Formerly considered rare, the ant species Cryptopone ochracea (Mayr, 1855) can be commonly detected using citizen-science tools

Abstract

Citizen science is a valuable tool for monitoring different species, especially in cases concerning truly rare and difficult-to-detect species where time-consuming field studies are limited and long-term research projects are uncertain. To better understand the distribution of the rarely collected Cryptopone ochracea (Mayr, 1855) (Hymenoptera, Formicidae) in Hungary, we obtained the occurrence data with photos uploaded by non-professionals to the page of the largest Hungarian Facebook group dealing with ants and a citizen-science website dealing with biological data collection. In this article, we expand the known distribution of C. ochracea to include 46 new records from Hungary and one from Serbia. With two historical records, this previously undersampled species has now been found 48 times in Hungary. Our results prove that social media platforms and other websites for citizen science projects offer new and useful opportunities for researchers to involve non-professionals in scientific work and, thus, obtain large amounts of valuable data, even for understudied arthropod species.