Posts tagged ‘taxonomy’
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Cataloguing the World’s Ants
Yesterday, Boing Boing’s David Pescovitz posted the documentary “Ants: The Invisible Majority”, about Californian entomologist Dr. Brian Fisher’s attempt to catalogue the world’s 30,000 species of ants before they’re extinct. Fisher has designed the website AntWeb, which digitises data and photos of different ant species. He calls on all amateur taxonomists to help catalogue ants, saying “We’ve discovered but 10% of the living things on earth. 90% is out there to be found. We need more taxonomists!”
The video also talks about evolutionary biologist Neil Tsutsui’s research into the invasive Argentine ant, which has eliminated almost all native ant species in its path, since it was introduced to the states from South America in the 1890s. Usually, most ants will fight against other colonies of the same species, but these Argentine ants form ‘super-colonies’, and cooperate with each other, leading to their high population densities. Ants can tell other species apart from waxy chemicals on their exoskeletons. Tsutsui found that by changing their external chemical uniform, they can turn friend into foe. He hopes to develop non-toxic insecticides to convince members of the Argentine colony to fight each other, leaving other ant species unharmed.
