Fiji Ant Survey

	Hand	Litter	Malaise	Fogging	Total
Islands	12	8	10	1	10
Sites	90	67	98	32	147
Samples	547	137	1,812	320	2,132
Specimens, estimated	4,114	27,400	90,600	1,000	91,600
Specimens, pinned	1,786	2,200	408	120	4,514
Species, described	86	40	-	22	94
Species, undescribed	35	30	-	3	60
Species, databased	121	70	-	25	154
Species, estimated	140	90	50	40	180

Summary of specimen sampling, sorting and identification effort. Hand = hand collection, Litter = litter sifting, Fogging = canopy fogging; Total = total number or unique records. Sites = unique georeferenced locations; Species, undescribed = do not match names described in the literature reviewed or determined species in the collections examined.

A large-scale inventory of Fiji’s ant fauna is currently being conducted throughout the archipelago. The ant survey is being built upon the work of three major collection efforts that began in 2001. Dr. David Olson initiated a broad standardized sampling of the archipelago’s leaf litter arthropods and trained his staff at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) to sort out a number of taxa for future study. Dr. Olson donated the ant specimens to Eli Sarnat for his revision of W. M. Mann’s 1921 monograph on the Ants of Fiji.

Meanwhile, the Schlinger Foundation, working in conjunction with Dr. Olson and WCS, established a network of malaise traps on the islands of Viti Levu, Vanua Levu, Taveuni and Kadavu. In 2004, the NSF-funded Fiji Terrestrial Arthropod Survey extended the breadth of the malaise trapping by adding new sites on all of the big islands, in addition to many of the archipelago’s smaller islands. Eli Sarnat was hired by WCS in 2005 to train a team of local parataxonomists and oversee the collection, curation and databasing of specimens for the NSF Survey, and was also entrusted with identifying the ants.

The third significant contribution of specimens is coming from the hand collections made by Eli Sarnat and Evan Economo. In total, nearly 100,000 specimens have been collected from twelve of Fiji’s islands. The collections are complimentary in nature, with the malaise traps capturing the arboreal fauna and the litter sifting capturing the ground fauna.

Hand collections are extremely valuable, as nest series can be used to associate castes, such as minor workers, major workers, males and queens that are often difficult to identify in isolation. Hand collection by taxon specialists also tends to be biased towards capturing rare species at the expense of common species, while standardized sampling methods such as litter sifting and malaise trapping tend to be biased towards capturing large numbers of common species.