Image attribution: OIST
Mr. Hidetsune Takamine is a well-known Okinawan ant expert who has been collecting ants in Okinawa for around 40 years. His collection includes 116 species, 30 of which are endemic to Okinawa.
On November 26, 2015, Mr. Takamine donated his ant collection to OIST at a handover ceremony that took place at the Biodiversity and Biocomplexity Unit and will be stored in the unit’s specimen shelf as the Takamine Collection.
Dr. Masashi Yoshimura and Prof. Evan Economo expressed their gratitude towards Mr. Takamine, emphasizing how much this donation would contribute to academic research and more specifically how it would improve the scientific research on Okinawan biodiversity and help us understand how the diversity of Okinawa fits into the broader picture.
! AntMaps is an interactive web framework for mapping ant species ranges and aggregate biodiversity patterns. In particular, AntMaps is built to visualize and interact with 
We are pleased to welcome Georg Fischer to the lab, our new Postdoctoral Scholar. Georg originally hails from Germany, but more recently was a postdoc at the California Academy of Sciences for several years. He is going to be taking a leading role in our projects on the biogeography, ecology, phylogeny, and systematics of the hyperdiverse ant genus Pheidole. Georg has worked particularly on the Afrotropical and Malagasy Pheidole, and will continue that work but also put it in context of the major Old World Pheidole radiations.