PSA: i HIGHLY Suggest seeking elsewhere for Ant IDs
Before I start, I’d like to make it clear that I mean no offense whatsoever to this community or the moderators that run it. I just thought I’d make this post to help lesser experienced hobbyists.
I’ve been lurking on this sub for some time now and consider myself proficient at being able to identify several genera of ants, being a part of the ant keeping community for well over a decade now. With this experience I am no stranger of knowing that this hobby is full of completely blatant misinformation , especially regarding ant IDs, and this subreddit is one of the worst offenders of it. An overwhelming amount people who comment on ID requests in this subreddit are not even able to correctly distinguish whether an ant is a queen or not, nevermind be able to identify one down to the genus or species. Some of the IDs made are so blatantly off the mark that it confuses me. Additionally, most of these IDs are made without any essential identifying information provided, which tends to be left out of these posts, such as geographic location and size of the specimen, and this subreddit provides no resources to new hobbyists that this is important information to be mentioned when making an ID.
IDs on this sub are often correct, but they usually get drowned out in incorrect IDs which makes it impossible for the OP to determine which ID is correct.
For more accurate and reliable ant identification that you can actually trust, I recommend making an account on the Formiculture forum, which actually contains a lot more active members that know what they are talking about and have been identifying ants for years.
Again, I don’t mean any ill will to this community or the people who run it. I just see time and time again that new hobbyists are given blatantly wrong information in here, and I think it is important as a passionate member of this great hobby to help entry-level ant keepers out as much as I can.
In the meantime, I highly encourage members of this subreddit not to make IDs on posts unless you are confident in your IDing skills. If any moderators of the subreddit are reading this, I think it would be really appreciated to see some form of misinformation prevention in here, however that may look like.
Thanks for reading, and I hope I have helped at least a few people.