Alex Wild
awild
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Reader Sam Tomkinson has been experimenting with my tracing-paper diffusion trick and took this lovely shot of a Myrmecia bull ant in western Australia:
Myrmecia are aggressive ants with a nasty sting, so kudos to Sam for putting his life at risk to bring us a taste of wild Australia.
It also…
From David Attenborough's brilliant Life in the Undergrowth:
Incidentally, Ed Yong's interview with Sir David is worth reading.
In the comments, blogger Huckleberry Days asks:
Speaking of tasty, what about chocolate covered ants: which ants are used?
Having never made chocolate-covered ants, I am not the best person to be opining about formicine confections. Â I do, however, have many years' worth of mostly…
Formica francoeuri tending larvae of the copper butterfly, Lycaena xanthoides. Southern California
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 20D
ISO 100, 1/250 sec, f/13, flash diffused through tracing paper
I'm hoping the stimulus bill includes a research allocation towards figuring out why "Your Argument is Invalid" can be hilarious and inexplicably odd at the same time.
(h/t Bug Girl)
As if butterflies weren't flamboyant enough already, it seems that some of them actively impersonate queens.
Queen ants, that is. A report by Francesca Barbero et al in today's issue of Science documents a clever strategy employed by a European butterfly, the Mountain Alcon Blue …
Ceruchus piceus - Stag Beetle - New York
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
A trail of Atta leafcutting ants in Gamboa, Panama.
From the recent literature:
The Journal of Experimental Biology has a lab study by Dussutour et al documenting how leafcutter ants avoid traffic jams under crowded trail conditions. Apparently, unladen ants increase a narrow trail's…
It's 6ºF (-14ºC) here in central Illinois. Can't do much about that, but here are some shots of warmer times and warmer places.
Monument Valley, 2006
Southern California, 2004
Tucson, Arizona, 2006
Joshua Tree National Park, 2005
Cholla at Joshua Tree National Park, 2005
near…
The blue-green iridescence on these Iridomyrmex purpureus workers shines from microscopic sculpturing on the ants' cuticle.
I've never taken to the Australian vernacular for one of their most conspicuous insects. The latin Iridomyrmex purpureus translates as "purple rainbow ant", referring…
Mark your calendar. The 26th annual Insect Fear Film Festival will be held February 28th at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This year's theme is "Centipede Cinema".
The film festival is legendary. I've heard about the event for years, and its lineup of bug…
Since the device we commonly use to capture insects is called an aspirator, does that mean the insects we collect are aspirations?
Discuss.
Cyborg beetles. Seriously. (h/t Cicindela)
The Other 95% hosts the Circus of the Spineless #35.
Coleopterist, photographer, and author Art Evans launches a new blog called What's Bugging You?
Archetype illustrates the counterintuitive segmentation of ant body parts.
Beetles in the…
Among the least understood technical aspects of photography, at least for novices, is aperture. Yet aperture has profound effects on the resulting image. Consider the following series of photos, each taken with a macro setup of an MP-E lens on a Canon dSLR camera, focused at the…
Where do all the cool kids hang out?
The Nature Blog Network, apparently. NBN hosts a directory of science/nature blogs sorted by category and traffic rank.  It's a great place to trawl for new reading fodder.
Explaining the evolutionary tree of life is always a tricky proposition, as narratives are inherently linear but evolution spirals outwards in countless messy directions at once. To tell a story from the tangled bank requires picking a single thread and following it, yet it is precisely our…
My earlier list of the most-studied ant species contained a few omissions. Here is a more inclusive list:
Ant species sorted by number of BIOSIS-listed publications, 1984-2008
The Top 10 Species
Publications
Solenopsis invicta
984
Linepithema humile
343
Lasius niger
250…
Pheidole moerens, major worker, Louisiana
Pheidole moerens is a small, barely noticeable insect that travels about with human commerce, arriving without announcement and slipping quietly into the leaf litter and potted plants about town.  As introduced ants go, P. moerens is timid…
I'll be giving an hour-long seminar on insect photography this coming Monday, February 2nd, as part of the University of Illinois Ecology and Evolutionary Biology "Ecolunch" series. Here are the details:
Alex Wild at Ecolunch
"Insect Photography: A How To For You Too"
***
February 2, 12-1pm…
Cicindela has been playing with scanners and saturniid moths, to great result:
The original file must be huge! Â Worth noting that Cicindela is taking a lead from Joseph Scheer, who first perfected the technique.
Widow spider and harvester ants. Hallelujah Junction, California
This young black widow (Latrodectus hesperus) set up shop above the nest entrance of a colony of Pogonomyrmex harvester ants. It's an all-you-can-eat buffet, allowing the spider nearly unlimited pickings as the ants come and…
Owing to a volume of incoming specimen requests, I've added a tab in the top menu for Myrmecology News to hold items like specimen requests and miscellaneous ant-related announcements so they don't scroll off the bottom of the blog too quickly.
If you've got something to post, please email me,…
Ted Schultz writes:
Postdoc Scott Solomon has arrived here at the Smithsonian to work on the systematics and phylogenetics of Trachymyrmex and Acromyrmex ants and fungi. Scott has spent a fair amount of time collecting in South America, but we want to be sure that we have an exhaustive…
Rachelle Adams writes:
I have begun a one year postdoc molecular project focusing on the species in the Solenopsidini tribe with Ted Schultz and Seán Brady at the Smithsonian, Washington DC. Due to the vastness of this tribe and its taxonomic challenges, I want to thoroughly sample each genus…
Tonight's selection was suggested for your viewing pleasure by Jack Longino.
Figure 1. For the 32 most-studied ant species, the percentage of publications 1984-2008 in various contexts.
In thinking about where the myrmecological community ought to devote resources in the age of genomics, it occcured to me that putting some numbers on where researchers have previously…
Amblycheila cylindriformis, New Mexico
The Giant Tiger Beetle Amblycheila cylindriformis is a tank of an insect, at 35mm in length the largest tiger beetle in North America.  Unlike the more familiar day-active Cicindela tiger beetles, the flightless Amblycheila lumbers about at…
Dalantech over at the No Cropping Zone writes:
From time to time I see people argue about the backgrounds in macro images, and about how dark backgrounds donât look natural âwhatever the heck that means. Seriously whatâs natural about macro photography? Do you see all the detail in a beeâs compound…
I know you're terribly bored with ants, ants, ants all the time here at Myrmecos Blog. So that's why we're bringing you something different. It's an ad from the 60's letting you know about an exciting new product for putting on a few pounds:
For some reason it was lying around the…