The Ants Go Marching One by One

Antweb shows Ant locations in Google EarthThe Google Blog released a story today by Brian L. Fisher, Associate Curator of Entomology, California Academy of Sciences about his web site Antweb. This web site would normally be of interest mostly to Entomologists, providing specifications and specimen photographs of those sometimes pesky little critters known to most as “ants”.
What is interesting is that Antweb has created a network link to access their georeferenced data for where specimens were collected in Google Earth. And, actually its kind of interesting to browse the numerous links around the world and click on a placemark to see if there is a picture. You then follow the link provided to the Antweb web page and you may see high-magnification specimen photos. Some of these ants look like they belong in an alien scifi horror movie.
This is definitely worth a download, but be forewarned. They have a huge number of placemarks and they download all of them for the entire world at once. It may cause your application to get slow for a minute while downloading and viewing placemarks. I would suggest they use a view-based query link to show just the placemarks for a smaller area of the world you are viewing. Still, this is an amazingly good application for use with Google Earth. Way to go bug guy!
Oh, and the bug guy was so glad to get help from Google with his project that he named an Ant after them: Proceratium google.

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    Antweb gets help from Google to bring ants to Google Earth. Web Pro News article, Google Earth blog post. Out of gratitude, an ant is named after Google. Check out the freshly minted Wikipedia article on Proceratium Google. (Re the…

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