Myrmecos
Archives for May, 2008
The comments on Roy Snelling’s memorial post…
Posted by Alex Wild on May 31, 2008 …continue to accumulate poignant stories. Go read.
Kin Selection Rescued by Phylogenetics?
Posted by Alex Wild on May 31, 2008 30 years ago, biologists thought they’d solved one of Darwin’s thorniest problems, the evolution of sterile social insects:
I wanna work in THIS lab…
Posted by Alex Wild on May 31, 2008 …the one that studies how Gomez works. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceX71za3GhY]
Friday Beetle Blogging: Cymatodera Checkered Beetle
Posted by Alex Wild on May 30, 2008 Cymatodera sp. Checkered Beetle (Cleridae) Arizona photo details: Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon 20D f/16, 1/250 sec, ISO 100, indirect strobe in a white box
Fisher and Smith break the PLoS taxonomy barrier
Posted by Alex Wild on May 29, 2008 Odontomachus coquereli – Madagascar Myrmecology continues to lead the way in online taxonomy. Today saw the release of the very first taxonomic paper published by the top-tier open access science journal, PLoS One. Brian Fisher and Alex Smith combine alpha taxonomy with DNA barcoding to produce a revision of the Malagasy trap-jaw ants. The revision…
She ate Nothomyrmecia?
Posted by Alex Wild on May 28, 2008 Check this out: http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/aus/582393674.html
Rover Ants (Brachymyrmex patagonicus), an emerging pest species
Posted by Alex Wild on May 27, 2008 As if we didn’t already have enough pest ants to worry about, here is a relatively new one. The rover ant Brachymyrmex patagonicus, a tiny South American species, has been working its way under the radar across the southern United States. Its presence is now large enough that pest control companies are reporting a sudden…
The most feared animal in Arizona ran away from me
Posted by Alex Wild on May 26, 2008 Centruroides sculpturatus – Arizona Bark Scorpion I have a hard time getting worked up over stuff that happened 25 years ago. But here’s something that still angers me every time I think of it. One of those educational safety movies we were shown back in grade school- you know, the “Stop-Drop-and-Roll” variety- presented the dangers…
Bad ecologists. Bad, bad, bad ecologists.
Posted by Alex Wild on May 26, 2008 What Christopher says.
Getting the backdrop right: an example
Posted by Alex Wild on May 25, 2008 This basic photo of a harvester ant carrying a seed took an hour and a half to capture. 150 exposures. The problem wasn’t that the ants weren’t behaving, but that it took nearly an hour of experimentation to get the simplicity of composition I had envisioned when I set out on the project. Few of…