Picnic Redux: Citizen Scientists Invite Ants to Lunch

By: Julia TraversScientists need your help to find out what ants in your neighborhood like to eat. Would you ask an ant to join you for lunch? A team of researchers at North Carolina State University in Raleigh calls on citizen scientists around the world to flip the picnic concept – they want *us* to feed the ants. By counting ants, recording their meal preferences, and sending in data, you can help Dr. Magdalena Sorger and her colleagues better understand what foods ants have access to around the world. This citizen science project, called Ant Picnic, could spark new studies into ant behavior, natural resources, and the impact of global factors like climate change. “Not only does [Ant Picnic] engage the public with scientific exploration, it will collect very valuable data on what resources are limiting -- at least for ants -- in different habitats and geographic regions,” Dr. Andrew V. Suarez says of the project. He leads ant research at the Suarez Lab of the University of Illinois. Ant Picnic data are incorporated into the largest research project of its kind – the biggest study of global patterns in preferred resources and activity within a single group of organisms.