[MUSIC]
Greeting AC family
Welcome to another episode of the AntsCanada ant channel
Here on the AC channel,
We watch ants feeding,
We watch them moving
into new homes,
we watch them grow,
and we also share useful tips
on how to care for ant colonies!
However, from time to time,
We are graced with the opportunity
to hear from people
who are actual experts on ants!
people who dedicate their lives to studying them.
These are the ant gurus of the myrmocological world.
With nuptial flight season officially
starting in the northern hemisphere.
Today we sit down with Dr. Brian Fischer,
creator of antweb.org,
from the California Acadamy of Sciences,
he will share with us how you, yes you, can actually be a contributor to scientific ant research.
You may even be keeping a brand new
undiscovered ant species without
even knowing.
We also have an update
on our queen Trapjaw ant
that you may have seen in a previous video.
Did she survive? It's a shocker.
You won't want to miss all this and more ahead,
So keep watching until the end.
AC family find out why you out there watching
are important to myrmecology, the study of ants
as we sit and learn from an ant master
in this week's episode
of the AntsCanada ant channel.
[whispering] Please subscribe to my channel
and hit the bell icon.
Welcome to the AC family. Enjoy!
During a recent trip to San Francisco, California,
I was able to visit the California Academy Of Sciences
to visit one of the most famous ant scientists,
they're called myrmecologists,
In the entire world!
Dr. Brian Fischer was one of my greatest idols for years,
ever since I started seriously keeping ants.
So naturally, I fanboy'd
Dr. Fischer was the creator of Antweb.org,
the world's largest, online database of images,
specimen records, and natural history information on ants
It is community-driven and open to contribution from
anyone with specimen-records,
natural history comments, or images.
As an ant keeper,
and ant lover like all of you,
I had so much to ask him on behalf of us, the AC family.
[onscreen]
Hello I'm Brian Fischer
and people call me the ant explorer,
or the species explorer.
[onscreen]
I'm here at a museum,
it's one of the largest museums in the world,
and it's called the California Academy of Sciences.
At this museum, we have a research side,
that's where I work, that's where I hide, that's my little basement
we have one of the largest collections of ants in the world
And then we have a public face
that's the public museum where you go and you look at
the aquarium, look at the rainforest, go to the planetarium
but I rarely get up there because when I walk in I
can't get away from the basement
[onscreen]
when I first went to the tropics, it was like 30 years ago,
I went to panama
and it was that trip where I
fell in love with ants.
And, they were everywhere, right?
I went down with study plans but,
I saw these ants and I was like,
I gotta know about these ants
But I couldn't find out any information!
There wasn't, like, a field guide to the ants
There were field guides to birds everwhere,
but not for ants.
And I said "Wait a minute,"
"how can this"
"be that we have this incredible diversity"
and we know nothing about it."
Then I couldn't find anybody
to tell me anything.
So I decided, at that point
I wanted to study ants
and I wanted to, in a sense,
know the name of every ant in the world
And not just its name!
What it looked like, where it lived,
whether or not its endangered!
and I realized later that it would be even better if
we could actually use that information to show that, humans,
our survival, is somehow linked to that.
is it true that the ants
have been glued that whole force together?
is it true that we actually need ants?
well, ants are invisible to most people
and my goal, with antweb,
was to make them visible.
In a sense, put a face on it.
Not just a name, at that time we didn't even know
the name of all the ants in the world.
Let's do more than that, let's put a face on that!
so, I wanted to create that field guide!
I wanted to create that tool!
in a sense
to be able to go anywhere in the world
and know what's there
and know what it looked like.
[onscreen]
Now we've imaged, so far, 41,000 specimens.
Not just a typical "click" image. but
each of those images is a composite
We take images through the plain of focus
and we make a composite image
taking the parts and focus from each image and
making a mosaic
of a single image where it's all in focus. That's
the image on antweb.
It's 70 to 100 images
in a mosaic
and we take a profile, a headshot,
a dorsal view, and a label.
That's the 41,000 specimens
We've gotten about 75% of all ant types image.
and each summer
we're going out again to raise funds
and if everyone can help us do that,
it better be great, we wanna finish this!
we wanna actually finish images of every species.