Greetings AC Family,
The Nuptial flights have begun in Northern Hemisphere! Hooray! This week to kick off the anting season we have a special treat! We sit down with Dr. Brian Fisher from the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and talk to him about discovering new ant species, his team’s work with Antweb.org, as well as ways in which you can help inn myrmecology even if you’re an amateur ant lover!
We also finally get an update on our trap-jaw queen ant that we were hoping would lay eggs for us!
Hope you enjoy this week’s info-packed ant video!
How to Discover a New Species of Ant | featuring Dr. Brian Fisher
Greeting, AC Family!
Welcome to another episode of the AntsCanada ant channel! Here on the AC channel, we watch ants feeding, moving into new homes, and growing. We also share useful tips on how to care for ant colonies! However, from time to time, we have the opportunity to hear from people who are actual experts on ants—people who dedicate their lives to studying them. These are the ant gurus of the myrmecological world.
With nuptial flight season officially starting in the Northern Hemisphere, today we sit down with Dr. Brian Fischer, creator of antweb.org, from the California Academy of Sciences. He will share with us how you, yes, you, can actually be a contributor to scientific ant research. You may even be keeping a brand-new, undiscovered ant species without even knowing it. We also have an update on our queen trap-jaw ant that you may have seen in a previous video. Did she survive? It’s a shocker! You won’t want to miss all this and more ahead, so keep watching until the end.
AC Family, find out why you, out there watching, are important to myrmecology, the study of ants, as we sit and learn from an ant master in this week’s episode of the AntsCanada ant channel.
[whispering] Please subscribe to my channel and hit the bell icon. Welcome to the AC Family. Enjoy!
During a recent trip to San Francisco, California, I was able to visit the California Academy of Sciences to meet one of the most famous ant scientists—they’re called myrmecologists—in the entire world! Dr. Brian Fischer has been one of my greatest idols for years, ever since I started seriously keeping ants. Naturally, I fanboy’d.
Dr. Fischer is the creator of Antweb.org, the world’s largest online database of images, specimen records, and natural history information on ants. It is community-driven and open to contribution from anyone with specimen records, natural history comments, or images. As an ant keeper and ant lover like all of you, I had so much to ask him on behalf of us, the AC Family.
Meet Dr. Brian Fischer
“Hello, I’m Brian Fischer, and people call me the ant explorer or the species explorer.”
“I’m here at a museum—it’s one of the largest museums in the world—and it’s called the California Academy of Sciences. At this museum, we have a research side, that’s where I work, that’s where I hide—that’s my little basement. We have one of the largest collections of ants in the world.”
“Then we have a public face: that’s the public museum where you go, and you look at the aquarium, look at the rainforest, go to the planetarium. But I rarely get up there because when I walk in, I can’t get away from the basement.”
When I first went to the tropics, it was like 30 years ago. I went to Panama, and it was that trip where I fell in love with ants. They were everywhere, right? I went down with study plans, but I saw these ants and I was like, “I gotta know about these ants.” But I couldn’t find out any information! There wasn’t, like, a field guide to the ants. There were field guides to birds everywhere, but not for ants.
And I said, “Wait a minute, how can this be that we have this incredible diversity, and we know nothing about it?” Then I couldn’t find anybody to tell me anything. So, I decided at that point I wanted to study ants, and I wanted to, in a sense, know the name of every ant in the world. And not just its name! What it looked like, where it lived, whether or not it’s endangered. I realized later that it would be even better if we could actually use that information to show that humans—our survival—is somehow linked to that.
Is it true that the ants have been the glue that holds the forest together? Is it true that we actually need ants? Well, ants are invisible to most people, and my goal with antweb was to make them visible. In a sense, put a face on it. Not just a name—at that time, we didn’t even know the names of all the ants in the world. Let’s do more than that, let’s put a face on that!
I wanted to create that field guide, that tool, in a sense, to be able to go anywhere in the world, know what’s there, and know what it looked like.
The Vision for Antweb
Now we’ve imaged, so far, 41,000 specimens. Not just a typical “click” image, but each of those images is a composite. We take images through the plane of focus and make a composite image, taking the parts in focus from each image and making a mosaic of a single image where it’s all in focus. That’s the image on antweb. It’s 70 to 100 images in a mosaic, and we take a profile, a headshot, a dorsal view, and a label. That’s the 41,000 specimens.
We’ve gotten about 75% of all ant types imaged, and each summer, we’re going out again to raise funds. If everyone can help us do that, it’d be great. We want to finish this! We want to actually finish imaging every species.