rhole's Journal

You may have found this project because I've added some of your observations. You may have found it because you searched for it. You may have found it by some other means.

Regardless, if you're at all interested in the ant fauna of California I hope you'll join, and contribute.

My goal is simple. To bring together the iNaturalist observations of ants in California in a convenient location for comparison, identification, and any other use we can put the information to.

That includes finding out places and taxa that are relatively unsampled (at least here), so we can make individual efforts to pick up some of those places and species for inclusion.

Thanks for playing along.

I've only recently become active here at iNaturalist. I'm enjoying the heck out of it.

I've gone through all my backlog of digital photos with locations and dates, as well as having made quite a few new observations in the last month or so. All my observations going forward will have to be new ones, I think. Unless I find a few in the backlog here and there that I've missed.

I'm happy to have 699 observations right now. I thought about running outside to do just one more observation solely to make up that 700th, but there's no need. It'll come, as did the Pholcus spider in my shower this morning.

I do have quite a few more images, but their location or their date, or both, has been lost. This is frustrating to me, but I'll deal with that. I'm unhappy that my previous digital camera held the date in an unreadable format. I may be able to work around that with some of the images, so there may be more coming.

One of the things I'm most enjoying about iNaturalist is the "Identify" section. I'm really having fun helping others find identifications for their observations, and learning about my own observations by having the help of others in making identifications for me. My own identifications have become better because of that, and I'm looking forward to continuing to learn.

Thank you for checking out and hopefully participating in the Ants of California Project.

To this time I (with some help from @glmory) have managed to add most of the observations that have been identified to genus or below, and I'm trying to add new ones that come in. I'm still working through the Argentine Ant observations (only about 150 to go!). That's about 1400 observations of 115 taxa so far.

[updated before midnight: Got those 150ish done! only about 1500 unidentified observations, "ants", to go]

The state north of Redding, and the central & southern Sierra are very poorly represented, so if you are taking a summer vacation to those spots, please consider doing some ant watching.

According to http://www.antweb.org there are 321 species in the state, which means we have identified observations for about 1/3 of them. We have a long way to go!

If you have some expertise in a species, or even some other taxon level, please take a wander through the observations and see what you can do about identifying them - this is especially important for the taxa not yet represented for California. Please don't neglect those observations that are a little older.

If you don't have expertise, why not take a look at the some taxon you fancy and see if you can get some expertise for yourself? I'm trying on some things, and it's fun. Antweb.org is also a good resource for learning more about ants, not just in California.

Thanks again for stopping by.