awild | September 20, 2009
Soybean aphids piling up in a spider web
It's been snowing aphids the past few days here in Champaign-Urbana. Trillions of them are drifting across town, settling out on our garden, getting caught in our hair. I've never seen anything like it.
I recently learned that this sternorrhynchan storm is composed of soybean aphids (Aphis glycines). That would explain all the aphid biomass. Illinois is a major producer of soy, and there's no shortage of soy fields around here. Sensing the end of summer, the aphids are moving en masse to their winter host, buckthorn.
Soy has traditionally been…
awild | September 19, 2009
It's been ages since I hatched out monarch butterflies. But old habits die hard, and we've been raising a monarch caterpillar on our kitchen counter for the past few weeks.
This morning the orange and black product of our labors crawled from his chrysalis, inflated his wings, and flew off to an uncertain future.
photo details: Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon EOS 50D
ISO 125, f/2.8 1/160 sec, ambient light
awild | September 18, 2009
Odontotaenius disjunctus, the horned passalus
Friday Beetle Blogging returns this week with portraits of an unusually social beetle. The horned passalus Odontotaenius disjunctus lives in groups in rotting logs, where adults practice a form of parental care. I photographed this individual last weekend in southern Illinois, but the species ranges from the tropical forests of Central and South America Texas to as far north as New York.
photo details (all photos): Canon 100 mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon EOS 50D
ISO 160, f/10-13, 1/125 sec, indirect strobe diffused in a white box
awild | September 17, 2009
Cimex lectularius - the common bedbug
Bed bugs are back. The resurgence of these blood-feeding pests is perhaps the biggest entomological story of the past decade. Take a look, for instance, at the Google search volume for "bed bugs" over the past few years:
Google Trends shows an increase in bed bug interest relative to other pests, 2004-2009
Why am I telling you all of this?
I've just posted a new online bed bug photo gallery. I was fortunate to get my hands on a vial of live bed bugs recently, and it turns out that the little guys are excellent entomological models. Cute, cuddly…
awild | September 17, 2009...and creates a visual representation of the Pyramica page history over at iphylo:
This is a continuation of an issue I blogged about a couple months ago.
awild | September 17, 2009Marek Borowiec writes in this morning with a request for ant specimens from the subfamily Cerapachyinae:
Dear Colleagues,
I am currently working on the ant subfamily Cerapachyinae. I plan to work on both alpha-taxonomy as well as phylogeny of these ants. In the course of my study I will need as much material as possible.
In addition to the traits already looked upon by other researchers, I want to explore as many new characters as possible, and so I plan to take a close look at both adults and immatures, the structure of metapleural, metatibial and metatarsal glands, sting apparatus,…
awild | September 16, 2009
Lethocerus sp., California
I don't know how I missed it when it came out, but The Dragonfly Woman has a post up on how to identify the three North American genera of giant water bugs. Check it out.
awild | September 15, 2009
Aphaenogaster tennesseensis ants and Entylia treehoppers
Cameras do not see the world the same way as do human eyes. Sometimes extra technological trickery is needed to make a scene appear as real in a photograph as it does in life. The above image is one of those cases.
I found these ants beautifully silhouetted on a sun-soaked leaf next to a lake in southern Illinois. But, the shade under the leaf was strong enough to require long shutter speeds for proper exposure. That made the moving ants blurry. The solution was to hold a flash behind the leaf to augment the natural…
awild | September 15, 2009
Ainsley Seago draws a fungus beetle
Rick Lieder shoots a firefly at sunset
Clay Bolt mows with the dictator
Doug Taron hibernates his butterflies
Bug Girl gets a car crush
awild | September 14, 2009Photographed this weekend in Dixon Springs, Illinois:
These Aphaenogaster lamellidens foragers have discovered a live centipede and are attempting to pull it from its burrow.
photo details: Canon mp-e 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 50D
ISO 100, f/11-f/13, 1/250 sec, flash diffused through tracing paper
awild | September 13, 2009
Proceratium silaceum, alate queen.
Last week at the Vermillion River Observatory I collected this alate queen of Proceratium silaceum, an odd and highly specialized subterranean predator of spider eggs. Once I finished photographing the ant I pickled it in 100% ethanol. The specimen should be in good shape for DNA work.
As Proceratium is both relatively uncommon and phylogenetically interesting, I thought I'd offer the specimen to any lab that might have use for it. Contact me if you're interested.
awild | September 10, 2009
Propodilobus pingorum
It's been nearly three weeks since the last new myrmicine ant genus was announced. An eternity, it seems. I've been going through novel-myrmicine-ant-withdrawal after a spate of descriptions earlier this year. Where will we be able to satisfy our craving for new and difficult to distinguish myrmicines?
Zootaxa, of course. This week Michael Branstetter gives us Propodilobus, a monotypic myrmicine that had been placed in the existing genus Stenamma.
Branstetter's paper is basically a detailed genetic and morphological study intended to better define Stenamma, a…
awild | September 10, 2009
I nominate Polyergus for the worst common name among ants: Amazon Ants. I'm cranky this morning and for some reason this has been irking me.
I now know they were named for their habit of raiding other ant nests, but I spent much of my childhood thinking they were some exotic tropical creature found in places like the...um...Amazon. I never thought to look for Polyergus locally. I was rather confused when, at age 12, I happened on a raid in upstate New York.
As it turns out, this is a common holarctic genus. Polyergus doesn't get anywhere near the real Amazon- it is more at home on…
awild | September 9, 2009
Multiple foundress queens of Acromyrmex versicolor atop their shared fungus garden.
A striking result from recent studies on the co-evolution of leafcutter ants and their fungus is that the two lineages do not show a tight pattern of coevolution. That is, the evolutionary relationships among the fungal lines often deviate from the phylogenetic trees shown by the ants. When ant populations speciate, the fungus doesn't follow.
The lack of cospeciation was puzzling, as the ants and the fungus are intertwined a tight ecological relationship. Each requires the other to survive. The…
awild | September 8, 2009By request, I have now organized the ant photos by subfamily. This mimics the arrangement from the old site. For the smug-muggers out there who want to know how it works, I basically set up an "old journal" gallery and put the genus names and links into the caption box. I used CSS to set all photos to align right.
Also, the Recent Photos feed on my blog (in the right sidebar) has been changed to show new uploads to alexanderwild.com. That way you can keep an eye on new material as it goes up. If that's your thing.
Finally, for good measure, below the fold is the full ant genus-by-…
awild | September 8, 2009
Crematogaster lineolata queen with a retinue of workers. (Vermillion River Observatory, Illinois)
This weekend we took a trip with some entomology students to the Vermillion River Observatory. The astronomical function of the observatory has long been abandoned, but the site remains as a lovely nature reserve and one of the closest patches of decent forest habitat to where we live in Champaign-Urbana.
The acrobat ant Crematogaster lineolata was one of many ants we encountered, and in this nest the queen was right up near the surface. She lingered long enough for me to get a few shots…
awild | September 7, 2009Long live Myrmecos.net!
By way of a replacement, the ant photos are now over at alexanderwild.com:
Advantages of the new site include:
Galleries can be viewed as a slide show
Geo data are integrated with Google Maps (I'm still working on this)
Images can be displayed at a larger size (up to 800 pixels)
RSS feeds (for example: new photos)
Smoother navigation
Searches return relevant thumbnail images
Automated commercial licensing
Automated ordering of prints
Images and galleries allow comments
As in the old site, the ant images are accessible by taxonomic list, by natural history, by…