Scientists take to Twitter to study flying ants, starling murmurations and house spiders

5-SEP-2018

BRITISH ECOLOGICAL SOCIETY

Searching tweets for text or hashtags allowed researchers to gather information on popular ecological phenomena observed in the UK such as the emergence of flying ants and starling murmurations. Their findings are published today in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

To test how reliable and accurate Twitter is as a data source for scientific research, ecologists from the University of Gloucestershire compared their results directly to three previously published studies on winged ant emergence, autumnal house spider sightings, and starling murmurations. These studies were based on primary data collected by citizen scientists during the same period.

They found that the "Twitter-mined" data was able to replicate most temporal findings, such as date and time of ant mating flights or house spider sightings. The researchers could also reproduce the sex ratio of house spiders by analysing the photos tweeters uploaded and, in some cases, received an indication of where in the house the spider was seen.

Professor Adam Hart from the University of Gloucestershire, who led the study, said: "The retrospective analysis of social media has been used widely to detect earthquakes or political sentiment, but not so much in ecological research. Our study shows that passive citizen science, where we gain information and access to photos indirectly through Twitter or other social media channels such as Facebook and Flickr, can indeed generate robust and interesting data."

More:
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-09/bes-stt090318.php