Dear colleagues,

     As most of you would be aware, I am working on the taxonomy of ants of the genus Polyrhachis with a revision of the subgenus Cyrtomyrma almost completed and one on the subgenus Hagiomyrma is well advanced. I am also close to completing a paper on Polyrhachis of Sulawesi, however, since I started working on this fascinating project, securing material for the review has proved problematic.
      At present, my paper deals mostly with the material collected during Project Wallace, the 1985 joint expedition of the Royal Entomological Society of London and the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) to North Sulawesi, with Nigel Stork as a leader. Also included are considerable collections made by Martin Brendel of the Natural History Museum, London and Kees van Achterberg of the Nationaal Natuurhistorisch Museum, Leiden, both before and after the expedition. In addition, material collected by Bruno Gobin of the Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, Seiki Yamane of the Kagoshima University and Maryati Mohamed of the University Malaysia Sabah, provided numerous Polyrhachis specimens from other parts of Sulawesi. The most recent material, including several new species, resulted from the 1999 Field Survey, jointly conducted by the Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Kyushu University, Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) and the Hasanuddin University, Ujung Pandang, with ants collected by Kazuo Ogata.
      Frederic Smith described the first twenty-five Polyrhachis species from Sulawesi, collected in 1856 and 1857 at Makassar and in 1859 at Menado by Alfred Russel Wallace. In the following years, a further twenty-one new species and subspecific forms were added by various authors, including Emery, Forel and Viehmeyer, bringing the number of Polyrhachis species described from the island to forty-six. This number includes eight species (and subspecies) described from copal and eleven, which are now considered junior synonyms of senior taxa described from Sulawesi or from elsewhere in South East Asia. In addition, over twenty extralimital species were reported from Sulawesi by various authors, however, at least half of these records remain doubtful, while some are obviously erroneous.
      At present my manuscript lists eighty-one species from Sulawesi, including twenty-two, which are described as new and three species previously known only from other parts of Indonesia. Included in the total number are also species not recently collected, but having Sulawesi as their original provenance, or being confidently identified from reliable sources. It has become apparent that some species reported from Sulawesi in the past are not represented in more recent collections in spite of a wide range of collecting methods used. These included fogging (Brendel, Stork), Malaise trap (van Achterberg), general hand collecting (Gobin) and time sampling (Ogata). However, considering that Project Wallace was centralized on a relatively small area of North Sulawesi and with only very limited recent collections from other parts of the island available for this review, I believe that the present paper does not reflect fully the richness of the Sulawesian Polyrhachis fauna.
      Unfortunately my own trip to Sulawesi, planned together with Simon Robson of James Cook University, Townsville, didn't eventuate, primarily because of a shortfall in financial support and partly because of some concern regarding our safety. I therefore plea to all who have ever collected on Sulawesi, or have any Polyrhachis specimens from Sulawesi in their care, to lend me this material, so I can successfully complete my work. Any loan or donation of material, dry or wet, will be appreciated and duly acknowledged.

Rudy Kohout
Honorary Research Fellow
Higher Entomology Section
Queensland Museum
PO Box 3300
SOUTH BRISBANE QLD 4101
AUSTRALIA
Tel: +61 7 3840 7704
Fax: +61 7 3846 1226
E-mail: rudyk@qm.qld.gov.au
or:kohout@powerup.com.au