Researchers embark on mission to find all the world's ants

MIAMI, Aug. 3, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- A team of international researchers is shining a light on the often understudied "little things that run the world" — ants.

With the help of cutting-edge technology, the researchers created a first-of-its-kind global biodiversity map to begin answering a long unanswered question about where ants can be found across the globe. Lurking in this map is another one, a so-called treasure map, to guide future research and exploration into unexplored regions where undiscovered species may be found. This data is the first step in protecting and conserving ant biodiversity. The findings were recently published and featured on the cover of Science Advances.

"Much of our knowledge of biodiversity, and our planning of conservation, has been based on other animals, like mammals, reptiles and birds," said Clinton Jenkins, an Florida International University (FIU) conservation biologist in the Department of Earth and Environment and the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center, as well as one of the study's authors. "This is a major leap forward in our understanding of life on the planet and its conservation status."

Ants, thought to be nature's most industrious insects, often toil away, carrying out many jobs and juggling important responsibilities. They are hunters, farmers, harvesters, gliders, herders, weavers and carpenters. One of nature's smallest creatures they have a big impact on entire ecosystems. While there's still much to learn about them, what's clear is that the world wouldn't be the world without ants.

"When I started looking into this more than a decade ago, it was so fascinating to realize the amount of effect ants have on an ecosystem," Jenkins said. "There are tens of thousands of types of ants, and in some places, they are key for the ecosystem to function. If you lose ants, other species could disappear. Yes, ants might be small, but they have a huge impact." 

Jenkins — who has studied biodiversity of other species — joined a team from the Biodiversity and Biocomplexity Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) and other universities to embark on this ambitious project of pinpointing where in the world ants are. Museum records, field observations and data extracted from academic research papers told part of the story. Because some species are found in more than one location, the researchers turned to computers to build better predictive models of the distribution of each species.

Okinawa in southern Japan is one of these high diversity centers. The team found many ant species in this area have small ranges — meaning this location is critically important to conserve biodiversity. The team also looked at how well-protected these areas of high ant diversity are. They found only 15 percent of the top 10 percent of ant rarity centers had some sort of legal protection, such as a national park or reserve.

To read the full release: http://news.fiu.edu/2022/ants

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SOURCE Florida International University