Alex Wild
awild
Posts by this author
May 13, 2009
...well, not really. But an exchange I had at Photo Synthesis with Andrew Bleiman of Zooillogix got me thinking about all the different insects that have charmingly envenomated me at one time or another.
Myrmecia piliventris, Australia
So I'm starting a meme called Things That Have Stung Me. …
May 13, 2009
One of the most vociferous debates in taxonomy is over a catchy-sounding concept called DNA barcoding. Since nearly all organisms carry a version of the COI gene in the mitochondrion, the idea is that the DNA sequence of the gene can serve as a standard identification marker. A barcode, of…
May 12, 2009
Eastern Treehole Mosquito
My commercial gallery now has flies!
Diptera photographs at alexanderwild.com
I feel sort of embarassed at how few fly images I have, considering the importance of the group. That's something I'll try to remedy as we get into this summer's photography season.
May 11, 2009
A bold paper by Rob Dunn et al in Ecology Letters is making news this month. Â Dunn and an impressive list of coauthors pool observations of ant species richness from more than 1000 sites worldwide, finding that southern hemisphere habitats consistently support more species than their equivalents…
May 11, 2009
Here's an old shot from the files:
Formica aerata- the grey field ant- California
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS D60
ISO 100, 1/200 sec, f/13, flash diffused through tracing paper
May 10, 2009
From the NOVA episode "Lord of the Ants"
May 10, 2009
...and it was fun. Here are some highlights from the past week:
Why do only some ants sting?
Competing for space on a fake walnut
The case of the Malagasy mystery ants
Here's one bit of information that might be useful for anyone thinking about starting a blog. The ScienceBlogs network- which…
May 8, 2009
"Lean on Me", by Lesley Smitheringale
The Burrard-Lucas brothers held a wildlife portait competition, and the results are simply spectacular. Click here to see the winners.
May 7, 2009
Mayapple
Brownfield woods, Urbana, Illinois
photo details: Canon 17-40x wide angle lens on a Canon EOS 50D
ISO 400, 1/30 sec, f/7.1, leaf backlit with handheld 550ex strobe.
May 5, 2009
Benoit Guenard has been hard at work the past couple years compiling broad-scale distribution data for all the world's ants, and his efforts are now online. Here they are- global range maps for all the ant genera:
http://www.antmacroecology.org/ant_genera/index.html
These maps will be a very…
May 5, 2009
It has long been known that ants recognize their deceased nestmates using the smell of fatty acids that accumulate as the body decomposes. The chemical signature of deadness helps ants remove the corpses from their midst, keeping a clean and sanitary nest. Indeed, this classic tale of ants and…
May 1, 2009
..over at Photo Synthesis:
How to attract an entomologist
Agrarian ants
Another way to humanize an insect photo
Ants in the New York Times
Photo technique: the white box
Humanizing the hordes: Anthropomorphism and science photography
April 29, 2009
Seriously, is there a name for the disorder whereby people think everything with wings is a honeybee?
April 29, 2009
Atta cephalotes, in the fungus garden
Big ant news today! Roche Applied Sciences is apparently funding the sequencing of a series of genomes- three ant and an array of fungal and microbial genomes- in an ambitious project to better understand the relationships among the players in the celebrated…
April 27, 2009
My profound apologies for the lack of blogitude here while I'm over at Photo Synthesis. Fortunately, the internet has other things in it:
Myrmician shares an action series of Australian Podomyrma taking apart a much larger Myrmecia.
Brian Valentine finds some British Myrmica with a serious mite…
April 27, 2009
Posted to EvolDir:
We are getting a new science building and one of the features will be beautiful floor to 3-story ceiling glass panels depicting various (somewhat abstract) images from science. I am looking for high resolution pictures of butterfly wing spots, close-ups of animal eyes, close-ups…
April 26, 2009
In the event you thought your weekend wasn't much fun, consider Nicholas White, who spent 41 hours trapped in an elevator one weekend in 1999. Here's the time-lapse security video:
The story is recounted by the New Yorker.
April 25, 2009
Pogonomyrmex micans, Santiago del Estero, Argentina
Ants of the genus Pogonomyrmex ("Pogos") are known to myrmecologists as the classic harvester ants of North American deserts. They are conspicuous insects, the most noticeable of the desert ants, and something of a model organism for studies of…
April 23, 2009
On the homepage of the Proceedings of the Royal Society? Really?
I expect this kind of screwup in, say, USA Today, but a major scientific society really ought to have someone on staff who can correctly identify a honeybee.
April 21, 2009
...it's because I'm blogging over at Photo Synthesis this month.
April 19, 2009
To all the anteaters!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/J8rgTdEWwDs]
April 18, 2009
Mycocepurus smithii: an ant without males?
An image I took a couple years ago at UT Austin is featured today in Nat Geo's "Photo in the News". This laboratory nest was one of the colonies screened in Anna Himler's study to determine that the species is parthenogenetic.
One correction to the Nat…
April 16, 2009
I never met Carl Rettenmeyer.
I regret this.  Rettenmeyer forms a part of my heritage as an ant photographer.  As a kid, my first exposure to army ants came through Rettenmeyer's stunning imagery in Ranger Rick magazine. His photos adorn the pages of E. O. Wilson's 1971 classic The Insect…
April 15, 2009
Messor capensis nests, as seen by The Google
Over at Photo Synthesis, commentator Kate directs our attention to Messor capensis, a South African seed harvester whose nests from the air look like some form of fungal growth. Except much, much bigger. (coordinates here: 33° 36â57.32âS, 22° 08â06.…
April 14, 2009
It is due in large part to Rettenmeyer's tireless tracking of army ants through all manner of tangled tropical jungle, for months on end, that we know as much as we do about those creatures. We've lost a real giant of myrmecology.
April 13, 2009
Here's a heat map showing the intensity of Myrmecos blog visitors over the last 24 hours:
As a reminder, I'm blogging this month over at Photo Synthesis. Posts in the past week have included bits on ant diversity, phorid flies, google earth, and whirligig beetles.