CitSciAsia Meets… the sANTinel project
The seventh episode of our CitSciAsia Meets… interview series has been posted, with Kammy Chung Hiu Wong and Dr. Benoit Guénard from the sANTinel project telling us about their fascinating citizen science project to study Hong Kong’s ants
CitSciAsia Meets… is an interview series focusing on the citizen scientists in Asia. If you’ve still not seen the CitizenScience.Asia youtube channel you should check it out and subscribe here. We have recorded a number of interviews with Citizen Science practitioners from across Asia and beyond, including previous postings covering Malaysian and Japanese City Nature Challenge participation, environmental citizen science strategies in China and the moths of Asia project. We hope these providing videos providing a forum for Citizen Scientists interested in sharing their stories with the community and the world.
In this new installment we had the pleasure to meet with Kammy Chung Hiu Wong and Dr. Benoit Guénard to hear about sANTinel, a Citizen Science project on the distribution of exotic ants in Hong Kong. Kammy is an ecology student being supervised by Dr Guénard at Hong Kong University, leveraging the power and curiosity of the Hong Kong public to study the distribution of ants in Hong Kong, with the aim to detect the spread and impacts of these species. They may be tiny, but ants are extremely important for our ecosystem. As Hong Kong has historically been a transport hub for humans, it also has been a migration spot for invasive species such as the imported red fire ant (Solenopsis invicta) from South America. In the video Kammy and Benoit met us in the Hong Kong biodiversity museum to tell us why they set up the project, and how you can participate and help.
You can see more about their project and get updates from their facebook page. As they are still looking for volunteers if you are in Hong Kong and want to contribute and help find out more about our tiny neighbours living alongside us in our concrete jungle you can email them via hkuants2021@gmail.com to find out when they are next distributing sampling kits. The team was recently featured on a ViuTV documentary, and Kammy has also made some useful videos explaining how to sample ants safely and systematically using their sampling kits.
Watch this space for new videos, and you’d like to be interviewed or share stories and videos relating to Citizen Science please let us know.
