After 30 years of research, the zoology team led by Alberto Tinaut has recently finished a study started in 1977. According to this study, published in the “Zoología baetica” journal, this list includes a third of the existing species in the Iberian Peninsula.
Tinaut states that “the altitude of the Sierra Nevada and its valleys, with continually flowing rivers, provides a great variety of habitats where the establishment of diverse species from various periods is possible”.
According to the publication, more than half of the species in the new catalogue, which number around fifty, have been identified for the first time in Sierra Nevada. The first one has been Rossomyrrmex minuchae (1981), a species endemic to the Penibetica Mountain and which preys on other ants. “At that time, only one other species of the same kind was known, but it was thousands kilometres away, in the foothills of the Caucasus”, remembered Tinaut.
Classifying all the ants of the Sierra Nevada meant many hours of commitment and several years of work. “Finding strange or rare species demanded thorough fieldwork; sometimes we had to use traps or baits, even lamps at night for sexed species”, explains Tinaut. In order to carry out a proper estimate of the wildlife in a specific area, fieldwork is not the only important thing to do, but also the identification of samples using all possible bibliography (including information from other Mediterranean and Central Asian countries) as well as studying collections stocked in museums.
“In spite of everything, this kind of study is not usually valued, not even by the scientific community, which considers it old-fashioned and irrelevant”, regrets the researcher.
Reference
Alberto Tinaut
Tlf: 958243231
Email address. hormiga@ugr.es