Project:

Barcoding ants from Sayville, New York

Students:

Gene Weng, Samuel Smith, Evan Como

School:

Sayville High School, Suffolk

Mentors:

Maria Brown

Abstract:

Ants make up a large part of the biomass of animals and are considered ecosystem engineers. Many studies have shown that ants are important in soil health as they increase nutrient availability and aid in soil bioturbation as well as the decomposition of organic materials. The goals of this project are to analyze ants from the Long Island region from multiple locations to assess genetic variation and whether new species and/or subspecies may exist. Another goal is to use ArcGIS Online to visualize the genetic variation and distribution of species for the Long Island region. We hypothesize that new species and./or subspecies will be identified through the barcoding techniques as a function of island biogeography form samples that have already been entered into Genbank and based on preliminary results we obtained last year independent of Barcode Long Island. We also expect to find different locations (residential hard surfaces vs open space areas such as parks and golf courses). Petri di

Poster:

Team samples: