Google Ant

obli writes "In Google's official blog, Dr. Brian L. Fisher (an entomology researcher) writes about a newly discovered species of ant that he has named after Google (Proceratium google). The reason for this name is a tribute to the usefulness of Google Earth in his research. This is not the only species with a company name, there is also the GoldenPalace.com Monkey (Callicebus aureipalatii)." The California Academy of Sciences also has a short piece on the discovery along with a brief background of Dr. Fisher.

Comments

Re:Sllime mold beetles... Irony at it's best???

[technoextreme]

http://www.news.cornell.edu/Stories/April05/slime- mold.Bush.Cheney.ssl.html Im not sure if this is a great honor or a backhanded insult.

Louse!

[students]

There is a louse named after Gary Larson.

I pitty the species that gets named after SCO Group.

Text of Google release

[Oh the Huge Manatee]

Ants unearthed with Google Earth

9/30/2005 10:37:00 AM Posted by Brian L. Fisher, Associate Curator of Entomology, California Academy of Sciences

At a time when the power of information technology doubles every 12 to 15 months and extends to capture every scrap we have, digitizing biodiversity information is a final frontier for IT. It's an essential step to ensure society maintains and hopefully increases bio-literacy. Toward this end, there's Antweb. It's a project from the California Academy of Sciences that has incorporated the Google Earth interface to provide location-based access to the diversity and wonder of ants: from your backyard to the Congo Basin.

As society advances, literacy increases and bio-literacy decreases. If you're illiterate, you may view a library as thinly sliced stacks of firewood; a Google search engine is meaningless. If you are bio-illiterate, a forest is at best a green blob to be consumed. If you are bio-literate, you see the diversity of the forest and understand that each animal, each plant, tells a story and has a place.

Google has helped us achieve free and democratic access to information, but now, with Google Earth, it's taken an important step to promote bio-literacy. Together with other institutions in the Bay Area, Google is uniquely poised to take on this enormous task.

There are two ways people need to access information on biodiversity: either have a name for which they want more information, or they are at a location and want to know what they will find there. On Antweb, you can access information about ants via location - and Google Earth allows for any scale of access via location. So you can be in Santa Clara County and see what ants you are likely to find. Soon you will be able to create a field guide for ants in any location defined in Google Earth.

We tried to get NASA's help to develop such a system for years with their mapping expertise and data, but Google Earth answered the call first. I am so impressed with Google that I have named an ant I recently discovered in Madagascar Proceratium google. Its bizarrely-shaped abdomen is an adaptation for hunting down obscure prey: spider eggs. Here's what it looks like.

I hope that Google will continue applying its skills to serve biodiversity data to conservation planners and the general public. Google has given us a tool to connect the 6 billion people on earth with our remaining biodiversity. Antweb welcomes any form of collaboration to help achieve this goal - and may the ants be with you.

The Ants

[airuck]

For those of you who have not seen The Ants by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, it is definitely worth a read. The drawings alone are worth the price of the book.

For those of you how are not impressed by ants, try to build one.

One more example.

[utenaslashed]

There's a butterfly named "Deudorix eagon" after the company named "Eagon" http://www.eagon.com/. The story I heard : the company(they make paper so they need lots of big logs) made a tremendous contribution to Solomon Islands and a doctor (John Tenant? I'm not sure) named his new discovery after the company's name.

Re:Finally it fits the original quote

[nacturation]

"I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords."

Two things: I can't believe it took over a half hour for someone to post that. Secondly, I can't believe the parent post got modded offtopic given that the Simpsons episode it's from had ants as the inspiration for that quote.

Re:Confusing the transitory with the long-lasting?

[DerekLyons]

In the long run, this little stunt will probably harm Dr. Fisher's reputation more than it will help Google's.

Ah - the wonders of slashdot, anyone without knowledge can post and get ranked insightful.

The reality is that there are [dozens|hundreds|thousands?] of the types of joke/pun names scattered across the taxonomy tree. In the long run, this will be forgotten and no one's reputation besmirched.

Re:Confusing the transitory with the long-lasting?

[Idarubicin]

There's a longstanding tradition in biology of giving amusing names to species that are otherwise completely irrelevant or uninteresting. Two hundred years from now, nobody is going to know why somone named a spider Calponia harrisonfordi, either.

See Arnold Menke's Funny or Curious Zoological Names and Douglas Yanega's Curious Scientific Names for a lot more weird names.

I doubt that the reputations of these scientists are harmed by the knowledge that they may have had senses of humour.