You certainly wouldn’t want to tread on an ant that looks like this [UPDATE: the previous link has disappeared, so I’ve linked to a new one, much less impressive, but still crazy scary. It’s just a head shot, instead of the previous full body profile view.]. Sent to Gigapan by the inimitable Brian Fisher, of the California Academy of Sciences, one of the sites that you really must see when you visit San Francisco. (Next time I visit San Francisco, I’ll try to take my own advice!) There really is something amazing about seeing such a tiny creature in such exquisite detail. [UPDATE: Today, the ant is identified: Eutetramorium mocquerysi from Madagascar, one of the two main focuses of Fisher’s collecting.]
Fisher is the entomologist who revolutionized the study of ant taxa by deciding to bypass the traditional classification scheme, in which a naturalist collects specimens, pins them, labels them with locale information, and then waits for a museum specialist to get around to looking at it. Instead, he vacuums up the critters and analyzes their DNA wholesale, relying on molecular biological assays to identify strands to the species level. (The website calls this process “large-scale discovery, description, and naming” of ant species. For more on this, read the essay in Conniff’s Swimming with Piranhas.)
His enthusiasm for the new, IT-assisted science led him to name a new ant species the Google ant back in 2005. (For the background on this story, check the Google blog entry from September 30, 2005.) This was all big news back in 2005, but since I hadn’t started reading my E.O. Wilson, I wasn’t paying attention.