The Importance of Ants...

I have always suspected that ants are not just very important in any ecosystem in the world, but in our scientific world as well. Nature's bibliography project "Connotea" confirms this suspicion with hard facts: Formicidae are more important than HIV and cancer.



Thanks to Jochen Bihn's work, almost all of the digital versions of the ant taxonomic publications are now also accessible through Connotea, a bibliographic tool aimed at the general science audience.

Check it out, add you own tags, and let us known for innacuracies, wishes and more

rss feeds and new names alerts

I just discovered the new UBio RSS-Nomina Nova feed for new names. This is much more professional then what we have at antbase.org, but it also has a different function, that is to discover new names in the literature. And of course, that's what we are out for to secure we have a catalogue as complete as possible.

If you compare the results from NominaNova and with our still simple "New Taxa Notifyer" for the year 2006, the results are very different: 5 publications when searching for "Formicidae" of which one is counted twice, and 105 species described (including those in the NominaNova publictions) on our system, plus two more publications or10 species for 2007 .

As a collector of new names, I would like to be NominaNova to be complete, and in return, I would like to have the possibilty to send a feedback, if I discover a publication, that is not in their feed. This is my personal interest.

But there is also a wide service to the community, since other Website providers are using the UbioRSS-feed on their website to inform their audiences about new publications (eg antweb, the ant of the cachoeira nature reserve.

There is an additional suggestion. Since all the new ant systematics publications are read, the names checked for whether they are already in the Hymenoptera Name Server, and if not, the the name is linked to an existing name and a decision is made, of what kind the relation is and then entered into the HNS, it would be ideal, if this could flow directly into the Ubio system as well - which I hope Norm Johnson at the Hymenoptera Name Server, where the ant data reside as well, and UBio can sort it out?

Nomenclatorial sloppiness (4) and a stinking dead cow

Sloppiness and a dead cow

Another paper I entered recently which make me think of the value of entering names into our databases so we could in future read all our publications by machines. But it needs somebody going through often confusing prose....

here the problems I encountered in Collingwood and Van Harten's "Additions to the ant fauna of Yemen":

Pachycondyla senaarensis; ought to be sennaarensis
Cardiocondyla yemene: ought to be Cardiocondyla yemeni
Cardiocondyla schuckardi: ought to be shuckardi
Crematogaster flaviventris Santchi, clandestinely raised to species in this paper
Monomorium phoenicium: ought be phoenicum (see quadrinomen below). But originally described as Monomorium salomonis subopacum var. phoenicia by Emery 1908: 677, then cited as Monomorium (Xeromyrmex) subopacum v. phoenica Emery in Santschi 1927 in his listing of Monomorium (Xeromyrmex) subopacum v. phoenicum
Monomorium wahibiense: ought to be wahibense
Technomyrmex bruneipes Forel: clandestinely raised to species
Camponotus spissinodis Forel: clandestinely raised to species
Lepisiota opaciventris (Finzi): clandestinely raised to species


Quadrinomen, a (stinking) dead cow
I am not sure, but it was Bolton who decided to get rid of quadrinomen by just dimissing them. The Code allows to disregard quadrinomen, and so, tacitly, the first author using the name at least as trinomen becomes the author. But many of them, like Santschi in the case of Monomorium phoenicum (and more recent authors as well), didn’t care, and implicitly accept the type of the new species as the one belonging to the quadrinomen and so fixed unintentionally, thus the new species is not valid, since no type species has been fixed properly. So, following suit of Bolton's iron broom, we ought to dismiss all the subsequently raised taxa.

But this is only part of the story: If we want to collect all the names though the Biodiversity Heritage Library and Ubio, then we need somebody sitting here, like I right now, curating all these names. I have the priviledge to have a system, where I can look up all the original literature, but spend nevertheless on the above document so much time, that I think twice about the value I am getting out of this. Clearly, getting the name is only one part - and in fact none with which I can get any scientific cridentials. It only begins to add up, once I can access all the localities mentioned in this paper - but this is yet another nut to crack, and a huge time investment.

So, when I think about building up an Encyclopedia of Life project which has hardly any money for this kind of work - work that can not be done by machine nor by untrained people - I just wonder where we end up. And this Yemen paper is just a simple paper....