awild | January 9, 2010Benoit Guenard notes that 2009 was a busy year for new ant genera
The NCSU insect blog has moved to a new URL: http://blog.insectmuseum.org/
Bug Girl blogs snow fleas
This is an amazing wasp
xkcd shows the difference between movie science and real science
Also, this:
awild | January 8, 2010ANT COURSE 2010
Danum Valley Field Centre, Sabah Borneo, August 16 - 26
DEADLINE FOR APPLICATION: April 1, 2010
click here for application form
COURSE OBJECTIVES. â ANT COURSE is designed for systematists, ecologists, behaviorists, conservation biologists, and other biologists whose research responsibilities require a greater understanding of ant taxonomy and field research techniques. Emphasis is on the identification of the ant genera and species occurring in Southeast Asia. Lectures will include background information on the ecology, life histories and evolution of ants. Field trips…
awild | January 5, 2010Yesterday afternoon, perhaps tired of keeping up with the subzero temps, our furnace up and quit. We were able to keep the house somewhat above freezing until the repair guy installed the replacement bits this morning. We're all fixed now. But the outage wasn't without a bright side: the ice crystals on the windows grew especially wild:
awild | January 4, 2010
Paraneuretus (Formicidae:Aneuretinae), photo by ebay seller rmvveta
Here's something unusual for the well-financed collector: Paraneuretus, an extinct genus from a nearly extinct subfamily of ants. This pair of fossilized worker ants is selling on ebay today for over $400. Out of my budget for these sorts of things.
Most amber ants up for auction belong to common extinct species: Azteca, Tapinoma, Camponotus and so forth, usually from the Dominican or Baltic amber deposits and pertaining to extant genera. This is the first aneuretine I've seen.
What's interesting about these ants? Well,…
awild | January 3, 2010The classic '80s video from Thomas Dolby:
I'm still not sure what it means. But I do hope they keep a room for me at the Home for Deranged Scientists.
awild | January 2, 2010Ice on the windows:
Photo details: Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon EOS 50D.
(top) ISO 250, f/4, 1/320 sec; (bottom )ISO 160, f/5, 1/500 sec
awild | December 28, 2009Earlier I listed my pick of the best insect photos of the year taken by other photographers. Now it's my turn. In 2009, I snapped 8000 exposures to produce 805 processed, saleable images of live insects. Below are my favorites.
A parasitic Pseudacteon fly targets a fire ant in Argentina
Male size variation in Onthophagus dung beetles
Aphaenogaster ants are tempted by the elaiosome of a bloodroot seed, Illinois
Eastern treehole mosquito larvae, Illinois
Trophallaxis in wood ants, Wisconsin
Face to face with a giant water bug, Illinois
male and female northern walking sticks,…
awild | December 23, 2009In 2009 the world's macrophotographers- both amateur and professional- continued to capture breathtaking images of the arthropod microscape. I've been bookmarking insect photos from around the web that catch my eye, and after spending some time this week reviewing the candidates I've selected nine favorites. Wow. These are the images from fellow photographers that most captured my imagination over the past year.
Together, by Jan Zajc
untitled, by Bonali Giuseppe
Frog beetle ready for take-off, by Alfred Preuss
Ants climbing tree, by Uros Kotnik
Water striders, by Clay Bolt
Eyes…
awild | December 21, 2009Sorry for an uncharacteristically technical post. But, I've produced an excellent example of a problem that's been plaguing the widely-used phylogenetics program MrBayes and thought it might be of interest to the handful of systematists who read this blog.
I've been running analyses on the Azteca y'all sent after my desperate plea last month and noticed something odd.Â
I set MrBayes to do two runs of 4 chains each. After 10 million generations they produced post-stationarity consensus trees that were topologically identical (that is, the avg. st. dev. splits frequency fell to .005 after…
awild | December 20, 2009Feeling nostalgic this afternoon for my Peace Corps days, I did a Google Earth fly-by of my adoptive community, Colónia Once de Setiembre. Not only does Google show the site in high-resolution, the images are clear enough to see a patch of trees I planted with my neighbor in 1997. Judging from the shadows, our token attempt at reforestation must be at least 10 meters tall now.
The miracle of the internet also allows me to confirm that the economy of Once de Setiembre hasn't changed much since I left.
awild | December 19, 2009
Camponotus rosariensis tending scale insects in Argentina
Another piece of the Camponotus hyperdiversity puzzle was published this week in BMC Evolutionary Biology. The reasons behind the tremendous richness of Camponotine ants- a worldwide group of conspicuous insects containing more than a thousand species- are unknown, but recent explanations have focused on the nutritional relationship between the ants and their endosymbiotic Blochmannia bacteria. These gut-dwelling microbes may have allowed camponotines to capitalize on honeydew resources nutritionally unavailable to other ants,…
awild | December 17, 2009We've returned from the 2009 Entomological Society of America meeting in Indianapolis. More on this later.
For now, here are slides from two presentations I gave yesterday:
Character Evolution in Heterospilus
Origin of Pheidole obscurithorax
Both talks report from ongoing research, so I should caution that neither of the studies has seen peer-review.
awild | December 15, 2009Agapostemon sp. - Halictidae
Fairport, NY, USA
Photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 20D.
ISO 100, f/13, 1/250 sec, twin flash diffused through tracing paper
awild | December 14, 2009A couple years back I posted a short bit on how to register photo copyright with the U.S. government. That turned out to be the last time I filled out a registration with pen and paper. For all subsequent submissions I've used the new ECO system at http://www.copyright.gov/eco.
Let me disabuse you of any preconception that the online method is easier. You'll need to clear an hour or two out of your schedule to prepare a submission. The new process involves clicking though an interminable array of confusing steps, filling out an order of magnitude more information than was requested in the…
awild | December 12, 2009
Photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 20D.
ISO 100, f/13, 1/250 sec, twin flash diffused through tracing paper
awild | December 9, 2009In reading various web reactions to news that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act contained nearly 1 million dollars for ant research at Arizona State University and the University of Arizona, it seems there's a lot of confusion about how something like ant behavior winds up getting a stimulus check. Here's an explanation.
Our starting point is the observation that stimulus has to be fast to be effective. The obvious problem is that we all know how fast goverment usually acts, and if the government were to put out a call for stimulus proposals with a full process of review and…
awild | December 9, 2009Heterospilus sp., undescribed species, Costa Rica
click to view the original image
I've been playing around a bit more with the freeware program CombineZP, and I thought I'd share this image of one of the wasps I'm working on in my current position. The image is a composite from 14 photos taken through a microscope at different focal depths.
The parasitic wasp genus Heterospilus is common and hyperdiverse in the new world tropics. It is also almost entirely unstudied. Our project is restricted to the taxonomy of the Costa Rican fauna, and we have about 500 new species just from that…