Authors and acknowledgments

Authors

Content and Images

Eli Sarnat, Artwork Consulting, LLC.

Website migration

Melissa Islam, Department of Biology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado
Ashley Miller, Department of Biology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado
Amanda J. Redford, USDA-APHIS-PPQ, Colorado

This website is created using Fact Sheet Manager 3, a content-management system, developed and maintained by Center for Integrated Pest Management, North Carolina State University.

For questions about content, access, or functionality, please contact ITP (itp@usda.gov).

Acknowledgements

Development and Support

Antkey was developed and published by the USDA Center for Plant Health Science and Technology (CPHST) as part of a cooperative agreement with University of Illinois, School of Integrative Biology Department of Animal Biology and Department of Entomology. Additional support was received from the Encyclopedia of Life Rubenstein Fellowship program (www.eol.org). The Kadoorie Farm and Botanical Garden supported additional development, including Asian language translation.

In 2025, USDA-APHIS-PPQ-S&T, Pest Identification Technology Lab (PITL), Identification Technology Program (ITP) migrated the tool's content to idtools.org from the accessible content on https://antkey.myspecies.info/en (Scratchpad platform) directly or from archived pages on the Wayback Machine. ITP will continue to migrate content as the Scratchpad platform site stabilizes including image attribution. Content was not modified or updated, except for fixing broken external links and adding image attribution.

Identification key

Many of the characters used to develop the identification guide were adapted from previously published and unpublished works. These include the following.

Genera-level characters

Bolton, B. (1994) Identification guide to the ant genera of the world. Used for genera-level characters.
Shattuck, S.O. (2000) Australian ants: their biology and identification. Used for genera-level characters.
Fisher, B.L. & Cover, S.P. (2007) Ants of North America: a guide to the genera. Used for genera-level characters.

Species-level characters

Ants (Formicidae) of the southeastern United States. Website developed by Joe A. MacGown. Used for Pheidole, Nylanderia, Brachymyrmex.
Brachymyrmex of the United States. Draft key (unpublished) in development by Christopher M. Wilson (Sam Houston State University).
Kallal, R.J. & Lapolla, J.S. (2012) Monograph of Nylanderia (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) of the World, Part II: Nylanderia in the Nearctic.

Ants of Costa Rica. Website developed by John Longino.

Images

Images throughout the site by the author, Eli Sarnat, unless otherwise noted. Specimen photographs in the identification key were used from Antweb.org under the Attribution-Share Alike Creative Commons License.

Videos

Videos embedded in fact sheets are by the author, Eli Sarnat. The ruler visible in the videos is in millimeters.

Specimens

Specimens used for morpohological analysis for this project were borrowed from the collections of the California Academy of Sciences (CASC), the United States National Museum (USNM), and the personal collections of Phil Ward (PSWC), and Andrew Suarez (AVSC). Data presented in Antkey's specimen database was imported from Antweb. The specimen database was not migrated to this tool.

Technical support

Special thanks to the Vibrant team for their work on the Scratchpads platform and assistance with the Antkey.org website.