The first time I visited the Triplehorn Insect Collection, I couldn’t have been more than 9 years old. I had a great time seeing all of the bugs and learning about the collection. However, I never would have guessed that, more than a decade later, I would be contributing to its curation.
My experience began at the end of my junior year at Ohio State. I had been doing research across the hall from the collection, in Dr. Rachelle Adams’ Ant Lab, for almost 4 years. I had just defended my thesis on the chemical ecology of Aphaenogaster ants, and I was looking for ways to add more skills to my toolset as I prepared to apply for graduate school. Dr. Adams suggested I could work in the Triplehorn Collection to help curate their ant specimens over the summer.
A drawer of unidentified ant specimens.
The last time major work had been done on the collection’s Formicidae section was in 2009 by Gary Coovert, author of “The Ants of Ohio (Hymenoptera: Formicidae).” The work he did was excellent, but in the 16 years since, several common ant genera have been revised, and several more have been renamed entirely. The larger problem, though, were the specimens that Coovert didn’t have a chance to work on. In the bottom half of the last ant cabinet there were about 7 drawers — ~1,600 specimens — of Nearctic ants that had not been identified, and just as many in the Neotropical section.
Over the last 6 years I had spent working with ants, I had gained a lot of experience identifying ant species that could be found in Ohio, so I felt I could tackle the Nearctic material. Little did I know, those 7 drawers would take me the rest of the summer to identify.
Three trays of identified ant specimens. As specimens are identified, a determination label is added to say who identified the specimen, when it was identified, and what species they determined it to be.
A taxonomic key like this one (from Trager’s 2007 revision of the Formica pallidefulva group) is a tool that scientists use to identify ants, insects, and many other branches of life.
The identification work had to be done with the utmost care for the specimens I was handling. While some of the specimens were new, added to the collection within the last 10 years, many were from the 1940’s or earlier. These ants had been collected more than 80 years ago! So, trying to keep legs, heads and gasters from detaching themselves was a task in and of itself. Aside from maintaining the integrity of the specimens, I had to actually identify and sort them. While I was already familiar with the identification of most of Ohio’s ant species, many of the specimens in the collection were not collected in Ohio; they were collected in Tennessee, Texas, Colorado, or even California.
This meant I often ran into ants from genera that I wasn’t very familiar with identifying, like Myrmecocystus and Pogonomyrmex. Occasionally, I would even run into a genus I had no experience with, such as Neivamyrmex. Luckily, I was able to find good literature/identification resources for most genera, so learning to identify them was not too difficult. Others, however, proved more challenging. If anyone is looking for a systematics PhD project, I suggest North American Leptothorax. Make it a little easier for the rest of us, please!
Two acrobat ant workers (Crematogaster cerasi) converge on a foraging trail in Caesar Creek State Park.
A Formica integra worker found at Brinkhaven Oak Barrens. This is the first time this species has been recorded from northern Ohio.
In addition to identifying preexisting ant specimens, I also went into the field once every week or two to collect ant genera / species not represented in the Triplehorn collection. This often led to new county records for less common ant species. These trips also involved collecting species for other projects in the Adams Ant Lab, and photos for a project that is still in the works.
A Formica querquetulana worker at the Denison Biological Reserve. This is the first time this species has been found in central Ohio.
An Asian Oak Weevil (Cyrtepistomus castaneus), also found at Brinkhaven Oak Barrens.
All in all, by the time fall semester started, I had done fieldwork in 10 localities around Ohio, taken photos of 40+ ant species in the field, and identified 1,440 of the collection’s unidentified Nearctic ant specimens to at least genus level, 1,105 of which were identified all the way to species. I had a great time working in the collection this summer, and I learned an incredible amount about ant taxonomy in the process.
About the author: Luke Doyle is a senior at OSU, majoring in Evolution/Ecology and Entomology. When he’s not doing research in the insect collection or the Adams Ant Lab, he enjoys running his small business, Buckeye Myrmecology.