awild | January 28, 2010Arachnids (you know, spiders and mites and things) never had much of a presence in my photo galleries. While I could chalk their absence up to an obsessive focus on formicids, the reality is that I'm mildly arachnophobic. Photographing spiders makes me squirm, so I don't do it very often.
Oddly, it really is just spiders. I don't have any trouble with opilionids, mites, or even scorpions. And it isn't all spiders, either. I'm rather fond of salticids. But there's something about the form of some spiders that touches off a deeply instinctual revulsion. Embarrassing for an entomologist,…
awild | January 28, 2010I did not expect everyone to nearly instantaneously solve yesterday's termite ball mystery. I'm either going to have to post more difficult challenges (from now on, nothing will be in focus!) or attract a slower class of reader.
Cuckoo fungus grows in a termite nest.
As you surmised, those little orange balls are an egg-mimicking fungus. It is related to free-living soil fungi, but this one has adopted a novel growth form that is similar in diameter, texture, and surface chemistry to the eggs of Reticulitermes termites. These hardened sclerotia are carried about the termite nest as if…
awild | January 27, 2010Mark this on your calendar: February 27 is the 27th annual Insect Fear Film Festival. Hosted by the entomology graduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the festival showcases two (usually terrible) arthropod movies. This year's delectable offerings are The Black Scorpion (1957) and Ice Crawlers (2003).
If bad movies aren't your thing, the festival also has an insect art competition, live insect displays, face painting, and other buggy entertainment. As way of a preview, Jo-anne posted her pics of last years event here. I've put the full announcement below:…
awild | January 27, 2010...they're something far more interesting.
Ten points to the first person who identifies the orange balls. These were photographed inside a termite nest in southern Illinois last fall.
awild | January 25, 2010Tomorrow's NOVA on PBS covers the great orange butterflies on their migration to Mexico:
Orange-and-black wings fill the sky as NOVA charts one of nature's most remarkable phenomena: the epic migration of monarch butterflies across North America. NOVA's filmmakers followed monarchs on the wing throughout their extraordinary odyssey. To capture a butterfly's point of view, camera operators used a helicopter, ultralight, and hot-air balloon for aerial views along the butterflies' transcontinental route.
awild | January 24, 2010
Here's something new. Instead of trawling youtube to find the Sunday Night Movie, I've made my own. Click above to watch the compressed version, or if you have a speedy connection click here to see it in full HD glory.
I spent the afternoon experimenting with the video capabilities of the new Canon EOS 7d. The 7d is the newest camera in Canon's SLR lineup, and unlike earlier models it can shoot high-definition video as well as stills.
I've been very curious to see how the video performs with my macro lenses. A lab colony of Odontomachus chelifer trap-jaw ants at the University proved patient…
awild | January 23, 2010
Camponotus floridanus, the Florida Carpenter Ant
Photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 50D.
ISO 100, f/13, 1/250 sec, diffused twin flash
awild | January 22, 2010...and it's about ants, of course:
The Trailhead Queen was dead. At first, there was no overt sign that her long life was ending: no fever, no spasms, no farewells. She simply sat on the floor of the royal chamber and died. As in life, her body was prone and immobile, her legs and antennae relaxed. Her stillness alone failed to give warning to her daughters that a catastrophe had occurred for all of them. She lay there, in fact, as though nothing had happened. She had become a perfect statue of herself. While humans and other vertebrates have an internal skeleton surrounded by soft tissue…
awild | January 21, 2010
Amblyopone australis: a primitive ant?
Earlier I chastised Christian Peeters and Mathieu Molet for misinterpreting the term "basal" in a phylogenetic context. What was that about?
The issue relates to the classic fallacy of viewing evolution as a linear progression from primitive to advanced. Popular conceptions of evolution aside, the process is not linear like a ladder so much as branching like a bush.
I don't know what quirk of human psychology so strongly predisposes us to frame ideas in linear narratives, but the fact that we do so makes evolution an unfortunately difficult concept…
awild | January 21, 2010...than matching ant shirts?
Courtesy of these guys. Thanks!
(and yes, that's what we here at Myrmecos international headquarters look like).
awild | January 20, 2010Let me preface this post by saying that Christian Peeters is one of my absolute favorite myrmecologists. If lost in a remote African jungle and stalked by ravenous leopards, for example, Christian is the first ant guy I'd pick to help get me out of the predicament.
Having said that, this paper in Insectes Sociaux is so bad I nearly gouged my eyes out and ran around in little circles screaming and flailing my arms.
Nonetheless there exist extant ants with relatively simple societies, where size-polymorphic workers and large queens are absent. Recent phylogenies show that the poneroid…
awild | January 17, 2010
Surfing around the bookstores this morning I see that the much-anticipated Ant Ecology book is out. At $129.00 it's not something the casual reader is liable to pick up. Nonetheless, Ant Ecology is a beautiful volume reviewing the state of the field, and scientists who work on ants should probably own a copy. Or at least get one on time-share.
The book is a collection of 16 chapters edited by Lori Lach, Kate Parr, and Kirsti Abbott. There's a mellifluous forward by Ed Wilson, but then, most ant books have a mellifluous forward by Ed Wilson. Ant Ecology's real strength is that each chapter is…
awild | January 16, 2010
Christopher Taylor on the evolution of insect wings
Get your fix of the Daily Parasite.
Remember Phase IV, the classic '70s ant sci-fi film? You can now watch the entire movie online.
Macromite is back.
Entomologists telling jokes, at Bug Girl's blog.
awild | January 14, 2010
Arilus cristatus, the wheel bug
Photo details: (top, middle) Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 50D.
ISO 100, f/13, 1/160 sec, diffused twin flash
(bottom) Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon EOS 50D.
ISO 200, f/11, 1/160 sec, diffuse overhead flash
awild | January 14, 2010I don't have anything to add about the horrific earthquake that hasn't already been said elsewhere.
But, I've added a donation button to the right sidebar for Doctors Without Borders, an excellent non-profit group already working in Haiti when the quake hit. They are apparently operating out of makeshift clinics in the absence of functioning hospitals. Click on the button to help; other donation options are listed here.
*update* Highly Allochthonous explains the tectonics of the quake.
awild | January 13, 2010If I were to mention an ant-fungus mutualism- that is, an ecological partnership between an ant and a fungus that benefits both- most biologically literate people might think of the famed leafcutter ants and the edible mycelia they cultivate. But that is just one example.
Several other fungi have entered into productive relationships with ants, assisting especially in ant architecture. Consider:
Lasius umbratus walking in the galleries of an underground carton nest (Illinois)
A larger view of the same nest. The intricate galleries are made from fungal mycelia growing through a…
awild | January 10, 2010From Australia's The Avalanches, a song and video even more delightfully bizarre than last week's movie.
(via gtcaz)
awild | January 9, 2010
Nylanderia guatemalensis
What are ant taxonomists buzzing about this week?*
Well. A hot new paper by John LaPolla, Seán Brady, and Steve Shattuck in Systematic Entomology has killed Paratrechina as we know it.Â
Nearly all those adorable, hairy little formicines we knew as Paratrechina- like the phantom sand ant and the rasberry crazy ant- have been pulled out and placed in a resurrected genus Nylanderia. All that remains of Paratrechina is but a single species, the fabled Black Crazy Ant Paratrechina longicornis. Which, incidentally, is the species in this blog's header photo.
Here's…