The oldest ancestor of Caucasian mountain ants was found in Kaliningrad

A new species of Manica ant has been waiting for scientists in amber for 37 million years.

The oldest ancestor of mountain ants of the genus Manica, 37 million years old, was found in a piece of amber in Kaliningrad by scientists from St. Petersburg University. The ant found is the first fossil species of the genus. This was reported by Insects magazine.

As MK was told at St. Petersburg University, Manica is a genus of ants whose length is 5–6 millimeters. Currently, they live exclusively in mountainous regions.

Before the discovery of biologists from the city on the Neva, six modern species of the genus were known. Four of them live in North America, one in Japan, and another in the mountains of Europe and the Caucasus.

The discovery of their oldest ancestor in Kaliningrad amber surprised scientists. After all, ants of the genus Manica had not been observed in that region before.

According to scientists, this is the first such ancient fossil find of this genus and the first such find in Europe.

The homeland of Manica is supposedly considered to be North America, which in the Eocene era (from 56 to 33.9 million years ago) was repeatedly connected to Eurasia by land corridors. It is possible that one of the ancestral species came to Asia and formed the modern species Manica yessensis, living in the mountains of Japan. Another could have gone east and reached Europe.

It seems that his relative was found by scientists from St. Petersburg in Kaliningrad. It turned out that it is a new species of Manica, which is similar to the subfamily of Myrmicinae ants. It was named Manica andrannae in honor of the employees of the Kaliningrad Amber Museum Andranik Manukyan and Anna Smirnova.

It was possible to classify the insect and assign it to a previously unknown species thanks to computed microtomography. Scientists also managed to digitize the ant in detail and create a 3D model of it. It was much more convenient to study insects that lived in the Eocene era, since researchers were not disturbed by plant remains and air bubbles in the amber that sealed it.

According to experts, the Manica andrannae ants could have come from North America. This is evidenced by the fact that, firstly, the European fauna of that period was cut off from Asia by the ancient Tethys Sea, and secondly, earlier, in 2022, biologists from St. Petersburg State University had already found another species among fossil ants, which turned out to be very widespread in the South and Central America.