Myrmecologists need Notes from Underground. Serious students of ants, now numbering in the hundreds and scattered over the planet, are still forced to communicate mostly by formal publications, which suffer considerable lag time, or by personal communications that are narrowly restrictive in reach. There should be a medium bearing witness to the crackling life of our subject and to share gossip, corridor talk, and the interesting and often important bits of information that may be too fragmented or otherwise inappropriate for full-blown technical publications. As examples of the latter category, consider a report of an interesting collection from Paraguay and where the collection has been deposited; or a find of the rarely seen queen of Acanthomyops; or the first nuptial flight observed of Poecilomyrma; or who got a curatorial job overseeing the Mayr ant collection; or a new grant to study granivores in Africa (postdocs invited to apply); and so on. Whatever. It's all interesting-well, almost all.
      Notes from Underground is also the place to plead for specimens of the genus you are revising, or young colonies you need for lab studies. Or more generally, information you think is important but you can't get yourself. Has anyone done a proper job of looking for ants on the Falkland Islands? Anyone seen a raid by Leptanilloides? Do slave Formica ever accompany their slavemakers on raids? What is the meaning of the bizarre form of the Leptomyrmex reproductive? Who, if anybody is doing research on caste determination in army ants?
      And so on. If experience repeats itself, and the Notes from Underground succeeds, it will be the first publication I pull out each time it arrives in a batch of mail.



     Edward O. Wilson
     University Research Professor Emeritus at Harvard