Progress Report

Stuff I have been doing --

1. I was able to get a copy of the new Wasmannia Key, which rocks and which I cannot wait to use.
   
2. I was able to send emails to a bunch of the people I wanted to in order to hopefully remind them that I am still hoping to see my specimens soon. Not sure how successful I was, but at least I tried. Most of them are at the Ant Course in Australia at the moment, so perhaps when they get back.
   
3. I was going to take a look at my Aztecas but instead ended up cleaning and reorganizing the lab, which was a very good thing.
4. Most importantly, I finished my probe paper. Yay! So now I can get back to actually looking at ants again. Huzzah!

Organizing the Ant Internet

This is what I am thinking about today -- I have this organization thing. I have a very strong need to have things in my life organized. A big pile of papers and junk drives me crazy. I just want to go through them all and put them into categories and file them away or throw away the trash and make everything look nice and neat. I get this feeling sometimes when I am browsing through the internet and looking at ant sites. I want to take them all off the web, look at them, clean them up a bit, throw away the junk, and put them all together in one well-organized drawer. There are so many ant sites nowadays and each and everyone seems to want to have everything you could ever want from an ant site, but none of them do. And I just think, if they could all get together, you really would have the best ant site ever. I'm not really sure why they don't. Even just a little bit of information sharing would be helpful. For instance, you've got AntWeb, which is a fabulous website if you are hoping to look up ants from Madagascar, but not if you are hoping to look up ants from Costa Rica. Why is that? The ants of Costa Rica have a fabulous webpage. It doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to import all of those costa rican ants onto AntWeb. DiscoverLife has done it. They don't have any checklists from Australia or Japan, though, which are also two groups of ant fauna with great webpages. Shouldn't we be trying to incorporate all of this information together? Even just a link to the other websites would be nice. It took me forever to figure out where the good websites were. I don't even trust the lists that are on DiscoverLife now -- I have a list of Tiputini ants on Discoverlife -- it is terribly out of date and I can't figure out how to update the list so I've just let it go. Tree of Life is another webpage that is basically useless to me. There are these beautiful photos but when you get down to the species level, you get a statement like "127 described species" but no actual list of species. Pseudomyrmex, for instance, has no species list on the Tree of Life website. Why not? A list certainly exists. And there are even labs that have been looking at this genus for years. Cephalotes, Procryptocerus, the Attini, Megalomyrmex, Pheidole, and Dolichoderus -- all genera that have no list of species on their tree of life webpage. Why hasn't someone added more ant information to this website? Or other websites? It is very frustrating to me. I wish someone would put me in charge of making one fantastic ant webpage that would incorporate everything. I know it would drive me insane but it would be very satisfying work.

Another Identification Tutor and Some Other Cool Sites

I received an email from Christiana Klingenberg from the State Museum of Natural History in Karlsruhe, Germany. She said she liked my ant quiz and pointed me to another similar quiz located at http://www.antbase.de/cgi-bin/antbase/tutor-englisch.cgi. Actually they call it an Identification Tutor, which sounds a lot better and may even be more accurate. Maybe I'll start calling mine an identification tutor, as well. Some of the pictures are a little hard to see, but it still works pretty well. And they have a lot more pictures than I do (at the moment anyway). So check it out. It can be found on the site www.antbase.net, which looks like a really nice resource, especially if you are interested in ants from Germany, Malaysia, or Mongolia -- kind of a bizarre trifecta. I keep finding these very nice websites with all sorts of cool features I would like to include on my website, but don't have the time to do. For instance, Jochen Bihn's website on the ant fauna of Cachoeira Nature Reserve has a really cool RSS feed from uBioRSS that lets you display news and journal articles on specific taxa. I would love to put that up on my website but I can't figure the thing out.

Things I should have been doing today instead of making an ant quiz

1. Emailing Jack Longino and asking him for a copy of his new Wasmannia key. I talked with him at the IUSSI conference and he said he would be happy to.
   
2. Identifying my Wasmannia once I get the key.
   
3. Taking a look at all of my Aztecas. I also met with Stephanie Johnson (University of Maryland) at the conference. She said she would look at my Azteca, which is awesome, but first I need to figure out how many I have, figure out what I have in alcohol, and then see if she still really wants to look at them when she realizes that I have ten billion workers and not a reproductive in sight. I don't know about her, b ut they all look the same to me.
   
4. Looking into getting a work study student or somebody to sort out all my ants in alcohol. I have a lot of folks wanting DNA samples of my ants, but most of my ants from the canopy and the winklers are just sitting in alcohol mixed together. I get panic attacks just thinking about it.
   
5. Finishing my probe paper.
6. Bugging Stefan about the Solenopsis, which he has had for some time now and hopefully will be done with soon.
7. Bugging Ted Schultz about the Attine ants, which I gave him awhile ago.
8. Bugging Shawn Dash about the Hypoponera he has had for some time -- actually I just got an email from him saying he was almost done. So Shawn rocks.
9. Bugging Scott Powell about the Cephalotes I gave him at the conference. Hopefully he will be able to look at them quickly.
10. Bugging Brian Fisher about the single Amblyopone specimen I gave him awhile ago.
11. Emailing John Lattke and see if I can get a copy of his new Gnamptogenys key.
    

I'm sure there's more. That's just off the top of my head. I'll get right on those things tomorrow.

Ant Quiz

So.. what the hell is wrong with me? I have ten thousand things to do and what did I spend today doing? Making an ant quiz. Check it out. I wish I had all the time in the world. I would make the rockin'est ant quiz in the world.

IBISCA at IUSSI -- IBILLCA?

In an earlier post I talked about the IBISCA project. What struck me most was the incredibly unequal distribution of resources devoted to the different layers of the rainforest. IBISCA stands for Investigating the BIodiversity of Soil and Canopy Arthropods, which would seem to indicate that they were equally as interested in collecting soil ants as canopy ants. And they were putting immense resources into collecting the canopy ants -- helium balloons and canopy rafts and giant cranes, for example. But as far as I could tell the only way they were collecting soil ants was pitfalls and winklers, which mostly just collect leaf litter ants. Maybe that's what they meant by soil ants -- they just thought IBISCA sounded better than IBILLCA. Anyway, at the IUSSI conference Maurice Leponce was there to talk about ants and their role in international environmental projects, and he presented some results from the IBISCA project. And I was able to ask him why there was such an unequal distribution of resources. At least that was what I was trying to ask. It may have ended up sounding like an advertisement for my subterranean probe, which it really wasn't. I just wanted to point out the inequality. Mostly I think he just said that they didn't have any good methods for the soil ants, so they didn't do them. Which of course makes sense and is perfectly reasonable, but I still maintain that people just aren't putting the effort or the money or the resources into looking for better methods. I mean, I can't even imagine the money and effort that must have gone into bringing a giant crane into the middle of the rainforest. People have even trained monkeys to collect for them in the canopy. But the best we can do with soil ants is dig up the dirt? It seems a little pathetic.

2006 IUSSI Congress in DC

Oh my goodness.... so much has happened and I have so much to say. The IUSSI congress was great, although DC was ridiculously hot. I presented my poster, which seemed to go over well. I had a lot of very excited folks wanting me to make them probes, which I really don't have the ability to do right now. I did, however, make a Do-It-Yourself web page with pictures and information on how to make your own probes, which I hope will be useful. I also put up more data from the probe experiment in case anyone wants to see that. What I really need to be doing right now is trying to finish that paper and get it published somewhere ASAP. That's next on my list after this.

The seminars I enjoyed the most were:

Symposium 12: Ant phylogenetics: new molecular trees to address old problems in ant biology
Symposium 14: Ant communities and biodiversity: global assessments and monitoring

The ant phylogenetics were quite interesting. The idea that subterranean ants are the most ancient group (as I have quoted in my poster) was called into question, which is too bad. I also liked the study on Pachycondyla which seems to show quite conclusively that they are not monophyletic and should almost certainly be divided into more than one genus. I'm sure someone is getting right on that.

I got to meet a bunch of ant folks, which was nice. And I got to visit the Smithsonian collection, which was also great. The comparison between that and the Harvard ant room is amazing. The Smithsonian ant room is large, brightly lit, climate controlled, with multiple rooms and offices for students and researchers, lots of equipment, and electronically controlled rolling stacks. In comparison, Harvard's room seems ancient, dingy and forgotten. There is not enough space for all the ants, there is a sad little window air conditioner, and barely enough room for more than a couple of people to do anything useful at the same time. And yet my understanding is that the Harvard collection is superior in terms of the actual specimens. I really don't understand why Harvard, which has more money than they know what to do with, is allowing the world's premier ant collection to stagnate. It's a crime. Anyway, visiting the Smithsonian was awesome. Maybe I can work there one day.

I also listened to EO Wilson's talk on the evolution of eusociality, which still seems a bit wonky to me but he did give my favorite quote of the congress, which was: "a scientist would rather use another scientist's toothbrush than his vocabulary." I think it depends on the scientist.

By Friday I was so overwhelmed with everything that I couldn't listen to one more talk so I skipped out and went to visit the baby panda, whose name is Tai Shan, but who I am told is called Butterstick by the locals. Adorable!