Alberta researcher makes surprising discovery about ant species

U of A researcher found 89 species

By Hanneke Brooymans, Edmonton Journal January 21, 2011

EDMONTON — Alberta is crawling with more than twice as many ant species as originally thought.

This surprising discovery was made by University of Alberta master’s student James Glasier while he was studying ants and their habitats in the sandhills near Edmonton.

He needed to sort out which ants were there, but quickly discovered there was no handy key on the ants of Alberta to help him identify all the different species. So he thought he’d make one himself.

Glasier, 25, drew on a preliminary survey done in the 1960s by Janet Sharplin, but nothing substantial had been done since then. So he collected ants wherever he went. He turned over rocks, dug through soil, pulled off tree bark, knocked down dead trees and set up traps. He found one species in the 27th-floor apartment of a friend. (That ant happens to be the only known invasive species in the province, called a pharaoh ant.) Other ants were sent to him by researchers doing work in various parts of the province.

Altogether, he has more than doubled the number of ant species in Alberta from 40 to 89.

One of the more interesting species was found inside the hill of another species. These guest ants, as they’re called, take up the chemical scent that the host colony members use to identify each other. That way they manage to fool the resident ants into accepting them and even feeding them, Glasier said.

It’s not clear if these free loaders are benefiting the hosts in any way. Sometimes they’re seen cleaning the larger ants, but Glasier thinks that might be how they pick up the chemicals they need to mask their identities.

Seems pretty smart for a creature only twice the size of the head of a pin. Glasier has a few of these pinned inside his insect cabinet where he has meticulously labelled and stored many of the species he has collected. Others are stored in small vials of ethanol.

In the first summer he amassed more than 20,000 ants. Parked in front of a microscope, he’s developed a knack for identifying ants, a tricky business involving noting the grooves and shape of the body, as well as the number of hairs on the body.

“I’ve looked at them for so long, sometimes they’re really easy,” Glasier said about the identification process. “But if it’s something new, it can take a long time to identify.”

Glasier thinks the province could still yield more species. “I would say there are definitely more out there, especially in southern Alberta, where I haven’t done a lot of work.”

Glasier said it’s important to know what species we have and what they’re doing because ants are an integral part of our ecosystems, not only as a source of food for everything from grizzly bears to woodpeckers, but also because they reduce some pest insect populations and protect some plants from being browsed.

One of Glasier’s academic supervisors is John Acorn, an entomologist and author of numerous books on bugs. Their relationship goes back more than a decade. When Glasier was in Grade 7, he asked Acorn to be a mentor. One of his first projects with Acorn involved ants.

Now he’s adding new species to the Alberta list.

“To me, the big message is there’s so much we take for granted,” Acorn said about Glasier’s new species. “There have been very competent entomologists working in Alberta for 100 years. And ants are not exactly obscure.

“In a way, it’s kind of embarrassing. We really should know this.”

On the other hand, it’s also exciting, he said. As we learn more about the ecology of ants and how important they are in the overall scheme of things, it will be useful to know which species play roles in the different ecosystems, he said.

hbrooymans@edmontonjournal.com

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/technology/Alberta+researcher+makes+surprising+discovery+about+species/4147744/story.html