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

Finally, Google expands into animals

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't wait for Google Dog. I expect it to fetch the paper AND pick out the important stuff based on my personal tastes.

Re:Finally, Google expands into animals

[WilliamSChips]

And he'll replace all the ads with Google targeted text ads.

Re:Finally, Google expands into animals

[sznupi]

I can't wait for Google Calendar...but perhaps I won't ahve to wait that long ( http://calendar.google.com/ - yes, it points to search...but why does it work at all? in opposition to, for example http://nothingtoseehere.google.com/ )

Re:Finally, Google expands into animals

[carl0ski]

Fine by me everytime i open the paper
a raft of annoying brousures and surveys fall out.
Then all the full page graphic ads disturbing my reading

Re:Finally, Google expands into animals

[fm6]

Not funny! 5 years ago, when "Intelligent Agents" were all the rage, lots of people were envisioning little animated creatures on your computer screens that would "fetch" information for you. (Naturally a AT&T commercial featured an talking dog.) The reality never progressed beyond lame little projects like that company (its name escapes me) that soaked up huge amounts of venture capital, and whose only real product was a particularly limited PDA. And of course, there's Microsoft's agent technology, which is known mainly for its irritating avatars such as clippy and Bob.

I now view all pseudo-biological software with extreme suspicion. Especially after playing with Seaman

RIAA sea cucumber?

[hobo sapiens]

What about it? It is a bottom feeder that disembowls itself when threatened! Sounds about right!

Very appropriate

[mcgroarty]

Any webmaster who's watched his logs spike from ten megs to one hundred can tell you that, much like ants: Once Google finds something on your site it likes, you'll come back to find it's all over everything.

Big deal.

[bigtallmofo]

My dad's had an ant named after him for years and he didn't have to come up with a fancy search engine to do it. He's only a carpenter.

Can we change

[zappepcs]

Can we change the /. icon for google now to an ant?

Re:Can we change

[tommertron]

How about they name the ant Keyhole? They were the ones who invneted "Google Earth" anyway.

Re:Can we change

[Wiwi Jumbo]

Unfortunately, there's always a difference between inventing and popularizing.

Sure Xerox invented the GUI, but Apple gets the credit for giving it to the people....

Meh.... Nothing new

[technoextreme]

Im fairly sure that a bunch of scientists all ready have done this sort of thing before. Im fairly certain they named some of their discoveries after people like George Bush. Unfortunately, I have no idea which species of animnal they used his name for because almost all searches for any refrence of animal and George Bush gets me websites for how he is an idiotic monkey.

Trademark Infringment?

[VikingDBA]

Did he ask if he could use that name for the ant? Hmmmmm?

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.

Confusing the transitory with the long-lasting?

[Oh the Huge Manatee]

Two hundred years from now, this ant species will probably still exist. But the name will seem just as silly and puzzling to the scientists of that day as if Dr. Fisher had named the new species Proceratium petsdotcom.

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

Re:Confusing the transitory with the long-lasting?

[the-amazing-blob]

Why would it harm him? I personally think it's quite funny, and wouldn't dislike him in the least for it.

Re:Confusing the transitory with the long-lasting?

[WilliamSChips]

At worst, they'll think he misspelled googol.

Re:Confusing the transitory with the long-lasting?

[Bonhamme Richard]

Yah! He should have named it something meaningful, like some sort of vauge latin description that the average human being cannot understand.

At least he gave the name as a gesture of thanks, instead of naming it after himself or his pet.

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.

Re:Confusing the transitory with the long-lasting?

[Kohath]

If Google goes out of business, just eradicate the species of ant.

Do I have to solve every problem for you people?

wtf?

[Phil246]

I thought it was apache :(

Louse!

[students]

There is a louse named after Gary Larson.

I pitty the species that gets named after SCO Group.

I will name my children...

[TheCarlMau]

I am going to name my child "Google" or "Googlina"!

Re:I will name my children...

[NanoGator]

"I am going to name my child "Google" or "Googlina"!"

When I was a kid, my name was "What'd you break?!" My nickname was "Dammit!"

Re:I will name my children...

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I named my son "Microsoft" and girls won't date him :-(

Re:I will name my children...

[nacturation]

Just don't name your kid GPL, as everyone will want to stay away to avoid the virus effect.

Sim Ant?

[adolfojp]

For a moment I thought that Google had adquired the rights to a Sim Ant Sequel.

So much for google games :-(

About the Golden Palace Monkey. I think that having private coorporations sponsoring this kind of research in exchange for branding is a great idea. It benefits all of us. And the name "Golden Monkey" doesn't sound half bad after all. ;-)

Googleverse

[Guy LeDouche]

When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks.

Golden Palace

[Speare]

I am getting very tired of Golden Palace's penchant for putting their name in every possible attention-grabbing place. Paid tattoos, Jesus sandwich auctions, and now taxonomy for hire. All for a stupid casino ad campaign. I swear that they're gonna pay Carly Simon some obscene amount just so she'll announce that her 1973 hit song is about their business.

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.

Google

[miffo.swe]

Where i live google is even a verb. When you want to search for something you google for it. I imagine this is pretty annoying for the other search engines *cough*MSN*cough*. Im sure Microsoft would like to have their name on some bugs too...
ohh, wait, forget that last one....

Finally it fits the original quote

[Viper Daimao]

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

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.

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.

ahahah what

[Anonymous Coward]

Google has helped us achieve free and democratic access to information

which is why they allow the chinese to block stuff?

next: Goatsezemia

[Tablizer]

A condition whereby your ass keeps itching so bad that you scratch your anus off.

MJ's nose

[Gertlex]

There should be a chameleon named after Michael Jackson's ever changing nose.

I can see it now, Ballmer "Kill Google!"

[layer3switch]

"Obligatory"
Dr. Flake: Mr. Ballmer! Mr. Ballmer! They found new ant! The news was even slashdotted!
Ballmer: Just tell me it's not Google.
Dr. Flake: umm.. yes, it's google.. but...
Ballmer: What the fuck! Ants? Google now searches ants now?
Dr. Flake: umm... actually no...
Ballmer: Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill that ant.
Ballmer: .. ? C'mon! Speak up, damn it! I didn't hire you with big money to mumble!
Dr. Flake: This entomology researcher named Dr. Fisher used Google Map to find his ants, sir...
Ballmer: FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! (throws chair across the room)
Dr. Flake: It's quiet facinating and in his research which it recites ...
Ballmer: Shut the fuck up, Flaky. You talk too much.
Dr. Flake: ... umm.. yes, sir.
Ballmer: Flaky, Quick! Find me one of them smart research scientist to find me a diabolical giant ANTEATER!
Dr. Flake: umm.. yes, sir... but our search doesn't cross link between search and map, sir...
Ballmer: Geee, Flake! Do I have to think of everything? Just fucking Google it!
---

savy

[xipho]

Dr. Fisher is an awesome collector- he has taken many new ant species (and passed on many other undescribed species to other experts in the field). Systematist like him will likely name tens or hundreds of species in their lifetimes, coming up with names for all of them is just a little icing on the cake- but it can get boring too. Fisher's website is one of the better "biodiversity" sites out there in terms of "web-tech". Perhaps his ulterior motive- associating his work in any way possible with a giant like google can only help his work in the long run, particularly in biodiversity/systematics studies which are notoriously underfunded...hint hint.

I agree!!!

[antdude]

I suggest an ant head icon!