Ants are consistently praised for their strength, organization and resourcefulness. However, no one — except pest management professionals and the people who run www.antweb.org — seem to like them. The site www.antweb.org is impressively expansive and it aims to eventually describe every species of ant known to man. According to the site, there are more than one thousand trillion ants currently on Earth.
The site states that its mission is to develop tools to accomplish two different goals. One goal is to “accelerate the discovery and documentation of ant diversity” and the other is to “ensure ant information is widely accessible across a broad community.”
AntWeb offers pictures of many different types of ants from various views that may help in identifying various species. There are even slide shows! Visitors can search for a certain species or look at previously prepared lists. The site even offers courses about ants. At press time it focused primarily on ants in California and Madagascar, but it has information about species all over the world.
The site offers general and detailed information, as well as interesting tidbits. One example is that “If every human climbed aboard one side of a scale, and every ant crawled onto the other side, the scale would just about balance.” — Marisa Peters
Explore the January 2005 Issue
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