ants
awild | January 23, 2010
Camponotus floridanus, the Florida Carpenter Ant
Photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 50D.
ISO 100, f/13, 1/250 sec, diffused twin flash
awild | January 22, 2010...and it's about ants, of course:
The Trailhead Queen was dead. At first, there was no overt sign that her long life was ending: no fever, no spasms, no farewells. She simply sat on the floor of the royal chamber and died. As in life, her body was prone and immobile, her legs and antennae relaxed. Her stillness alone failed to give warning to her daughters that a catastrophe had occurred for all of them. She lay there, in fact, as though nothing had happened. She had become a perfect statue of herself. While humans and other vertebrates have an internal skeleton surrounded by soft tissue…
awild | January 21, 2010
Amblyopone australis: a primitive ant?
Earlier I chastised Christian Peeters and Mathieu Molet for misinterpreting the term "basal" in a phylogenetic context. What was that about?
The issue relates to the classic fallacy of viewing evolution as a linear progression from primitive to advanced. Popular conceptions of evolution aside, the process is not linear like a ladder so much as branching like a bush.
I don't know what quirk of human psychology so strongly predisposes us to frame ideas in linear narratives, but the fact that we do so makes evolution an unfortunately difficult concept…
awild | January 21, 2010...than matching ant shirts?
Courtesy of these guys. Thanks!
(and yes, that's what we here at Myrmecos international headquarters look like).
awild | January 20, 2010Let me preface this post by saying that Christian Peeters is one of my absolute favorite myrmecologists. If lost in a remote African jungle and stalked by ravenous leopards, for example, Christian is the first ant guy I'd pick to help get me out of the predicament.
Having said that, this paper in Insectes Sociaux is so bad I nearly gouged my eyes out and ran around in little circles screaming and flailing my arms.
Nonetheless there exist extant ants with relatively simple societies, where size-polymorphic workers and large queens are absent. Recent phylogenies show that the poneroid…
edyong | January 18, 2010The mighty insect colonies of ants, termites and bees have been described as superorganisms. Through the concerted action of many bodies working towards a common goal, they can achieve great feats of architecture, agriculture and warfare that individual insects cannot.
That's more than just an evocative metaphor. Chen Hou from Arizona State University has found that the same mathematical principles govern the lives of insect colonies and individual animals. You could predict how quickly an individual insect grows or burn food, how much effort it puts into reproduction and how long it lives…
awild | January 17, 2010
Surfing around the bookstores this morning I see that the much-anticipated Ant Ecology book is out. At $129.00 it's not something the casual reader is liable to pick up. Nonetheless, Ant Ecology is a beautiful volume reviewing the state of the field, and scientists who work on ants should probably own a copy. Or at least get one on time-share.
The book is a collection of 16 chapters edited by Lori Lach, Kate Parr, and Kirsti Abbott. There's a mellifluous forward by Ed Wilson, but then, most ant books have a mellifluous forward by Ed Wilson. Ant Ecology's real strength is that each chapter is…
awild | January 13, 2010If I were to mention an ant-fungus mutualism- that is, an ecological partnership between an ant and a fungus that benefits both- most biologically literate people might think of the famed leafcutter ants and the edible mycelia they cultivate. But that is just one example.
Several other fungi have entered into productive relationships with ants, assisting especially in ant architecture. Consider:
Lasius umbratus walking in the galleries of an underground carton nest (Illinois)
A larger view of the same nest. The intricate galleries are made from fungal mycelia growing through a…
awild | January 9, 2010
Nylanderia guatemalensis
What are ant taxonomists buzzing about this week?*
Well. A hot new paper by John LaPolla, Seán Brady, and Steve Shattuck in Systematic Entomology has killed Paratrechina as we know it.Â
Nearly all those adorable, hairy little formicines we knew as Paratrechina- like the phantom sand ant and the rasberry crazy ant- have been pulled out and placed in a resurrected genus Nylanderia. All that remains of Paratrechina is but a single species, the fabled Black Crazy Ant Paratrechina longicornis. Which, incidentally, is the species in this blog's header photo.
Here's…
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 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 | 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 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 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 8, 2009The Republican Party speaks:
GOP senators on Tuesday highlighted âpure wasteâ in the billions of stimulus funds spent this year, including money for fossil research in Argentina, puppet shows and to protect cruise ships from terrorist attacks...
What does the Republican Party consider wasteful? Science, apparently:
Half a million dollars went to Arizona State University to study the genetic makeup of ants to determine distinctive roles in ant colonies; $450,000 went to the University of Arizona to study the division of labor in ant colonies.
âI had no idea that so much expertise concerning…
awild | December 8, 2009
Formica integroides wood ants tending pine aphids (California, USA)
Photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS D60.
ISO 100, f/13, 1/200 sec, twin flash diffused through tracing paper
awild | December 5, 2009
Oddly enough, a photograph I took in 2007 has been chosen as one of Popular Science's 2009 "The Year's Most Amazing Scientific Images" (I'm #34 in the gallery). I guess that's because the image wasn't widely distributed until the NY Times picked it up earlier this year. Not that I'm complaining, of course.
My favorite image in Popular Science's lineup is this one, a spectacular confluence of lightning and volcanic eruption captured by Carlos Gutierrez. But there are plenty of other stunning images in the gallery. Go see.
awild | December 5, 2009
Pogonomyrmex micans, stack of 23 images using CombineZP. Click for large file.
I don't ordinarily do product endorsements on the blog, but here's one: the image-stacking software CombineZP. I recommend it for two reasons. First, CombineZP produces smoother, more artifact-free images than the very expensive competition. Second, CombineZP is freeware. Alan Hadley, a British arthropod enthusiast, wrote it in his spare time.
Good. And free. Not much to argue with there.
CombineZP and similar products are designed to counter a major challenge of macrophotography, the narrow depth of…