Shadow ants: a phylogenomically informed revision of the Gnamptogenys mordax clade (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)

The <em>Gnamptogenys mordax</em> clade (“shadow ants”) comprises rare Neotropical ants that are primarily nocturnal or cryptic inhabitants of leaf litter, rotten wood, and soil in mature forest ecosystems.</p> <p>The study integrates morphological examination with phylogenomic inference based on ultraconserved elements (UCEs) to reconstruct evolutionary relationships and revise species-level taxonomy within the clade.

The phylogenomic dataset includes 77 ingroup samples, of which 58 are newly generated for this study. In addition, mitochondrial COI barcode sequences were analyzed using a dataset of 268 terminals derived from UCE assemblies and public data from BOLD Systems.</p> <p>This repository includes assembled UCE contigs, multiple sequence alignments, partitioning schemes, and phylogenetic trees used in the analyses. These data support a major taxonomic revision of the <em>Gnamptogenys mordax</em> clade, increasing the number of recognized species from 9 to 39, including the description of 26 new species and the validation of several previously synonymized taxa.</p> <p>Raw sequencing reads generated for this study are available from the NCBI Sequence Read Archive under BioProject PRJNA1279638, and previously published UCE data from Camacho et al. (2022) are available under BioProject PRJNA668430.