I am an amature ant fan (citizen myrmecologist, my day job is teaching Computer Science and Mathematics) so when I started getting interested in ants I didn’t really know anything about taxonomy beyond the idea that all of life could fit into a big tree with maybe LUCA at the bottom, and somehow biologists sorted organisms into more and more narrow bins until you got to species.
I was surprised not to find a concise definition (as we’d have in math) for a species, but the idea still made sense. I learned about the ants I liked, raised colonies and eventually learned to identify the ants people bring me all the time because if you like ants people think you know every ant.
But then I got into identifying species and I was shocked to find that many ants are undescribed. And these aren’t ants deep in some mountain cloud forest only one person visits a year. Undescribed ants are everywhere. I was at first horrified, but then fascinated.
I still get a little frustrated when I find an ant in NYC, and it’s a common species and the antiwiki has only two sentences on it. Hasn’t anyone thought to pay a little more attention to this wonderful ant that is shaping our environment?
At the same time the magnitude of the task is staggering. Were this just iAnt and not iNaturalist it’d still be staggering.
(I promise I will help with the flies someday, I’m just busy now…)
I really get a kick when I can I identifiy an undescribed species on iNaturalist.
Recently I noticed a group of ants “stuck at the genus level of ID” this means that no one knows what species they are. I did the research to try to pin down the exact species and hit a wall.
Then I found out from more accomplished myrmecologists that, yes, these ants need to be described. They don’t have a name yet. Isn’t that awesome?
The ant species is in Australia and to write a species description you’d need to collect the ants, or identify them in an existing public collection and write a paper making a case that would pass peer review that these ants don’t fit in any existing species bin. I don’t have the skills to do that yet, and I couldn’t have done this without the field photos on iNaturalist and the help of other users there.
So I’ll leave it to an Aussie to do the rest.
“The rest” isn’t glamorous or easy either. And I think other people have noticed that this ant needed to be described. But I’m still excited and happy to have done some of the puzzle for myself.
Really there are a lot of species that need to be described and not enough people to do this work. It’s not like it pays well… or at all.
Every time I find a new wrinkle it’s so exciting.