NewsMakers: Research

Database puts ants' world at researchers' fingertips

Thanks to HOLLY WAGNER, university science writer for allowing us to excerpt parts of this story, which originally appeared in onCampus

The more than 11,000 known ant species are now available in a database called Antbase, an effort to catalog all known species of ants. The project is spearheaded by Johnson, the director of Ohio State's insect collection and a professor of entomology.

Antbase, www.antbase.org, houses information on ants and other insects in the order Hymenoptera, which also includes bees and wasps. This clearinghouse allows scientists all over the world to quickly find all available information on a particular variety of ant.

"Say an entomologist in Costa Rica finds an ant he's never seen before," said Johnson, who is an expert on parasitic wasps. "He can hike back to his research station and search the Web site for info on that particular species."

As Antbase grows, entomologists will be able to curb the time they spend describing already-identified species.

Johnson and his colleagues scoured the entomology literature, adding everything they could find about individual species to the database. Getting information on a particular ant is easy, as long as the user knows the insect's name.

Although Johnson said he and his Antbase colleagues are finally caught up with adding to the database all the published literature that they could find on known ant species, their work certainly hasn't stopped. Researchers estimate that Hymenoptera contains as many as 115,000 species.

"That's roughly 10 percent of all known life on Earth - including plants, animals, fungi and microbes," said Johnson, who collaborated with scientists from the American Museum of Natural History in developing Antbase.

"We wanted to get the information out of the storage cabinets and into the hands of the people that could use it," Johnson said.

"Every generation of researcher typically gathers a small collection of the important entomology papers," Johnson said. "These collections take years to build. When the researcher dies, that information usually gets lost.

"It's time for entomologists to stop reinventing the wheel, and help the field progress by building on what's already been done."

Say the entomologist in Costa Rica does find an ant he's never seen. It could be a newly discovered species. Or he may find it described on Antbase, only to discover that it's an invasive species - a signal that something may be awry in that particular ecosystem.

"Ants are bioindicators," Johnson said. "Their presence or absence may say a great deal about the health of an ecosystem."