vladislav Ivanov, Lucas Kaminski, Celal Karaman, Kadri Kiran, Tomislav Kragujević, Maurizio Lagotto, Philippe Laroque, R. Larsen, Claude Lebas, Marta Ledesma Vega, Carlo Legittimo, Fabio Liberto, Federica Lisi, M. López, Guglielmo Maglio, Fabio Manca, Diego Mantua, José Marín, Valeria Marques, Andy D. Marquis, Jan Martini, Niccolò Massimo, Björn Matthies, Paolo Mazzei, C. Meloni, Stefano Menchetti, M. Michlewicz, Gabriel Mochales, Giorgia Mocilnik, Yeray Monasterio, Andrea Montechiarini, Elia Nalini, R. Neumeyer, Michail Nikolas, V. M. Ortuño, E. Pascual, Marco Pecoraro, Lorenzo Pelicella, Ivan Pesce, Rafael Pinto, Roberto Piras, Leonardo Platania, Salvatore Platania, Massimo Plumari, J. Pomorska, Alexandre Portheault, Marc Ramos, Giulia Ricciardi, Roberto Ritrovato, Norian Saliba, Vania Salvati, A. Sánchez, Daniele Saracino, Vanessa Schär, Antonio Scupola, E. Sgro, Loukia Spilani, Julien Stanley, Rasmus Stenbak Larsen, Adrián Talavera, D. Tarnawski, S. Tieri, Alberto Tinaut, Eric Toro-Delgado, Valter Tovoli, James Trager, Francesco Turillazzi, D. Vailati, Sara Viale, Sabina Vila, Marco Villani, Adrián Villastrigo, Roberto Viviano, Raluca Vodă, Herbert C. Wagner, D. Zanon, P. Zięba, Dominik Zięcina.
Publications
What has come out of it
García F., Cuesta-Segura A.D., Espadaler X., Vila R., Menchetti M. (2026) Description of a new desert-ant belonging to the Cataglyphis cursor group (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) from the Iberian Peninsula.
Menchetti M., Schifani E., García F., Schär S., Sbrega E., Balević N., Blaimer B., Borowiec L., Cioppa D., Corbella C., Dincă V., Gentile V., Giotis I., Gómez K., Gómez Durán J.M., Kalaentzis K., Lapeva-Gjonova A., Mori E., Talavera G., Tinaut A., Ruano F., Salata S., Sequeira E., Serracanta M., Suchan T., Hebert P.D.N., Dapporto L., Vila R. (2026) DNA barcode reference library for European ants: a roadmap for phylogeography and species discovery.
Zięcina D., Menchetti M., Borowiec L., Bračko G., Lapeva-Gjonova A., Vila R., Salata S. (2024) Taxonomic revision of the Aphaenogaster subterranea species group (Hymenoptera, Formicidae).
Menchetti M., Schifani E., Alicata A., Vila R. (2023) Quantitative morphology and mtDNA reveal that Lasius maltaeus is not endemic to the Maltese Islands (Hymenoptera, Formicidae).
Menchetti M., Schifani E., Alicata A., Cardador L., Sbrega E., Toro-Delgado E., Vila R. (2023) The invasive ant Solenopsis invicta is established in Europe.
Schär S., Vila R., Menchetti M. (2023) First Record of the Introduced Ant Myrmica specioides In the Eastern United States.
Menchetti M., Schifani E., Gentile V., Vila R. (2022) The worrying arrival of the invasive Asian needle ant Brachyponera chinensis in Europe (Hymenoptera: Formicidae).
Schär S., Menchetti M., Schifani E., Hinojosa J.C., Platania L., Dapporto L., Vila R. (2020) Integrative biodiversity inventory of ants from a Sicilian archipelago reveals high diversity on young volcanic islands (Hymenoptera: Formicidae).