Ants are social insects that live in colonies. A queen spends her life laying eggs, most of which grow into workers. During a short period of the year, when it is time to start new colonies, some eggs grow into virgin males and queens that are winged. These virgin males and queens participate in nuptial flights where they form a mating ball in the air. Males from one colony mate with queens from other colonies. After mating, the males die. The newly-mated queens rip off their wings and search for new homes to start their colonies.
Our project has two goals. First, we want to enable scientists to use the timing of ant nuptial flights to monitor environmental changes on a global scale. Second, we want to help people collect ants in a less destructive and disruptive manner.
To achieve these goal, we have developed AntNupTracker as a tool for reporting ant nuptial flights from the field. Using this app, we are building an open and publicly-accessible database of ant nuptial flight records. This database can either be browsed in the app, online or downloaded in the format of your choice. Whether you are a beginner or a professional myrmecologist, we invite you to share in our passion for ants and contribute to this citizen science project!
FEATURES:
– Record ant nuptial flights
– Record genus, species, date and time of flight
– If species cannot be identified, “Unknown” option exists
– Using location services, flights can be reported from the field (wifi or data required)
– Time and location of flight can be manually entered to allow reporting of archived data
– Upload an image of the flight in order to provide better validation for the species identification
– View ant nuptial flight records recorded by other users
– Filter flight list by genus and species
– Comment on flights uploaded by other users
– Flight data can be validated by professional myrmecologists
– Get notifications about specific species (free sign in required)
LICENSE:
This binary is licensed under Apple’s Standard License Agreement. However, the source code is licensed under the GNU GPLv3 with App Store Exception. The full text of the license can be found on our website (https://www.antnuptialflights.com/app-license/).
All user-uploaded content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).
Weather information is provided from OpenWeatherMap (https://openweathermap.org/), which is made available here under the Open Database License (ODbL) (https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1-0/).
TAXONOMY LIST:
The list of genera and species presented in the app (last updated summer of 2019) is copied from AntWiki’s “Category:Extant species” (https://antwiki.org/wiki/Category:Extant_species) and can be downloaded at https://www.antnuptialflights.com/taxonomy/. In keeping with the original licensing, this list is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).
Enjoy recording nuptial flight data!
