Bioacoustics of Crematogaster (Orthocrema) foliocrypta

Biology Crematogaster foliocrypta is known from only four collections, all from Braulio Carrillo National Park on the Atlantic slope of Costa Rica. The habitat where the species occurs is 500m elevation rainforest. Two of the collections are workers obtained in mixed collections of foragers. One collection is from a cluster of very distinctive nests. The ants had constructed flat carton nests between leaves of small saplings, pulling two or more leaves together and sealing the edges, completely concealing the disk-like carton nest. I saw five of these nests in one small area. Often there were scale insects on the leaves inside the nest, and most nests I saw had spiders associated with them. The carton itself was composed entirely of filamentous material molded into passageways. The nests contained workers and brood, including some large larvae that were possibly queens, but none of the nests contained adult queens or males. A final collection was from the canopy of a Licania tree (Chrysobalanaceae). A small group of workers was in a dead stick, and other workers were scattered in small clusters throughout the crown. G. B. Edwards of the Florida State Collection of Arthropods identified the spiders as immatures of the salticid genus Cotinusa . He and colleagues alerted me to the fact that a species of Cotinusa has been reported inhabiting a nest of Tapinoma melanocephalum (Fabricius) (Shepard and Gibson 1972). These spiders have stridulatory organs, and it has been suggested that the stridulation may be related to communication with ants (Maddison 1987).