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Both nature and nurture control caste development in harvester ants, forthcoming in The American Naturalist. (via Physorg). An ant slave rebellion? Temnothorax often kill their Protomognathus captors.

Tetramorium sericeiventre 2008, Canon MP-E 65mm macro lens, MT-24EX twin flash One nice thing about my recent trip to South Africa was that I could revisit the same species I shot on my last visit in 2003. Only, with decent equipment this time around. Check out the difference between the SLR (…

Dorylus helvolus, KZN, South Africa Last night the internet arrived at our new house. I've celebrated the occasion by tackling the backlog of photo uploads. Over at myrmecos.net the South Africa photos are starting to go up. The first batch covers Dorylus helvolus, a subterranean predatory ant…

Pelidnota punctata - Grapevine Beetle Champaign, Illinois Here it is: the first insect I've photographed since moving to Illinois last week.  I've been posting a lot of scarab beetles recently, but can you blame me?  They're so pretty. photo details: Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon 20D…

Our first paper from the Beetle Tree of Life study has been published. Here's the citation: Wild, A. L. & Maddison, D. R. 2008. Evaluating nuclear protein-coding genes for phylogenetic utility in beetles. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, doi: 10.1016/j.ympev.2008.05.023 My co-author David…

This shot wasn't too difficult.  The ant was following my finger about menacingly, as seen here, so I only needed to lift my hand just above the viewing frame to get her to pose.

Asphinctopone differens Bolton & Fisher 2008 A new species from the Central African Republic Bolton & Fisher Revise Asphinctopone (Zootaxa) Shattuck Revises the Indo-Pacific Prionopelta All imported Fire Ants in the U.S. are descended from 9-20 initial foundress queens [summary in…

Our yard here in Champaign is about the size of a postage stamp, but it is in an older part of town and the ant fauna isnât half bad. In moving up from Tucson Iâve traded my desert harvester ants for a more midwestern fauna. Hereâs what I uncovered yesterday in a few minutes of looking around:…

Cicindela lemniscata - White-Lined Tiger Beetle Arizona, USA This one is for Ted, who has an excellent blog about Tiger Beetles. photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon 20D ISO 100, f/13, 1/250 sec, flash diffused through tracing paper.

Euprenolepis procera (photo by Witte and Maschwitz) This is cool. A new paper by Volker Witte and Ulrich Maschwitz details a previously unknown behavior for ants: nomadic fungivory.  Here's the cite and the abstract: Witte, V. and U. Maschwitz. 2008. Mushroom harvesting ants in the topical rain…

I am minutes away from shutting down this computer to pack it away for the long trip to Illinois tomorrow, but before I do that let me point out the New York Times' review of what may well be the most ambitious arthropod exhibit ever: The New Orleans Insectarium. If any of you have the opportunity…

Strategus aloeus - Ox Beetles, female (left) and male Arizona, USA Impressive pronotal horns mark the male in these sexually dimorphic scarabs. Strategus aloeus is found in the southern United States from Florida to Arizona. photo details, top photo: Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon 20D f/…

Harpegnathos saltator - Jumping Ant I thought I would have to travel all the way to India (the horror!) to photograph one of the world's most charming insects, the jumping ant Harpegnathos saltator. But I recently learned that myrmecologist Juergen Liebig, a professor at Arizona State University…

...documented in detail at the Photoshop Disasters Blog. The number of major corporations guilty of egregious image manipulation errors is surprising.

The more avid readers (that's you, mom!) may have noticed a lack of activity on the blog of late.  Life has intruded.  Next week I will be leaving my job at the University of Arizona and taking a new one in Illinois.  This means tying up loose ends on the beetle project, saying goodbye to…

Cotinus mutabilis - Fig Beetle Tucson, Arizona A few weeks ago we started noticing these giant green scarabs flying about Tucson.  They're about the same size and clumsiness in the air as carpenter bees, but brilliant green in color.  My wife- a bit of a bug geek herself- was given a few for her…

Oecophylla weaver ants are exceptionally cooperative subjects for photography, allowing for plenty of experimentation with lighting while the ants preen and pose. While developing the photographs from South Africa I discovered that strong backlighting allows a crystal-clear view of the tracheal…

Apparently both Wordpress and Smugmug host images through Amazon's servers, and Amazon failed in a spectacular fashion this morning.  The outage took down both www.alexanderwild.com and many of the images for this blog, so if things appear to behave oddly, that's what's happening.

Funniest show ever.

I've had a week to digest the International Congress of Entomology (ICE) meeting held earlier this month in Durban, South Africa. Thousands of diverse presentations happening in 15 parallel sessions cannot easily be summed up in a single blog post, so I'll stick to a few of my own impressions of…

Apatides fortis (Bostrichidae), the Horned Powder-Post Beetle Tucson, Arizona These robust wood-boring beetles have been common at my blacklight in early monsoon season. Good thing, too.  We collected a few for the Beetle Tree of Life study, and they've been one of the easier beetles to produce…

Leptogenys attenuata In spite of the southern winter, the coastal forests of Kwazulu-Natal had plenty of ant activity to keep me occupied last week. In addition to the beautiful Polyrhachis I posted earlier, here are portraits of a few of the species I encountered. Crematogaster tricolor…

Among the more charismatic ants I saw during my visit to South Africa was a silver Polyrhachis that seemed all too happy to pose for me. With such an unusually cooperative subject, I was able to experiment with several different arrangements of the flash heads on my MT-24EX twin flash. Compare…

Who was that waspy-looking male ant I posted last week? Cephalotes rohweri, the Arizona Turtle Ant.  Workers like like this:

...it is now legal for Australians to be annoying.

While I was away the Photoshelter blog posted a recent interview I did with Allen Murabayashi, the company's CEO.  You can read it here, and I've also pasted it below the fold. I don't market my photos through an agency- my own sites work pretty well- but if I did, Photoshelter is one of the first…

Sunset over the St. Lucia Estuary I am happy to report that both parts of my trip- ant photography in the coastal forests of St. Lucia and the ICE conference in Durban- were a success. I'll try to put up a few posts in the coming week about both. A brief note about this photo: I used a 2-stop…

After a stroll through a Palo Verde woodland in the Tucson mountains I returned to my car to find this male ant sitting on the roof. I didn't immediately recognize it, and several hours later, after I figured it out, I wished I'd stuck around to looks for queens. What is it? I'll provide the…

Chrysina (=Plusiotis) gloriosa - The Glorious Beetle Huachuca Mountains, Arizona Few of Arizona's beetles are as spectacular as the jewel scarabs in the genus Chrysina. They are most readily collected by blacklight (as in Kojun's handful o' beetles) in juniper forests in the weeks following the…