Nature
awild | April 12, 2010[note: this and all preceding entries are reposted from myrmecos.wordpress.com; guesses for this Monday Night Mystery are also lodged here.]
What in the world is this strange creature?
The point breakdown* will be as follows:
2 points for order
2 points for family
2 points for genus
2 points for species
2 points for describing the behavior
As in past weeks, you have to be first in each category.
*What are Myrmecos points good for? The cumulative winner at the end of the month gets to choose either 1)any 8x10 print from alexanderwild.com, or 2) a guest blog post on a topic of their choosing.
grrlscientist | April 9, 2010tags: Farben, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, travel, nature, flowers, image of the day
Farben.
Nordwestzentrum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Image: GrrlScientist, 7 April 2010 [larger view]
This is one of several photographs I snapped of these tulips. The colors were so intense that it made me think of a very neatly arranged stack of Easter eggs.
awild | April 9, 2010
Penthe pimelia (Tetratomidae)Illinois, USA
A couple years back I was working on the Beetle Tree of Life project as a molecular phylogeneticist. My main responsibility was to gather DNA sequence data for several hundred beetles distributed across the spectrum of Coleopteran diversity.
As I'm not a Coleopterist, I spent most of my time lost in a befuddled daze of incomprehensible taxonomy. There are so many beetles. The larger families each hold more species than all of the vertebrates combined. Think about all the mammals and birds you know- the warblers, the polar bears, the shrews, the…
grrlscientist | April 8, 2010tags: WeiÃe Blüte in Morgensonne, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, travel, nature, flowers, image of the day
WeiÃe Blüte in Morgensonne.
Nordwestzentrum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Image: GrrlScientist, 7 April 2010 [larger view]
This is another flower I photographed yesterday in the morning sunshine. The photograph turned out better than I expected, despite the shadows and peculiar sunlight that seemed to transform colors before my very eyes.
grrlscientist | April 7, 2010tags: Violett HahnenfuÃ, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, travel, nature, flowers, image of the day
Violett HahnenfuÃ.
Nordwestzentrum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Image: GrrlScientist, 7 April 2010 [larger view]
As soon as I saw this image through the viewfinder on my camera, I knew it was magic. The camera did not capture the purple color correctly (it was much richer and brighter than you see here -- a rather washed out version of real life) but it did capture the amazing patterns that made this image so beautiful in my eye.
awild | April 7, 2010Wasmannia auropunctata - little fire ants Buenos Aires, Argentina
One of the world's worst invaders, the little fire ants have spread from the new world tropics to warmer regions around the globe, becoming especially problematic on oceanic islands. The ants above, though, are from an innocuous native population in northern Argentina. They arrived at a cookie bait at the Costanera Sur reserve, barely noticeable specks of orange just over a millimeter long.
Wasmannia has a painful sting for such a small insect, and the ants do this annoying thing where they'll wander around on your body for an…
awild | April 6, 2010Plega sp. (Mantispidae)
Who was the source of Monday's DNA? As many of you discerned from the online Genbank database, the sequence came from Plega dactylota, a Neuropteran insect in the family Mantispidae.
10 points to Aaron Hardin, who guessed it first.
For future reference, these genetic puzzles are only slightly more complicated than a Google search. Go to NCBI's BLAST page, select "nucleotide blast" (because we have nucleotide data), click the box for "others" to get you out of the human genome, enter the sequence in the search box, and click the "BLAST" button. Any significant matches…
grrlscientist | April 6, 2010tags: Bockenheimer Turm bei Nacht, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, travel, nature, cities, photography
Bockenheimer Turm bei Nacht.
Bockenheimer Warte, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Image: GrrlScientist, 6 April 2010 [larger view]
So why am I in Bockenheim again? I went here because I had an appointment to get a bank account. After complaining mightily about this enormous waste of time (I've never had to make an appointment to set up a bank account before), I was surprised and most pleased to meet a personable banker who visits NYC frequently (he has family there and is returning on 15 May for a…
grrlscientist | April 6, 2010tags: Bockenheimer Turm, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, travel, nature, cities, image of the day
Bockenheimer Turm.
Bockenheimer Warte, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Image: GrrlScientist, 6 April 2010 [larger view]
This is an astonishingly gorgeous day in Frankfurt am Main; warm (but not too warm) and everything is exploding into bloom under an impossibly blue sky. I wish you were here with me because I would bring you to my favorite coffee shop in Bockenheimer Warte; Cafe Extrablatt, where they not only give me FREE wifi, but they also cheerfully provide powerpoints (that's a "plug in" or an "…
grrlscientist | April 4, 2010tags: Sonnenuntergang, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, travel, nature, sunset, image of the day
Sonnenuntergang.
Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Image: Bob O'Hara, 4 April 2010 [larger view]
Sunset over Frankfurt, as photographed from the bedroom window.
awild | April 4, 2010
Prenolepis imparis - winter ant (queen)
Urbana, Illinois
Photo details: Canon mp-e 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 50D
ISO 100, f13, 1/250 sec, diffused flash
grrlscientist | April 3, 2010tags: Orchidee, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, travel, nature, flowers, image of the day
Orchidee.
Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Image: GrrlScientist, 6 March 2010 [larger view]
I have a whole slew of orchid photographs that I might set free upon the world someday. This image captures a rather common flower, but I still like it because, even though it's not perfect, it almost seems like abstract art.
awild | April 2, 2010Dendroides fire-colored beetle,
Illlinois
We in the Friday Beetle Department don't often turn our attention to immature beetles. But these Dendroides larvae are too striking to pass up.
Dendroides fire-colored beetles inhabit the flat, two-dimensional space under the bark of dead trees. The oddly compressed body helps this insect squeeze through tight spaces looking for food.
update: Identification updated, on closer examination of the urogomphi. I think everyone should spend more time examining urogomphi.
Photo details: Canon mp-e 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 50D
ISO 100, f13, 1/…
ddobbs | March 31, 2010
Double helix, courtesy NIH/National Genome Research Institute
It's the 10th anniverary of the coding of the human genome. Snuck up on me -- but not on Nature or Reuters. Both of these outfits â two of the best science/med reporting teams out there â published big, beautiful, multipart packages today. They're worth a look even if you're not a genome geek.
Reuters looks at what NIH director and former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute Francis Collins found when he finally had his genome run last summer: a disposition for type-2 diabetes, among other things. Collins was…
grrlscientist | March 30, 2010tags: Frankfurt am Main, Germany, Sonnenuntergang, travel, nature, environment, photography
Sonnenuntergang.
Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Image: Bob O'Hara, 30 March 2010 [larger view]
This was the sunset as photographed from the windows of the flat where I live in Frankfurt am Main. Don't you wish you could be here too, drinking a nice syrah and eating some of the Karotten-ingwer Suppe that I am preparing at this very moment?
awild | March 30, 2010
Who were those magical mystery insects?
The ant is Prenolepis imparis, recognizable by the attractive hourglass constriction in her mid-thorax. Congrats to Julie for the answer. The ant's hapless prey was, as Ted McRae proferred, a hackberry psyllid Pachypsylla celtidismamma (Hemiptera: Psyllidae).
The hard part was figuring out what the heck sort of group the oddball prey insect belonged to. Psyllids are related to aphids but haven't suffered such extreme modification over the course of their evolutionary descent. They retain all sorts of general buggy traits, rendering them difficult to…
awild | March 29, 2010"Ah, an easy one!" you might think.
But no. I'm only handing out 4 points for identifying this common Illinois ant species. I'm more interested in this ant's quarry, for six points: 2 each for order, family, and genus. First correct guess in each category gets the points.
The cumulative point winner at the end of April gets an 8x10 print from the gallery, or a guest blog post on a topic of their choosing.
grrlscientist | March 29, 2010tags: Max-Planck Institut für Biophysik, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, Rote Tulpe mit gelbem Auge, flowers, nature, environment, image of the day
Rote Tulpe mit gelbem Auge.
Max-Planck Institut für Biophysik, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Image: GrrlScientist, 25 March 2010 [larger view]
Here's one photograph of the red-and-yellow tulips I saw at the Max-Planck Institute a few days ago. Unfortunately, the weather has not cooperated since, so even though I've photographed these flowers daily since then, none of those images captured what I wish to show to you. But this photograph isn't too…
awild | March 29, 2010
While photographing a Lasius alienus colony in the park yesterday I noticed a red, round mite hanging off the leg of this worker ant. I'm glad we humans don't have parasites like these.
Perhaps if we're really nice, Macromite will tell us something about the little guy.
Photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 50D
ISO 100, f13, 1/250 sec, diffused flash heads positioned for backlighting and fill
grrlscientist | March 29, 2010tags: Alex Filippenko, Josh Frieman, FermiLab, astronomy, astrophysics, Science Bulletins, research, American Museum of Natural History, AMNH, New York City, space, nature, universe, The Expanding Universe, streaming video
In 1998, astrophysicists discovered a baffling phenomenon: the Universe is expanding at an ever-faster rate. Either an enigmatic force called dark energy is to blame or a reworking of gravitational theory is in order. In this new Science Bulletins video, watch a FermiLab team assemble the Dark Energy Camera, a device that could finally solve this space-stretching mystery…