Your Wild Life is back in NYC! You heard about our most recent work in the Big Apple from Amy Savage, an ant researcher with our team, in late September.
And now we’re back! This time we’re on a mission to expand our studies of urban ants from the 40 sites that Amy visited this summer to over 60 locations in the medians of Broadway and adjacent urban parks (like Central Park, Morningside Park, and Riverside Park).
In August Amy plopped the ants she collected into alcohol to preserve them for later identification and further study. This time around, we’re freezing the ants so that we can conduct chemical analyses (More on that later, but essentially we want to know what the ants are eating and what contributions “people food” might make to their diets).
Today was Day One of sampling and we had a BUSY day. We visited and collected ants from four Broadway medians on the Upper West Side and then visited sites at Morningside and Riverside Parks. We tweeted as we worked and will continue to do so for the next few days of our collection – Follow us in the field using the hashtag #antsonbroadway.
Below are the highlights of our day’s sampling via Storify – Enjoy! And stay tuned for more on Wednesday and Thursday.
A fascinating time – and such good ant-collecting company.