Crematogaster sotobosque occurs in lowland and mid-montane mature wet forest habitats. Workers are frequently collected in Winkler samples of sifted leaf litter from the forest floor, and dealate queens are occasionally encountered as well. Workers forage on low vegetation in the forest understory. I usually find foragers at night, but have also seen them during the day in heavily shaded forest. Foragers are solitary and usually very thinly dispersed over the vegetation. I have attracted workers to sugar baits and to dead mosquitoes, but I never see large aggregations of foragers.Although observations are few, nests appear to be diffusely spread in the forest leaf litter. In one case I baited a worker with a dead mosquito and followed it back to a small carton shelter in the leaf litter around the base of a fern. The shelter contained only workers, with no brood or sexuals, but a search of the surrounding litter yielded a lone queen with a packet of brood in a hollow stick. There were no workers with her, but she was only a few centimeters from the carton shelter. On other occasions I have found aggregations of workers in small shelters in the leaf litter, between dead leaves, with small amounts of carton construction, but have been unable to find any chambers with brood or sexuals in the vicinity. These observations of broodless worker bivouacs is tantalizing and suggests an interesting nesting and foraging behavior.
Costa Rica south to Amazonian Brazil and Peru.
Taxonomic history
Combination in Crematogaster (Orthocrema): Blaimer, 2012c PDF: 55.
