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Little Creatures that Run the World:Bringing Ants to a Wider AudienceDorothy Barra

a Harvard University, Cambridge, MassachusettsPublished online: 29 Apr 2014.

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Science & Technology Libraries, 33:176–184, 2014Published with license by Taylor & FrancisISSN: 0194-262X print/1541-1109 onlineDOI: 10.1080/0194262X.2014.912954

Little Creatures that Run the World:Bringing Ants to a Wider Audience

DOROTHY BARRHarvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) are among the most ubiquitousand successful creatures on earth. They are the subject of researchby ant biologists worldwide, and with over 8,800 identified species,access to quality information is important for those researchers.AntWiki (http://www.antwiki.org/) was created originally as anonline listing of all ant taxonomists and their papers, and librari-ans have assisted the project by finding, scanning, and uploadingarticles and contributing to a page on Human Culture and Ants.

KEYWORDS Formicidae, ants, Hymenoptera, Antwiki,collaboration, wikis, taxonomies, systematics

INTRODUCTION

Today we are experiencing an explosion of information sharing that is trans-forming research. The sciences have benefitted greatly from this, and a widerange of online vehicles have been created to facilitate sharing of informa-tion. There are websites, blogs, webguides, wikis, etc. Some are officiallysponsored by academic and research institutions; others are the work ofinterested amateurs; and there is everything in between. One collaboration ofant biologists, AntWiki (http://www.antwiki.org/) (see Figure 1), was created“to provide a wealth of information on the world’s ants” (Antwiki 2014) andgathers contributions from ant experts worldwide, making the informationaccessible to anyone with an Internet connection. Since 2011 librarians andalso library school interns have collaborated with the researchers to enhance

© Dorothy BarrAddress correspondence to Dorothy Barr, Harvard University, Ernst Mayr Library,

26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. E-mail: dbarr@oeb.harvard.eduColor versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at

www.tandfonline.com/wstl.

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FIGURE 1 Antwiki homepage.

Antwiki and have worked together to further the world’s knowledge of ants,the “little creatures that run the world” in E. O. Wilson’s words (Upton 1995).

It has always been important for researchers to share their work bywhatever means available. Originally this was done informally, throughtheir writings and teachings. As far back as Egypt’s Old Kingdom, around3,000 years ago, the high priest Imhotep described surgical procedures on apapyrus known today as the Edwin Smith Papyrus (Finger 2000). The ancientGreek physician Hippocrates, known as the Father of Medicine, taught andwrote, though most of his written work has not survived (Hornblower,Spawforth, and Eidinow, 2012). During the Renaissance in Europe, scholarsregularly exchanged letters describing their work. Then with the foundingof the Royal Society in 1660, physicians and scientists (then called “naturalphilosophers”) got together to talk and to run experiments. In 1665 theybegan to publish the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and themodern scientific journal was born (Wikipedia 2014).

Over time, the number of journals increased, their publication becamemore regular, and dissemination grew wider. Eventually authors were given acertain number of paper reprints that they could distribute to their colleaguesto make their research more widely available. More recently, with the adventof e-journals, paper copies have fallen into disfavor, and PDFs are the usualmeans of distribution of specific scholarly output.

In the field of natural history, taxonomic information has always beenparticularly important. To understand the behavior, evolution, and phyloge-netic relationships of species, it is necessary to identify and classify them andthen publish and share the descriptions in order to prevent duplication in

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identifying and naming species. Precise descriptions are collected in variousways and are usually local or regional in scope. Names must conform to setrules; in the case of animals, those are laid out in the International Codeof Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN). Although there is no official register ofanimal names, the Zoological Record acts unofficially as such. It is also theworld’s oldest continuing database of animal biology, and coverage in theonline version currently goes back to 1864.

Although originally bibliographies were printed, today most taxonomicarticles are also available electronically. In addition, there are databases suchas the Encyclopedia of Life (http://eol.org/) and the Tree of Life (http://tolweb.org/tree/) that aim to include all known information about ani-mals. The Internet has clearly opened up new avenues for creating onlineresources that are accessible, dynamic, and easy to keep updated. Antwikiis such a resource focused on ants and offers “information from ant expertswith discussions provided by everyone” (Antwiki 2014).

ANTS

Ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) are among the most ubiquitous and suc-cessful creatures on earth. They first appear in the fossil record around100 million years ago (Lapolla, Dlussky, and Perrichot 2013). Today thereare over 8,800 identified species worldwide, and there are undoubtedly manymore that have not been described. Ants are found on every continent exceptAntarctica and in a wide variety of habitats. They may be economicallyimportant in various ways. Sometimes their activities ruin crops or build-ings, but they may also be helpful by turning over soil, recycling organicmaterial, defending plants, spreading seeds, killing crop pests, and in otherways (Hölldobler and Wilson 1994).

Ants are “eusocial,” along with only a handful of other taxa—some beesand wasps, all termites, a very few other insects, a couple of crustaceans,naked mole rats, and humans (Wilson, 2012). Eusociality is characterized bymultiple generations living together and caring for young, maintenance anddefense of the nest, and division of labor.

Ants have highly efficient social structures. There is a queen (or some-times queens) whose sole purpose in life is to mate, start the colony, andlay eggs. Workers groom, feed, and care for the queen and tend the young.Other workers forage for food, build and repair the nest, and defend thecolony from attack from outside. In many ant species, workers take ondifferent roles at different stages in their lives (Hölldobler and Wilson 1994).

With so many species around the world, keeping track of anttaxonomy—name changes, discoveries of new species and relationshipsbetween them—has never been easy. Originally, taxonomic records wereoccasionally gathered into print bibliographies, usually regional or local inscope (e.g., Wheeler 1935). Usually, however, ant biologists looking for

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information on species had to search various sources such as the ZoologicalRecord to find what they needed.

In 1955 W. L. Brown Jr. published a scathing denunciation of the stateof ant taxonomy from around 1853. He refers to a “taxonomic maze . . . ofdubious names and useless descriptions . . . [during a] depressing period of. . . taxonomic irresponsibility” (California Academy of Sciences 1955) thatdid not begin to lift until the publication in 1950 of W. S. Creighton’s Antsof North America. Ant biologists began to apply systematic, critical methodsto descriptions and classification. Even so, it took years for modern methodsand revisions to improve the state of ant taxonomy.

The first compendium of all taxonomic decisions for ants worldwidewas prepared by Barry Bolton in 1995. He followed that in 1996 with ABibliography of Ant Systematics written with Philip Ward, Steve Shattuck andWilliam Brown Jr. (Ward et al. 1996), and in 2003 Synopsis and Classificationof Formicidae (Bolton 2003).

ANT TAXONOMY GOES ONLINE

In May 2008, a meeting of ant biologists from around the world was heldat Harvard University to formally plan for an online listing of all ant taxo-nomic literature arranged by author. Bolton collaborated with Steve Shattuckof Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation(CSIRO) and Philip Ward of the University of California at Davis to cre-ate the Global Ant Project, or GAP (http://gap.entclub.org/). They importedthe Bolton bibliography and at a second meeting in November 2009 pulledtogether more ant biologists to work on the project. By 2011 almost 1,000 tax-onomists were listed in GAP, with brief biographies, portraits when available,and lists of their publications with links to PDFs whenever possible. It wasincreasingly popular, receiving thousands of hits from all over the worldand from almost every country (190 of ∼193 countries listed by the UnitedNations in 2011).

The author is a librarian at Harvard University’s Ernst Mayr Library–Museum of Comparative Zoology (EML) and by 2011 was assisting the antresearchers in finding the missing articles, scanning them as necessary, andcreating PDFs for upload to GAP. However, there were still many importantbut difficult to obtain articles missing, and progress was slow since the authorhas many other duties and could only sporadically devote time to the project.

Around this time, spring 2011, the Simmons College Graduate Schoolof Library & Information Science (GSLIS) launched an internship course,LIS 501 (http://www.simmons.edu/gslis/academics/courses/electives/index.php), and solicited partners around the community to sponsor students.The interns were required to have completed all their requirements, so thatthey were nearing the ends of their programs, and to commit 120 hours of

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work. Recognizing that an intern would be perfect for the GAP project, thelibrary applied for one, and in the summer term the first arrived at the EML.In succeeding semesters she was succeeded by four more.

We decided that the best approach was to go through the alphabet, fill-ing in missing papers in order. Along with the author the first four internsworked systematically through the list, no small task in itself for several rea-sons. Many of the needed items were old, in obscure or defunct journals.Some were in languages other than English. To make matters worse, thecitations were often incomplete, abbreviated, or simply incorrect, and it wasfirst necessary to disambiguate them. This involved confirming citations (forexample, by double-checking other possible sources, or finding them in theold Royal Society Catalogue of Scientific Papers), searching lists of abbre-viations, and even creating specific lists that the interns passed on to theirsuccessors.

Even with a correct citation, finding the actual item in the library wasoften still a challenge. The Library is 153 years old, and although Libraryof Congress catalog numbers have been assigned to books since 1978, olderitems were cataloged using a homegrown classification system. For example,books about ants would be classified MCZ HYM (Museum of ComparativeZoology–Hymenoptera), and within that section would be arranged byauthor’s last names, and within each author’s section by date in ascendingorder. Further, many items in the old system are not books but reprints ofjournal articles, and these are often flimsily and sometimes randomly boundtogether, making finding an individual item difficult (and very easy to mis-place). So there were significant challenges for the interns, though happilythey all rose to the occasion and even enjoyed the detective work. The satis-faction of tracking down something after half an hour’s searching is familiarto all librarians.

As needed items were found, they were scanned and uploaded to GAP.The fourth intern, Marie Hviding, completed the list as best she could andalso searched for missing portraits of the taxonomists with some success.The result of all the interns’ work was that many difficult-to-get articles weremade available to ant researchers worldwide via links to the PDFs.

GAP MOVES TO ANTWIKI

In November 2010 Steve Shattuck demonstrated to the GAP ant biologistswiki software that he had been exploring as a possible replacement for GAP.Wiki technology would provide a more dynamic platform and be easierfor researchers around the world to maintain. This was accepted, and thebiologists decided to go beyond taxonomy and create species pages for allthe ants of the world. Therefore, in 2012 Antwiki was formally launched andGAP was incorporated completely into it (http://www.antwiki.org).

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Antwiki proposes to provide “a wealth of information on the world’sants” (Antwiki 2014). The About page (http://www.antwiki.org/wiki/Antwiki:About) emphasizes the global scope of the project, the opennessof the formats, the use of images and graphics (free to use but copyrightremains with the owner), etc.

Antwiki includes a number of sections, all easily accessed from thehomepage. They are:

● Identification and species accounts. This includes a homepage for everyknown ant, with text, data, images, everything known about each ani-mal. The pages can be browsed in various ways—by taxonomic rank, bycountry or region, by name, and more.

● Extinct ants. This section is really about fossil ants. Some are fossilized instone, though as with all insects these are often not well preserved despitethe fact that insects were larger in the past than they are today. Some weretrapped in plant resin that hardened: The resin is called amber if it is olderthan one million years; older resins are called copal. Ants so trapped areusually in better shape than ones fossilized in stone.

● Behavior. This in broken down into ethograms or defined behaviors, forag-ing, interspecific and intraspecific interactions, and models of ant behavior,with subcategories under each.

● Distribution and diversity. Ants are found in a wide variety of ecosystems,and this section allows the visitor to search by country or by taxonomicgroup or to see maps of the distribution of all genera.

● Ant Societies. This section describes Life in an Ant Colony. It also includesAnts as Pests, Classification, Identification, a Glossary of Terms, CollectingMethods, and Specimen Preparation.

● Morphology, Anatomy, and Terminology. This is subtitled Morphologyand Terminology, and includes Morphological Terms; Surface Sculpturing(this describes, with photographs, the varying surfaces of various antsand parts of ants, with descriptive terminology defined); MorphologicalMeasurements, defining the “core” measurements used in describingants; Caste Terminology, defining the various castes of ants; andTerminology, descriptions of the life history strategies such as subter-ranean, lignicolous, etc.

● Biochemistry, Genetics, and Evolution. Included are Systematics(Phylogenetics); Genetics, with links to sequenced ant genomes whereavailable or under development; and also Karyotypes; Pheromones andChemicals; and Pupal Development.

● Ecology. Much of this is still under construction, though the frameworkis set. It includes Ant Nests, Mimicry (nothing linked), and Morphologicaland Functional Diversity of Ant Mandibles. There are also sections onSpecies Interactions, Predators Specialized on Ants (no links), and TrophicStrategies (only link is to one species).

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● Human Culture and Ants (see Figure 2). The last intern, KatherineBartolomea, worked on this section. She searched various databases bothin paper and online for anything ant related. This was work that neitherthe researchers (who simply want to study ants) or the author (who hasa zoology background and is not particularly interested in popular cul-ture) wanted to do. Using wiki markup language, Bartolomea contributeddirectly to content on Antwiki and created sections on Books & Literature,with sortable tables for fiction, nonfiction, and children’s books; Movies &Television; Music; Art; Photography; Games; Humor; and Food. One of theresearchers, Dr. Gary Alpert, has added information about photographingants, and there are more topics listed but not yet populated. See Figure 2.

● People and History of Myrmecology. This incorporates GAP, which remainsas a standalone as well.

● A Table of Contents.● And finally, a “New to Antwiki? Start Here” page.

The wiki software means that Antwiki is dynamic and always growing;researchers around the world can upload to it or make edits as needed. Themost complete section is the one on People and History of Myrmecology,which took over GAP, but even that part is constantly expanding as newarticles and taxonomists are added and missing papers uploaded.

FIGURE 2 Part of Human Culture and Ants page.

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It is clear from even a quick perusal of Antwiki that much of the infor-mation is quite technical and mainly of interest to researchers. However,worldwide there are a lot of ant biologists, and so far Antwiki has receivedover 3 million hits (G. Alpert, pers. comm.).

There is much that could be useful for even casual visitors.There are instructions for collecting ants (http://www.antwiki.org/wiki/Collecting_Ants); a page on Ants as Pests (http://www.antwiki.org/wiki/Ants_as_Pests); sections on ways to identify ants (for example, http://www.antwiki.org/wiki/Ant_Identification); and of course the page on HumanCulture and Ants (http://www.antwiki.org/wiki/Human_Culture_and_Ants)with its lists of books, films, and more.

CONCLUSIONS

Antwiki is an excellent resource for ant biologists but also for general ento-mologists or for those taking or teaching an entomology course. It provides“one-stop shopping” for ant researchers and librarians supporting them bypulling together information into one readily accessible place. It also pro-vides a model for making biological information widely available. Librarianscan support these efforts and in so doing enhance the library’s reputation andincrease its visibility, showing that librarians can assist with research, savebiologists time and effort, and help to provide resources for the advancementof scientific knowledge.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are due of course to all the GSLIS interns. In order of appearancethey were: Chorong Lee, Kristin Parker, Christopher Glass, Marie Hviding,and Katherine Bartolomea.

Thanks also to the ant biologists at Harvard, Gary Alpert, DavidLubertazzi, and Stefan Cover, and to all the EML staff members who madethe interns welcome and shared their insights.

REFERENCES

Antwiki. 2014. http://www.antwiki.org/Main_PageBolton, B. 1995. A new general catalogue of the ants of the world. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press.Bolton, B. 2003. Synopsis and classification of Formicidae. Gainesville, FL: American

Entomological Institute.California Academy of Sciences. 1955. A century of progress in the natural sciences,

1853–1953. San Francisco: California Academy of Sciences.

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Creighton, W. S. 1950. The ants of North America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Museumof Comparative Zoology.

Finger, S. 2000. Minds behind the brain: A history of the pioneers and theirdiscoveries. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.

Hölldobler, B., and E. O. Wilson. 1994. Journey to the ants: A story of scientificexploration. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Hornblower, S., A. Spawforth, and E. Eidinow. 2012. The Oxford classical dictionary.4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lapolla, J. S., G. M. Dlussky, and V. Perrichot. 2013. Ants and the fossil record.Annual Review of Entomology 58: 609–30. doi:10.1146/annurev-ento-120710-100600; 10.1146/annurev-ento-120710-100600

Upton, N. (Director). 1995. Ants—Little creatures who run the world. [Video/DVD]Boston: WGBH.

Ward, P. S., B. Bolton, S. O. Shattuck, and W. L. Brown, Jr. 1996. A bibliography ofant systematics. University of California Publications in Entomology, 116, i–vii,1–417.

Wheeler, W. M. 1935. Check list of the ants of Oceania. Honolulu, HI: The Museum.Wikipedia. 2014. Royal Society. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_societyWilson, E. O. 2012. The social conquest of earth. New York: Liveright.

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