The Ants Go Marching One by One

The 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.

About Frank Taylor

Frank Taylor started the Google Earth Blog in July, 2005 shortly after Google Earth was first released. He has worked with 3D computer graphics and VR for many years and was very impressed with this exciting product. Frank completed a 5.5 year circumnavigation of the earth by sailboat in June 2015 which you can read about at Tahina Expedition, and is a licensed pilot, backpacker, diver, and photographer.

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