Alex Wild
awild
Posts by this author
September 23, 2008
Battle of the Pavement Ants, definitely not Tetramorium caespitum
While walking through the park yesterday, I happened across a sidewalk boundary dispute between two colonies of Pavement Ants. As is their habit, these little brown ants opted to dispense with diplomacy in favor of all-out warfare…
September 22, 2008
Relevant to our earlier discussion, google search statistics suggest "flies" should be able to hold their own against "ants" in the public eye.
Caveat: additional meanings of "flies" (such as, the conjugate of the verb " to fly") may overestimate the fly tally.
September 21, 2008
The BBQ Song. Once this gets in your head, good luck. It won't come out.
September 20, 2008
Dipterist Keith Bayless exposes a pernicious case of media bias:
Six new families of Diptera were described from newly discovered species in the last 6 years! None of these flies received the press coverage given to Martialis. There are a variety of explanations for this, including that
1) The fly…
September 18, 2008
Speaking of bad science reporting...
Not the right ant.
Nope.
Camponotus? You've gotta be kidding.
It isn't Lasius, either.
Nor Ectatomma. (And isn't that Corrie Moreau's copyrighted photo?).
September 18, 2008
The New York Times has a short piece on the discovery of Martialis and the story behind the name.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/science/18ant.html
The annotated specimen photo seems an effective way to point out key parts of the insect. I've got to say, I'm continually impressed by the extra…
September 17, 2008
Platythyrea pilosula - Image by April Nobile/Antweb
Yesterday, the above photograph was uploaded to Antweb's databases. Â Platythyrea pilosula is the final species to be imaged for the Ants of Paraguay project, marking the end of a sporadic and meandering study that I started in 1995 as a hobby…
September 16, 2008
Here's something that bugs me. Instead of emphasizing the real significance of the find, a discovery like the "Mars ant" Martialis heureka is usually condensed down to "Wow, this ant is weird!".
I've pasted below a sampling of leads:
Newly-Discovered Bizarre Ant - Boing Boing
'Ant From Mars'…
September 15, 2008
Martialis heureka Rabeling & Verhaagh 2008
drawing by the inimitable Barrett Klein for PNAS
Most scientific discoveries these days emerge through carefully planned and controlled research programs. Every now and again, though, something unexpected just pops up in a distant tropical jungle. …
September 14, 2008
Pheidole megacephala
Go see!
Incidentally, you might want to surf back here to Myrmecos Blog on Monday afternoon. There's been a very, very exciting discovery...
September 14, 2008
Camponotus castaneus
Champaign, Illinois
I photographed this ant's nest yesterday afternoon. A couple hundred large, orange ants with piles of silken cocoons under a board in the park next to our house. I feel vaguely guilty about this now, as the soggy remains of Hurricane Ike are blowing…
September 12, 2008
A few links to make your weekend just that much more fun:
Photo.net has posted their Editors' 2008 picks for best macro.
Haje Jan Kamps explains how to make a macro lens from an old Pringles can.
Brian Valentine has an amazing series of a dance fly absolutely covered in mites.
If you've not yet…
September 12, 2008
Prionocyphon Marsh Beetle (Scirtidae)
New York
Scirtidae is a small family of mostly small beetles found in wet, swampy habitats all over the world. Taxonomists find them to be difficult creatures, the larvae are archaic in appearance but the adults share some similarities with the elateriforms-…
September 11, 2008
My favorite upstart stock photography business, the Photoshelter Collection, has decided that their experiment was not successful enough to continue.  This is a shame. The quality of imagery at Photoshelter is competitive with the industry giants, yet they treated photographers more fairly…
September 10, 2008
Meet the European Paper Wasp, Polistes dominulus. Or is it Polistes dominula? Most biologists I know refer to this common Holarctic insect as P. dominulus, but I've just learned via Bugguide.net that the common spelling is a grammatical misunderstanding of the original latin:
Explanation of…
September 9, 2008
All the better to steal your brood with, my little red riding ant...
Polyergus
Champaign, Illinois
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon D60
ISO 100, f/13, 1/200 sec, flash diffused through tracing paper
September 8, 2008
Here's an example of the power of evolutionary theory. Suefuji et al just published a paper in Biology Letters describing the relationship between the number of queens in an ant nest and the rearing of new reproductives. That'd be a cool enough paper on its own, but there's more. Evolutionary…
September 8, 2008
The much-hyped Encyclopedia of Life has started adding content for the ants, mostly by harvesting photos and text from Antweb. The interface is a little odd, as EoL layers Antweb's up-to-date information over the obsolete ITIS taxonomy, losing taxa whose status has changed over the past decade.…
September 7, 2008
In an earlier discussion on the merits of megapixels, commentator and snail guru Aydin notes:
Megapixel counts matter if you need to crop out large sections of an image & still need to retain enough pixels for a large enough print.
To illustrate Aydin's point, I've taken a full photo of an…
September 2, 2008
I'm on a roll! Myrmecos.net has a new series covering several species of trap-jaw ants:
Go see!
August 31, 2008
This video clip looks like it is straight off cute overload, but the sweetness is offset by Of Montreal's dark sense of humour and heavy bass-line. This song is Wraith Pinned to the Mist (and Other Games), from the album The Sunlandic Twins.  I wonder if somewhere a student writing a thesis on…
August 30, 2008
As you may have noticed, for a photography blog I don't write much about camera gear. Partly this is because I'm not the sort of person who chases the latest gadgets and gizmos, but partly because I think all the focus on equipment obscures the most important aspects of photography. Good…
August 29, 2008
Juergen Heinze has a must-read piece in the latest edition of Myrmecological News about how ant colonies are not often simple families as we like to think of them:
Abstract: The social systems of ants are far more variable than has traditionally been believed. In addition to variation in queen…
August 29, 2008
Microphotus angustus - Pink Glowworm
California Coast Range
Believe it or not, this squishy pink thing is an adult beetle.
Now and again, evolution produces a species that loses the complexities of the adult form. These animals simply retain a larval appearance into their adult life, later…
August 28, 2008
A perpetually happy Venezuelan Leptogenys
We don't really know why some species of Leptogenys hunting ants sport a permanent grin. The oddly ecstatic mandible shape might, however, have something to do with handling the broadly curved exoskeleton of their preferred prey: isopods (the sow bugs and…
August 22, 2008
Ochthebius sp. Minute Moss Beetles (Hydraenidae)
Pyramid Lake, Nevada
Tiny flea like specks
Move among the algal slime.
Oh! Hydraenidae!
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon D60
ISO 100, f/13, 1/200 sec, flash diffused through tracing paper
August 21, 2008
On my recent visit to the coastal forests of Kwazulu-Natal I noticed basketball-like growths on many of the Acacia trees. In North America, any large gray ball you see hanging off a tree branch is liable to be a hornet's nest. In South America, it's probably a carton nest of fierce little…
August 19, 2008
I've always been fond of playful and irreverent scientific names, so imagine my delight when I discovered that Paul Marsh, the taxonomist I will be working with over the coming year, is the same Paul Marsh who brought us the classic wasp names Heerz tooya, Heerz lukenatcha, and Verae peculya.
I'll…