The ant Cyprus feared was an invader turns out to be a native found nowhere else

For years, a carpenter ant in Cyprus's mountains carried a suspicious label: it resembled an East Asian species, the kind that arrives with imported plants and pushes natives aside. Researchers went back to specimens collected in the island's Cedar Valley in 2012 and again in 2024, compared them with relatives from Hong Kong and Japan, and checked their DNA barcodes. The verdict flipped the story. The Cypriot ants are a species entirely new to science — Camponotus limbouros — native to the island and found nowhere else on Earth. It nests inside dry twigs on Cyprus's protected golden oak, and its formal description lifts the island's count of endemic ant species to 19 while striking one name off the suspected-invader list.

SDG 15 · Life on land