[xipho]

Disclaimer- shameless plug involved. Humans are one species, a complicated on for sure, Ants are well over 15k species. Of course not all are found together, but many species are. As the article notes the diversity of their social structures is collectively nuts. The combinatorics of all these species interacting with a myriad of micro-habitats and resultant behaviors emerging is crazy. The sheer number of non-ant species that have evolved to look and behave exactly like ants, from being drug-pushers to parasitoids, to meme-ready social influencers says a lot about how long they've been around and how important they are to how natural systems work.

We're happy that AntWeb (https://www.antweb.org/) recently moved their data to TaxonWorks and are now building that site of data curated there. Data for over 250k individuals, with many more coming as we work to aggregate data are there. Check out a wealth of data and images there.

[hammock]

> The sheer number of non-ant species that have evolved to look and behave exactly like ants, from being drug-pushers to parasitoids, to meme-ready social influencers says a lot about how long they've been around and how important they are to how natural systems work.

Fascinating to me, and thank you for calling it out. Ants aren't the only "form" that this happens to in the animal kingdom either.

Homo sapiens used to live alongside other similar species like neanderthals etc, and eventually we crowded them all out. Often we tell ourselves it's because we were superior to them. Many have wondered what society would be like if we still had close species cousins living among us. Certainly our own approach to geopolitics would be quite different to what it is today

[graemep]

> Many have wondered what society would be like if we still had close species cousins living among us. Certainly our own approach to geopolitics would be quite different to what it is today

It would not be great. If you consider the track record human being have of being horrible to those who look very slightly different or have a slightly different culture, how would we treat beings who were far more different?

It would be even worse if they were are mental inferiors. Imagine a world in which scientific racism was proven true rather than debunked. They would be perfect slaves or research subjects.

[octagons]

I am an avid ant hobbyist and use AntWeb regularly to aid in identification and distribution of ant species when hunting for new queens. I’m glad to hear about this change - the site had needed a bit of a refresh for a while!

[xipho]

At present it's just the data being dumped from TaxonWorks and re-integrated into the existing front-end (separation of concerns nicely done). In the future we hope efforts that wrap TaxonWorks APIs and tooling, "companions", will evolve to make things look better. For example it would be trivial to wrap AntWeb in TaxonPages (see Github for everything) to get a new front end there, though that software is focused at the Taxon level. Multiple groups are looking to build out similar efforts at the specimen level (perhaps SpecimenPages).

We've recently has some amazing success with previously "unknown" people contributing to our open-source framework(s). These contributions, and hopefully future ones, will let us deliver additional features in a more timely fashion, for example things like multi-entry and "traditional" taxonomic keys. TLDR - there are opportunities to chip in to the "refresh" efforts on multiple fronts.

[octagons]

I’d love to discuss contributing further. Do you have a link to a GitHub repository or organization?

[xipho]

https://speciesfilegroup.org and https://github.com/SpeciesFileGroup, among others.

[digging]

How exciting. I'm a huge fan of ants and I didn't know about AntWeb. Insects tend to be harder to find identification resources for than spiders, which is what I spend more time on. However, this site seems to exceed any individual digital resource I know of for spiders.

RIP to SpiderID.org, which hasn't had moderation in years and now has ads. How would I get started creating a new community-driven hub for spider identification in the vein of AntWeb? I'm not associated with any research organizations but maybe I should be.

[xipho]

I would first engage, if you haven't, the spider community at iNaturalist. It is likely that others are thinking along the same lines as you.

We (Species File Group) are trying to build out open-source tools (e.g. TaxonPages, 'distinguish') that would ultimately help to make these types of projects possible, through GitHub pages or other similar approaches. If you wish, we have multiple ways to be reached, see 'Events' after doing a little sleuthing as to who we are. We are definitely interested in facilitating the structuring of communities that link people like you to those doing the science behind the scenes, this is really important for the long term stability of resources like those you're interested in.

[hoseja]

A single human weighs on the order of tens of millions of ants. The Earth is so much bigger for them.