Worldwide spread of the pharaoh ant, Monomorium pharaonis (Hymenoptera: For- micidae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ph araoh ant, Monomorium pharaonis (LINNAEUS, 1758), has long been considered the most ubiquitous house ant in the world. Monomorium pharaonis is particularly notorious as a pest in hospitals, where it is known as a vector for disease. I compiled and mapped specimen records of M. pharaonis from > 1200 sites to document its known worldwide distribution and evaluate hypotheses concerning its geographic origin. I documented the earliest known M. pharaonis records for 225 geographic areas (countries, island groups, major islands, US states, Canadian provinces, and Russian federal districts), including many for which I found no previously published records: Austral Islands, Central African Republic, Delaware, Dominican Republic, Gabon, Guatemala, Hainan Island, Haiti, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Maine, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Pakistan, Palmyra Atoll, Rhode Island, Tunisia, and West Virginia. In tropical areas, M. pharaonis occurs both indoors and out, but in temperate areas, it is found almost exclusively indoors. It is by far the most common tropical ant found in heated buildings of Europe and North America. Monomorium pharaonis appears to have originated in tropical Asia, where widespread outdoor records have been reported. Also, Monomorium longi FOREL, 1902 and Monomorium wroughtoni FOREL, 1902, the two species thought to be most closely related to M. pharaonis, are endemic to tropical Asia. Although M. pharaonis was first described from Egypt, I found no evidence supporting the popular, but apparently mistaken, idea that M. pharaonis is native to Africa. Numerous authors contend that M. pharaonis populations are rapidly expanding. My analyses, however, suggest that M. pharaonis had already spread over much of the world > 100 years ago. Much of the purportedly recent population increases of M. pharaonis may be an artifact of greater sampling and dissemination of information.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".