Ants. M. V. Brian
are only 4 species in the Northern Isles. In Ireland, Leinster (18) and Munster (17) are twice as rich as Ulster (9); Connaught with 14 is intermediate.
This southerly tendency can be seen in ant distribution over the whole world. The humid Tropics have by far the greatest number. No doubt temperature is the most important single factor in this but rainfall, soil type, vegetation and humidity are subsidiary and of course highly interrelated. In this country the temperature of the soil where the ants live is probably more important than the air temperature and ant distribution is strongly influenced by the hours of sunshine in spring; this can be seen very clearly from fig. 8 in which the hours of sunshine in May have been plotted over the number of species per vice-county.
FIG. 8. The number of species of ant per vice-county and the zones where daily sunlight in May averages 6 to 7 hours. Black: over 30 species; densely dotted: over 20; lightly dotted: over 10; blank: between 1 and 10. The information on ants was obtained from the Transactions of the Society for British Entomology, Volume 16, Part 3, pages 93–121, Collingwood, C. A. and Barrett, K. E. J. The information on sunlight is from the Climatological Atlas of the British Isles, published by H.M.S.O. in 1952.
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