I apologize for making everyone change RSS feeds and bookmarks twice in recent months. What’s worse, I can’t promise that Myrmecos won’t move again in the near future. Some intriguing offers have arrived in my inbox and I am thinking them over.

My sincere thanks to the various bloggers and support staff here at Scienceblogs for hosting me. I’d especially like to thank Erin Johnson, who brought me into the network and handled some of the difficult blog migration issues.

Don’t read too much into this change of address. Scienceblogs is having a tough run at present, true, but the biggest impetus is simply that I liked blogging on the old platform more than the present one. And, I was never able to overcome the feeling that Scienceblogs and Myrmecos were not quite the right combination of network and blog.

I’ve been a regular Scienceblogs reader since the early days in 2006 and hope to remain so. Behind the scenes, significant changes are afoot on the part of both bloggers and management that make me optimistic Scienceblogs will pull through the current difficulties. I want them to succeed, but I also recognize that I do not need to be an active participant in that process.

Jajotopajeypeve,

Alex

I will be blogging at the old digs for the next few days until I have had time to digest the unfortunate recent events here at Scienceblogs. What’s going on? I’ll let my excellent sciblings explain:

• GrrlScientist
• Mark Chu-Carroll
• Thoughtful Animal
• PalMD
• Dr. Free-Ride

***update and clarification*** I have reached no decision about the future location of Myrmecos blog.

I like some things about Scienceblogs. Their openness in letting bloggers air this sort of dirty laundry out in public is one of them. I dislike other things. The Pepsi blog-buy behind the current kerfuffle is troubling, but ultimately it is small beans, a symptom of a larger corporate undercurrent I’d been watching even before I moved the blog. At the time, I thought I could live with it in exchange for bringing an ant blog to a larger audience. Now that the trend is moving- no, running like mad- the wrong way, I’m not so sure.

I may well be back here in a few days. Or not. Several sciencebloggers- particularly the more journalistic of them- have opted out of the network already. I’d rather take the time to reach a solution I won’t regret. In the meantime, I am more comfortable at the old site.

Easily mistaken for a bee, Eristalis is in fact a clever mimic capable of luring many an unsuspecting observer into the land of amusing taxonomy fail.

But the structure of the antennae, the broad attachment of the abdomen to the thorax, and the presence of only a single pair of wings mark it as a fly.

I took this photo in bright sunlight, although it doesn’t look that way from the black backdrop. This dramatic lighting effect is achieved by using such a small aperture (f/13) and a fast shutter speed (1/250 sec) that almost no ambient light reaches the sensor. A small but intense flash directed at just the fly and the flower- but not the garden in the background- provides sufficient illumination for a proper exposure of just the intended subject.

I do congratulate the fine folks at Antweb, though, for having the emotional maturity to let the vocabulary slide and just answer the question.

Points will be awarded for the first correct guess: five for family and five for genus.

The cumulative points winner for the month of July will win either 1) any 8×10 print from my insect photo gallery, or 2) a guest blog post on the (safe-for-work) topic of their choosing.

As you may have noticed, in painting our hives we’ve eschewed the standard hive whitewash in favor of pleasing pastels.

But we’ve got nothing on the hive art produced by other beekeepers on the web. Below the fold is a selection of my favorites:

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Ant ecologist extraordinaire Rob Dunn sends along the following request:

We are looking for live colonies of

• Aphaenogaster rudis
• Temnothorax curvispinosus or T. longispinosus
• Crematogaster lineolata
• Tapinoma sessile

from anywhere within their ranges. If you are potentially willing to contribute colonies we would be very grateful. Please contact Sarah Diamond (sediamon@unity.ncsu.edu) regarding details. If you are interested in more extensive collection of colonies, we may be able to reimburse your collection time. These collections will be used to try to understand variation across the geographic ranges of these species in thermal tolerance and other life history traits. We are also interested in how the cryptic species of the A. rudis complex differ in their traits associated with thermal tolerance (and will be DNA barcoding specimens) and so if you aren’t sure which of the A. rudis complex species you have, feel free to just send it along and we will sort it out.

Very Sincerely,

Rob Dunn and Sarah Diamond

The Dunn lab is at the cutting edge of macroecology and produces some absolutely world-class ant science. If you have access to any of these common North American species, I encourage you to contact Sarah for details about how to collect and send the colonies.

Meet the Colorado Potato Beetle.

If I had to make a list of ten insects all people should know, I’d probably put this one on it. Leptinotarsa decemlineata is a walking case study in evolutionary ecology.

Anyone with a potato patch will recognize this large, pin-striped beetle as a particularly voracious consumer of potato leaves. And that’s true- the insect is a major agricultural pest. But it has only been eating potato plants for 150 years or so. Before that, L. decemlineata was an obscure insect found in the mountains of western North America where it fed on native Solanaceae that no one cared about.

When European settlers pushed west in the 1840′s with their newly-planted potato fields, a world of culinary possibilities opened up for this native beetle. A few gave the novel plant a try and never looked back. The population exploded and rapidly spread eastward across the continent. The beetles even reached Eurasia, too. It’s a textbook case of an evolutionary host-switch.

The colorado potato beetle evolves in other ways, too. Leptinotarsa decemlineata has become the poster child for pesticide resistance, and its various populations developed resistant to more agrochemicals than any other insect species. Organophosphates? Carbamates? Pyrethroids? No problem- thanks to a prolific life cycle and indiscriminate pesticide application, this beetle can now detoxify all of them.

These are the strong-stomached folks who study the arthropod fauna that colonizes dead flesh. Their knowledge of insect taxonomy, ecology, and development can be used to provide estimates of the time and conditions of death. Or zombification, in the present case.

Hypothetically, suppose a zombie shuffles along to my house at horrifying rate of 1 km/hr.

On arrival, I note that the zombie is infested with final instar larvae of the blow fly Phormia regina. Under our current warm summer weather conditions, it takes at least 5 days for the maggots to reach that developmental stage since momma fly visited the zombie. So we can presume that the zombie has been decomposing for at least that long.

Let’s see. 5 days is 120 hours. Shuffling at 1km/hour would put the origin of that zombie no further than 120 kilometers away.

If we collect maggots and crunch the numbers from enough zombies, we should be able to triangulate in on the location of the zombie epicenter. The zombie control forces will then be able to deploy where they will be most effective.

And as usual, entomologists will have saved civilization.

On a more personal note, though, I guess I should have run instead of doing the math.