insects
awild | March 28, 2010I've moved some of my better termite photos to a new gallery at alexanderwild.com.
Go visit.
awild | March 27, 2010No, not really. I'm just kidding. Wouldn't it be great to have an ant field guide, though?
Off and on for the past couple years I've been playing with concepts. A potential format is this (click to download pdf):
The salient features, in my opinion:
Targeted at the general naturalist, so less technical than the excellent Fisher & Cover guide
Organized around genera, as species IDs remain problematic without microscopes
With synopses of the most commonly encountered species
Containing brief chapters on ant ecology, collection, culture, etc
But that's what I'd like in an ant book. The…
awild | March 26, 2010
Tenebrio molitor, pupa
Tenebrio molitor is a darkling beetle known more for its immature stages than for its adults. It is the ubiquitous mealworm. You can buy these granivorous beetles at any pet store as food for fish, birds, and reptiles.
The above shot of a developing pupa requires two sources of light. A flash head positioned behind the insect backlights the subject to produce the translucent glow. A second, positioned above and in front, is powered down and provides the highlights and details of the head and appendages.
Tenebrio molitor larva and pupa
Stronger backlighting gives this…
awild | March 25, 2010
Blatta orientalis
Oriental Cockroach
The key to this image is the soft lighting. A strobe fired into a white box produces an even white light, allowing us to see the subtler tones and textures on the surface of this common pest insect. You could almost sell this roach on ebay.
Photo details: Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon EOS 50D
ISO 200, f10, 1/160 sec
awild | March 22, 2010Tonight's mystery is a straight-up Name That Bug:
From central Florida, the mystery insect
One point for picking the order, two points for family, five points for genus, and five points for species. [added in edit- you've got to be first in any one category].
And guess what? We've finally decided what to do with all these hard-earned Myrmecos Points!
At the end of every month, I'll tally points from the preceding weeks and the winner will get to choose either:
Any 8x10 print from the galleries of www.alexanderwild.com
-or, since so many of you are bloggers-
A freebie blog entry where the…
awild | March 21, 2010
I had an assignment this weekend to shoot preserved insects as if in a museum display collection. Dead bugs aren't normally my thing, but there's something to be said about subjects that stay put and allow me to arrange lighting without scurrying off. I pinned the insects in foam-bottomed trays and reflected the strobe off an overhead white board. More photos below.
Photo details (all): Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon EOS 50D
ISO 100, f5-f11, 1/40 sec, indirect strobe
grrlscientist | March 19, 2010tags: Life, Discovery Channel, BBC, Challenges of Life, Stalk-Eyed Fly, animals, mammals, birds, television, streaming video
Gail Weiswasser at the Discovery channel emailed a few days ago to tell me about the upcoming March 21 premiere of BBC's LIFE on the Discovery Channel. LIFE is the 11-part follow up to PLANET EARTH (the most successful natural history documentary of all time). While PLANET EARTH told the story of the natural world through the framework of our planet's ecosystems and regions, LIFE takes us on a more intimate journey, introducing different animal and plant groups, using…
edyong | March 18, 2010
One night of passion and you're filled with a lifetime full of sperm with no need to ever mate again. As sex lives go, it doesn't sound very appealing, but it's what many ants, bees, wasps and termites experience. The queens of these social insects mate in a single "nuptial flight" that lasts for a few hours or days. They store the sperm from their suitors and use it to slowly fertilise their eggs over the rest of their lives. Males have this one and only shot at joining the Mile High Club and they compete fiercely for their chance to inseminate the queen. But even for the victors, the war…
grrlscientist | March 18, 2010tags: Life, Discovery Channel, Challenges of Life, Cheetas Hunting Ostrich, animals, mammals, birds, television, BBC, streaming video
Gail Weiswasser at the Discovery Channel emailed a few days ago to tell me about the upcoming March 21 premiere of BBC's LIFE, the 11-part follow up to PLANET EARTH (the most successful natural history documentary of all time). While PLANET EARTH told the story of the natural world through the framework of our planet's ecosystems and regions, LIFE takes us on a more intimate journey, introducing different animal and plant groups, using the latest in HD filming…
awild | March 16, 2010The magical mystery lump from last night? As many astute readers noted, they are insects in the enigmatic order Strepsiptera. They live as parasites in the bodies of other insects. Considering the host species (Isodontia mexicana, a sphecid wasp), the streps are probably in the genus Paraxenos. Here are a couple more shots:
Assuming my math is correct, here's your point breakdown:
Ted McRae: 20
macromite: 20
Joshua King: 20
Gordon Snelling: 10
Scot Waring: 10
Invictacidal: 10
Chris: 10
tuckerlancaster: 5
I gave ten points for identifying the mystery as a Strepsiptera, five for picking…
mikethemadbiologist | March 16, 2010Right wing TV bloviators oppose scientific research. And in other news, dog bites man. By way of Bug Girl, I came across this story about Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson opposing the use of $187,632 of stimulus money to buy storage cabinets for Michigan State University's Albert J. Cook Arthropod Research Collection which houses over 1 million insects collected over 143 years:
Fox News host Sean Hannity launched a series of "investigative" reports this week, in which he claims he will reveal oodles of wasteful stimulus spending by the Obama administration. In his first report, Hannity and…
awild | March 15, 2010
Ok, so we all know this is a wasp. But what's with the lumps near the tip of the abdomen?
Ten points for identifying the lump, and five points for anyone ambitious enough to put a name on the wasp, too.
awild | March 14, 2010
To create this video, I fed honey water to a captive colony of Camponotus pennsylvanicus carpenter ants and recorded them passing the liquid among nestmates. The sharing behavior is called trophallaxis, and it means more to ants than mere nutrition. They use the behavior to spread chemical messages around the nest and to create a unified colony odor.
As a case in point, near the end of the video workers are visible licking the queen. Her scents are picked up this way and passed around the colony via trophallaxis. It's how the ants know the queen is present and reproducing.
For the record, I…
edyong | March 11, 2010Not Exactly Pocket Science is a set of shorter write-ups on new stories with links to more detailed takes by the world's best journalists and bloggers. It is meant to complement the usual fare of detailed pieces that are typical for this blog.
Geneticist sequences own genome, finds genetic cause of his disease
If you've got an inherited disease and you want to find the genetic faults responsible, it certainly helps if you're a prominent geneticist. James Lupski (right) from the Baylor College of Medicine suffers from an incurable condition called Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) disease, which…
awild | March 10, 2010At the time I photographed this little scene (at Bell Smith Springs, Illinois) I was myself unsure of the drama playing out on the oak gall. I sent pictures to wasp expert Hege VÃ¥rdal to see if my preliminary guess of a pair of gall parasites was worth anything. Her reply:
I believe that you are on the correct track concerning the specimens. It is probably an inquiline and a parasitoid trying to reach the gall chamber. It looks like a unilocular (one-chambered) gall. Often the inquiline female kills the gall wasp larva when ovipositing in the gall or alternatively the inquiline larva kills…
awild | March 9, 2010Watch beetle guru Anthony Cognato trying to deal with Fox News ignoramus Tucker Carlson:
It isn't news that Fox News isn't, um, news. Nor is it news that Fox can't grasp the benefits of public investment in knowledge creation- perhaps because actual knowledge is anathema to their business model. But I digress.
I'm going to complain instead that Cognato missed out (or was edited out) on a major talking point to counter Fox's bluster. Fox pretends Cognato just sidled up to suckle at the stimulus teat while the getting was good. A university welfare queen, or something. But that's simply…
awild | March 8, 2010Alright, Sherlock. What's going on here?
Five points each for the identity of the big round thing, for the insect at the top, and for the insect at the side. Ten points for describing the story.
And a freebie point to anyone who comes up with an idea for what to do with all these points.
This scene was photographed in the fall in southern Illinois. Here are close-ups of the critters:
mystery wasp #1
mystery wasp#2
grrlscientist | March 7, 2010tags: Praying Mantis, Preying Mantis, mantid, insects, birds, hummingbirds, offbeat, predation, predatory behavior, nature, streaming video
Sandy Lizotte, the Ventura Hummingbird Lady, captures a rare and remarkable moment where a praying mantis was waiting patiently at a hummingbird feeder to ambush a hummingbird. As you'll see in this video, the mantid succeeds.
The hummingbird did survive.
awild | March 4, 2010
Who's that odd ant out?
While in sunny Florida last summer (ah, sunshine! I vaguely remember what that looks like), I spent an hour peering into a nest of little Dorymyrmex elegans. These slender, graceful ants are among Florida's more charming insects.
Every few minutes, though, the flow of elegant orange insects out of the nest was interrupted by a darker, more robust ant: Dorymyrmex reginicula. Who was this interloper?
Dorymyrmex reginicula is a temporary social parasite. Mature colonies behave pretty much like normal ants. Workers guard the nest, forage for food, and tend the larvae.…
edyong | March 4, 2010We've all heard about "beer goggles", the mythical, invisible eyewear that makes everyone else seem incredibly attractive after a few pints too many. If only beer had the reverse effect, making the drinker seem irresistibly attractive. Well, the good news is that beer does actually do this. The bad news is that the ones who are attracted are malarial mosquitoes.
Anopheles gambiae (the mosquito that transmits malaria) tracks its victims by their smells. By wafting the aromas of humans over thousands of mosquitoes, Thierry Lefevre found that they find the body odour of beer drinkers to be…