Ant research has long been unfashionable in Taiwan. According to Professor Wu Wen-jer of the Department of Entomology at National Taiwan University, entomology got a later start than botany and vertebrate zoology and has fewer people working on even as basic an area as taxonomy. The number of known species of insect in Taiwan currently stands at more than 200,000, but this number is thought to be less than 10 % of the actual total.
台灣的螞蟻研究向來備受冷落，台大昆蟲學系教授吳文哲表示，以「給物種一個名字」的基礎分類學來說，昆蟲的分類比起植物或脊椎動物，不但起步晚，研究的人也少，台灣目前已知二萬多種昆蟲，竟還不到實際存活種類數的 1/10。