awild | July 16, 2009I will be spending the remainder of July in Arizona without regular internet access. It is monsoon season in the desert and the insects are at peak activity, so the hiatus now means better photoblogging later.
In the meantime, here's one of our local Polyergus:
Polyergus montivagus, Illinois
awild | July 13, 2009The folks at the wildlife film company Ammonite are gearing up to do a documentary about ants and are looking for a few good stories about fire ants. Here's the announcement:
We are looking at is the growing success of the non-native (Exotic) Fire Ant (Solenopsis invicta). We'd like to hear from people who live, (or once lived) in an area with a significant fire ant population.
Have you been affected by these ants?
Do you have any strong feelings about them?
If you have anything to say on the subject please send an email to info@ammonite.co.uk with Fire Ants in the subject box
awild | July 10, 2009No, I haven't forgotten you all. We're still busy moving to the new house. Blogging will remain slow until we get the internet connected, and given the way that AT&T has managed to botch just about everything else so far I don't know if that will happen any time soon. (There's really nothing like the sluggish, incompetent service that AT&T provides. But, at least it's overpriced.)
If you need an ant fix, click on this for a slide show of Pogonomyrmex harvester ants.
Click me.
awild | July 2, 2009
(a) current distribution of Sasquatch (b) Sasquatch distribution post-climate change
For those of you dallying around about how seriously to take the threat of climate change, here's something for you. If we don't cease our emissions of greenhouse gases pronto, Bigfoot will invade Arizona and Utah. I'm serious.
awild | July 2, 2009A while back, Mike Kaspari asked me if I might be able to produce an image that really captures the essence of the leaf litter ant fauna*. A conceptual shot that would be useful for presentations and the like. It wasn't immediately clear how to do this, as the leaf litter is a dark, dark place. Most of the inhabitants are blind. Not many photons there for a photographer to work with, and lighting it up with a flash sort of kills the native ambiance.
In any case, while in Florida I sat down with a charismatic Strumigenys trap-jaw ant and tried a few things. I came up with this:…
awild | June 30, 2009For reasons that aren't clear to me, but are possibly related to the onset of summer bug season, traffic here at myrmecos blog has surged over the past few weeks. We're now getting more daily visitors than do my galleries at myrmecos.net.
I'd like nothing more than to entertain all the new readers with thoughtful essays and astounding photographs. But that's not going to happen. Just the opposite, I'm afraid. The timing of this surge is terrible.
You see, we've just bought a house across town and are in the messy process of packing, paperwork, and moving. The internet will be off for…
awild | June 29, 2009I hadn't anticipated that my keen readers would try to guess the *species* of the aforementioned oddity, but since the guessing has headed in that direction I'll post this hint, which shows the much more commonly seen worker caste of our little mystery bug.
Stakes are now at, um, 15 points. Yeah.
awild | June 28, 2009Well. I'm off to host a photography workshop. But in the meantime I can't resist passing along this video. In honor of Michael Jackson, of course.
ht: nyt
awild | June 27, 2009
This odd little beast crawled out of a leaf litter sample from a mesic oak/pine forest in Florida. Ten points to the first person who picks what it is.
(Not sure what you'll do with ten points. But hey. You're all a creative lot.)
awild | June 26, 2009A few months ago we learned via an unintentionally leaked press release that a team of researchers lead by Nicole Gerardo and Cameron Currie had won a Roche Applied Sciences grant competition. The team will be sequencing the complete genome of 14 players from the ant/fungus/microbe co-evolutionary system, including three attine ants from different genera.
The announcement is now official.
An Acromyrmex queen, with brood, in the fungus garden
awild | June 26, 2009Alaus oculatus (Elateridae) - The Eyed Elater
Illinois
One of North America's largest beetles, the eyed elater is more than an inch long. Alaus oculatus is widespread in the deciduous forests of eastern North America where their larvae are predators of wood-boring beetles. Other species of Alaus occur in the south and west. This individual was attracted to a pheromone trap intended to bring in longhorn beetles as part of a University of Illinois study on beetle pheromones, a ready demonstration of how predators may exploit the chemical signaling of their prey.
This particular beetle has…
awild | June 25, 2009
Paratrechina Nylanderia phantasma
Archbold Biological Station, Florida
Here's an ant I almost didn't notice. Paratrechina Nylanderia phantasma is one of the least known insects in North America, active at night and restricted to a particular type of sandy soil in Florida. Workers are only a couple millimeters long and the color of sand. In the field they appear as ghostly little shapes skirting across the ground, scarcely visible even to those looking for them.
Incidentally, N. phantasma was named and described by James Trager, a frequent commentator here at Myrmecos Blog. Perhaps, if…
awild | June 24, 2009...when I disappeared to Argentina recently, I was with my wife.
Here she is, collecting ants in the mountains near Tafà de Valle:
photo details: Canon 17-40mm f4.0 L lens on a Canon EOS 20D
ISO 400, 1/250 sec, f11.0, with circular polarizer & gradient filter
on-camera fill flash
awild | June 24, 2009
Shortly before I left for Florida, my post on the taxonomy of Strumigenys spurred a comment from an anonymous colleague:
I wouldnât be so bold as to publish so many evaluations of ideas without the backing of formal peer review. I wouldnât be as concerned about the validity of my criticisms, but rather the perceived validity. Perhaps Iâm hypersensitive to alienating other scientists. I just wouldnât want to be responsible for airing other peopleâs dirty laundry.
Iâm not saying that youâre unfair. But I think most people whose work is being reviewed on your site feel that it wonât stand up to…
awild | June 23, 2009
An ant, climbing from the pit of a predatory ant lion.
The predator, buried in sand at the base of the pit, hurls a volley of debris towards its target.
Caught in the falling sand, the ant slides back into the pit.
The ant tries to escape, and again the unseen predator hurls a load of sand into her path.
No matter which way the ant turns, the ant lion adjusts its aim, sending up clouds of sand and preventing the ant from gaining traction on the steep walls of the pit.
In the end, the ant lion wins.
A tight crop of the previous image shows the jaws of the ant lion reaching up…
awild | June 22, 2009
Pogonomyrmex badius
The Archbold Biological Station hosts 100+ species of ants. Here are a few of them.
Trachymyrmex septentrionalis
Platythyrea punctata
Strumigenys rogeri
Cyphomyrmex rimosus (queen)
Dorymyrmex bureni
Brachymyrmex obscurior
Paratrechina longicornis
Xenomyrmex floridanus
Cardiocondyla emeryi
Camponotus floridanus
Pachycondyla stigma
Pheidole dentigula
Pyramica eggersi
Pseudomyrmex gracilis, with larva
awild | June 22, 2009For those of you accessible to central Illinois, I will be hosting a free insect photography workshop next Sunday at the University of Illinois Pollinatarium. The workshop is offered in celebration of the 3rd annual National Pollinator Week. Details are as follows:
Insect Photography Workshop
Free to the public
2:00 pm, June 28th, 2009
at the University of Illinois Pollinatarium (map)
Bring your camera, as this is a participatory event!
awild | June 21, 2009
dawn in the scrub
I spent last week in central Florida at the Archbold Biological Station.
Archbold preserves 5,000 hectares of Florida sand scrub, some of the last remaining patches of an ecosystem now largely lost to agriculture and strip malls. The sand scrub is an odd place, a fossil beach from when sea levels were high enough to restrict peninsular Florida to a narrow sandbar. Water runs right through the coarse sand, leaving the scrub looking much like a desert in spite of regular afternoon rains. Cacti thrive. It is a paradoxical place.
The scrub is also remarkable for…
awild | June 20, 2009So when we say ants can teach us something, itâs not that we should all aspire to live like an ant. That would be horrible. What ants can teach is that networks of labor distribution, where communications are good and where each groupâs work benefits the other, are effective.
Read the whole thing at the New York Times.
(Yes, I know I'm late in posting this. But I just returned from the field late last night...)
awild | June 19, 2009
Opisthius richardsoni, Montana.
Opisthius richardsoni is a broad, flat ground beetle common along river banks in the colder regions of western North America.
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 20D
ISO 100, 1/250 sec, f13, flash diffused through tracing paper