Alex Wild
awild
Posts by this author
June 28, 2008
I'm leaving shortly for the 2008 International Congress of Entomology in Durban, South Africa. This means another break from the blog for me, but when I return in mid-July there will be plenty of African insect photos. St. Lucia, where I'm headed the week before the conference, has African weaver…
June 28, 2008
A close-in crop of the body:
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon 20D
ISO 100, f/13, 1/250sec exposure
June 27, 2008
Yesterday's unexpectedly intense monsoon storms brought several inches of rain and flash floods to Tucson. Many of our desert ants cue their mating flights with the onset of the summer rains, and this morning the Forelius were flying, congregating in dense swarms that twirled and twisted above…
June 25, 2008
Arizona has five seasons: Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer, and Monsoon. Monsoon is my favorite.
By late June or early July, intense summer heat on the interior of the continent sets up a weather pattern pulling tropical moisture up from the south. After several weeks of baking at 106° with not a…
June 23, 2008
Via GTDA comes this mesmerizing time lapse video demonstrating the efficiency of ant recruitment:
June 22, 2008
A century ago, William Morton Wheeler inked this iconic illustration of the striking polymorphism displayed among members of an ant colony. You may have seen it; Andrew Bourke and Nigel Franks used it as the cover for their 1995 text Social Evolution in Ants.
I always assumed Wheeler's figure…
June 22, 2008
We celebrated the repair of our computer by having a KitKat. A British Kitkat, that is. I never liked the cheap corn-syrupy flavor of the American version.  But the original british kitkat is a world apart- it's really quite good. The chocolate actually tastes like chocolate.
June 15, 2008
Yes, the computer is still in the shop. But there's still Gogol Bordello and what is quite possibly the world's best song:
June 11, 2008
The computer is still broken.  So here at Myrmecos Blog we're still on vacation. I should be back online within a week or two.
June 5, 2008
Derobrachus hovorei - Palo Verde Borer
Cerambycidae
Tucson, Arizona
Every June, hundreds of thousands of giant beetles emerge from beneath the Tucsonian soil. The enormous size of these beetles- up to several inches long- makes them among the most memorable of Tucson's insects. They cruise…
June 3, 2008
My main blogging/photography machine has gone down and will be in the shop for a few weeks. I don't think I'll be buying another Gateway desktop- the current failure is not the first time.
In the meantime, you may amuse yourselves with the amazing Spider Dog:
June 1, 2008
Taxonomists are busy, busy people. Their efforts in the year 2006 have just been released by Arizona State University's Institute for Species Exploration. Within insects, here's the breakdown by order:
The Institute has also compiled a whimsical "Top Ten" list of their favorite new species.…
May 31, 2008
...continue to accumulate poignant stories. Go read.
May 31, 2008
30 years ago, biologists thought they'd solved one of Darwin's thorniest problems, the evolution of sterile social insects:
No doubt many instincts of very difficult explanation could be opposed to the theory of natural selection,âcases, in which we cannot see how an instinct could possibly have…
May 30, 2008
Cymatodera sp. Checkered Beetle (Cleridae)
Arizona
photo details: Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon 20D
f/16, 1/250 sec, ISO 100, indirect strobe in a white box
May 28, 2008
Odontomachus coquereli - Madagascar
Myrmecology continues to lead the way in online taxonomy. Today saw the release of the very first taxonomic paper published by the top-tier open access science journal, PLoS One.
Brian Fisher and Alex Smith combine alpha taxonomy with DNA barcoding to produce a…
May 28, 2008
Check this out:
http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/aus/582393674.html
May 27, 2008
As if we didn't already have enough pest ants to worry about, here is a relatively new one. The rover ant Brachymyrmex patagonicus, a tiny South American species, has been working its way under the radar across the southern United States. Its presence is now large enough that pest control…
May 26, 2008
Centruroides sculpturatus - Arizona Bark Scorpion
I have a hard time getting worked up over stuff that happened 25 years ago. But here's something that still angers me every time I think of it.
One of those educational safety movies we were shown back in grade school- you know, the "Stop-Drop-and…
May 25, 2008
This basic photo of a harvester ant carrying a seed took an hour and a half to capture. 150 exposures. The problem wasn't that the ants weren't behaving, but that it took nearly an hour of experimentation to get the simplicity of composition I had envisioned when I set out on the project.
Few of…
May 24, 2008
We went down to the Rialto last night to catch a benefit concert by Calexico. Best show I've seen in ages. They pull off an unexpected blend of mariachi, folk, and straight-up rock, including a Neil Young cover featuring two full mariachi bands and a slew of guest vocalists on stage. Calexico…
May 23, 2008
Olla v-nigrum - Ashy Grey Ladybird Beetle
Arizona
Here it is: the very first ladybird beetle featured on the Friday Beetle Blog. Instead of a boring ol' red and black one, I've chosen a stylish and tasteful beetle colored in grayscale: the Ashy Gray Ladybird. These have been arriving in some…
May 22, 2008
Spring is swarm season for honeybees, and the feral population in Tucson is booming. We've got not one but two new colonies nesting in dead trees in our yard. I didn't do anything to attract them, they just moved in on their own.
My feelings about honey bees are mixed.
On one hand, I have many…
May 21, 2008
Scott Solomon, who researches fungus-growing ants, has a brief piece in Slate Magazine on the Paratrechina Crazy Ants invading Houston.
I'm not convinced that this ant is anything different from Paratrechina fulva, a common South American species and the oldest name in that species complex. People…
May 19, 2008
Lycaena xanthoides - Great Copper
California
A butterfly larva peeks through a hole it has eaten in its Rumex host plant.
May 18, 2008
Apparently either Jo-anne or I share a name with, or similar to, someone on the U.S. government's secret terrorist watch list. I can't say which of us it is; no one at the airport is authorized to tell us that. All I know is we were prevented from checking in at the Tucson airport on Thursday…
May 16, 2008
Carpophilus sp. Sap Beetle, Nitidulidae
Arizona
The Opuntia prickly-pear cacti have been flowering the past few weeks. Every time I poke at a blossom I find several chunky Carpophilus beetles.
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon 20D
f/13, 1/250 sec, ISO 100, twin flash…
May 15, 2008
Opamyrma hungvuong Yamane et al 2008
Vietnam
It isn't every day we get a whole new genus. In this week's Zootaxa, Seiki Yamane, Tuan Vet Bui, and Katsuyuki Eguchi report the discovery of Opamyrma, an amblyoponine ant from central Vietnam. The full article is behind Zootaxa's subscription…