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godzilla 27 October 2006 Discovery, Endangered & Extinction 116 views No Comment Print This Post  Email This Post

Conservation International

In exacting detail, the Ant Protocol sets forth guidelines for scientists studying the critical insects – from collecting the surface layer of forest floor known as “leaf litter,” to sifting its finest contents into a device known as the “Winkler apparatus,” and finally to capturing the ants that fall to the bottom for scientific study and identification.

But why such extensive procedures for ants?

“The leaf litter layer doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves,” says John Longino, a member of Conservation International’s Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) Initiative and lead scientist for the Ant Protocol. “That layer under your feet is just concentrated biodiversity.”

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Pooling scientists from around the world, the TEAM Initiative quantifies and forecasts changes in biodiversity in tropical forests, in part by identifying ants. The Ant Protocol helps to ensure that various scientists collect data in the same manner, allowing them to come to conclusions more efficiently. If scientists are lucky, they’ll find a species in the Winkler they never knew existed. It is a process that Longino compares to finding a needle in the haystack.

Despite the odds, Longino identified one new ant species and rediscovered another in September 2006 at the TEAM Initiative’s Volcán Barva site in northern Costa Rica.

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Longino also identified a worker of Typhlomyrmex prolatus, a species that was previously only known from a lone queen collected near San Jose, Costa Rica around 1940.

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© Piotr Naskrecki
The nearly 12,000 known species of ants provide imperative services within their environment, such as loosening the soil and making it friendlier for small sprouting plants.