Critically Endangered
Sri Lankan relict ant
Aneuretus simoni
Sri Lankan relict ant is an ant in the family Formicidae (order Hymenoptera) — Aneuretus simoni, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
Workers are yellow to orange in colour and the surface has striations running transversely.
Range and habitat
In Gilimale forest, E O Wilson and other researchers found colonies mainly at the edge of forest clearings. "Twenty years later, one of my undergraduate students, Anula Jayasuriya, a native Sri Lankan, found the species rare or absent in the same localities. The genus is monotypic, with the only species endemic to Sri Lanka, where it is known from just a few locations.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Life history
Life history follows the order: complete metamorphosis in moths and beetles, nymphs in grasshoppers and bugs. This page does not invent a host plant that no source named.
In crisis
It is one of the few ant species considered endangered.
Sri Lankan relict ant is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Sri Lankan relict ant, Wikidata item Q308872. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
