Myopias tenuis

I've been pretty quiet recently as I've been very busy organising my first overseas anting trip of 2008. About a month ago, the University of Regensburg, Germany, invited me to visit them. Part of the trip will involve a seminar, so I've been trying to write the seminar, arrange travel, etc. and re-learn the little German I knew 15 years ago. This and my full-time job have left little time for very much else.

To make up for the lack of posting I decided to post something rather neat. The specimen in the picture is Myopias tenius. It wasn't collected by me; that honour goes to Catherine L. Parr, who also attended the Ant Course in 2007. Catherine found a number of interesting species during the two weeks and kindly let me have this specimen. I've only now got around to identifying it.

According the Shattuck (1999), Myopias are infrequently collected and are found from Sri Lanka to southeast Australia. Within Australia, M. tenuis is only known from north Queensland, but is also known from New Guinea, including the Indonesian part, and the Solomon Islands (Willey & Brown, 1983). This specimen was collected from Smithfield Conservation Park, an area of rainforest about 10 minutes walk from James Cook University, Cairns campus.