San Francisco

Small wonder: Microdaceton tibialis is one of hundreds of species in the AntWeb catalogue. Credit: A. NOBILE

An Internet-based system of ant images is expected to help ecologists study and preserve global biodiversity.

The website, http://www.antweb.org, provides researchers with three-dimensional images of thousands of ant species, along with all of the information held in traditional catalogues of species.

“This sets new standards for doing taxonomy online,” says Brian Fisher, an entomologist at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, who led the $30,000 project to set up the system.

AntWeb already holds images of many of the world's 10,000 species, including those from California (270 species) and Madagascar (210 species), where more than 1,000 species are under threat from deforestation. Six hundred species, mainly from Florida, will be added to the website by the end of the year. The eventual goal is to include all of the world's ants.

Ants are important in many ecosystems, and AntWeb is intended to help conservation biologists by providing quick access to information on every ant they come across.

The Nature Conservancy, for example, plans to use AntWeb to help its ecologists manage the Lassen Foothills, an ecologically sensitive region of about 900,000 hectares in California. “The evaluation of our conservation efforts is a great challenge,” says Mark Reynolds, a Nature Conservancy ecologist based in San Francisco. “AntWeb gives us the ability to know what is happening at the invertebrate level.”