awild | February 26, 2009A comment left on this blog last week alerted me to the sublime glasswork of artist Wesley Fleming. Wow. Not only are the pieces aesthetically stunning, they are also largely anatomically accurate. Legs attached to the right spots, tarsal segments counted out, tibial spurs in place.
If you have a few minutes, do yourself a favor and visit Fleming's gallery.
awild | February 26, 2009
I've never understood the controversy over the Superorganism concept. It isn't as though organisms themselves are all that clear-cut, especially when considering oddities like social amoebas and lichens.
photo details: Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon EOS D60
ISO 400, 1/10 sec, f/2.8
awild | February 25, 2009
Solenopsis geminata, the tropical fire ant
The latest upload concerns three species in the subfamily myrmicinae that have been traveling about the globe with human commerce. Solenopsis geminata, the tropical fire ant, is the most worrying of these tramps, but the other two, Pheidole moerens and P. obscurithorax, are rather poorly known and probably merit more study than they receive. Click to visit the gallery.
Incidentally, if I'd known at the time that Solenopsis geminata confers hero status on their collectors, I'd defintely have spent more time pointing them out to everyone within…
awild | February 24, 2009If you're wondering why I've been posting more than usual the last couple days, it's because I'm home with the flu. When wrapped in blankets and doped up on Sudafed it's a lot easier to futz around on the internet than attempt any actual work.
It turns out that flu levels are at their highest point for the season. I know this through Google's Flu Trends, one of the company's cleverest applications. It seems someone noticed that activity levels of certain search terms correlate tightly with CDC's official flu statistics, but lead CDC's estimates by two weeks. Amazing.
awild | February 23, 2009What's new in ant science this week? Lots.
Atopomyrmex mocquerysi, South Africa
Myrmecological News has posted a pair of studies online. The first, by Martin Kenne et al, observe the natural history of one of Africa's most conspicuous yet chronically understudied arboreal ants, Atopomyrmex mocquerysi. The second, by Jim Wetterer, is part of a continuing series on the global spread of pest ants. This installment targets Monomorium destructor.
Onychomyrmex sp., Australia
The Australian Journal of Entomology counters with a pair of its own ant studies. In the first, Hiroki Miyata et…
awild | February 23, 2009
Stenamma sp., California.
This request comes from Michael Branstetter:
I am working on a broad-scale phylogeny of the ant genus Stenamma and am in search of fresh specimens from the Old World. Stenamma is a cryptic genus that is most often collected in forest leaf litter. The genus is primarily Holarctic in distribution, but also has representatives in the New World tropics. Producing a phylogeny of the genus will help me in my quest to better understand the genus as a whole and to revise the Mesoamerican species. In the Old World there are species records from Europe, northern…
awild | February 23, 2009From my inbox, a postdoctoral job announcement:
The Department of Botany, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia seeks to appoint a Postdoctoral Fellow to conduct research in Invasion Biology on Christmas Island. Over the last decade, supercolonies of the invasive yellow crazy ant Anoplolepis gracilipes have spread across island rainforest and caused a variety of significant impacts. High ant densities are consistently associated with high densities of exotic honeydew-secreting scale insects. This project will determine the dependence of ant supercolonies on associated scale insects…
awild | February 22, 2009I've created a set of desktop wallpapers to fit the newer 1680 x 1050 widescreen monitors. To put any of the following on your desktop, click on the image. Once the large version loads to your browser, right-click and select "Set as desktop background."
awild | February 21, 2009
The port at Mobile, Alabama, photographed from across the bay.
The port city of Mobile, Alabama holds special significance for students of ant science. Jo-anne and I took a weekend trip down to the gulf coast in January, and as we are both myrmecologists we felt compelled to stop and take a few photographs. Not only is Mobile the childhood home of ant guru E. O. Wilson, but the city's docks have been the point of introduction into North America for some notorious pest ants. We'd have neglected our intellectual heritage to just drive through.
Mobile's busy international commerce has…
awild | February 20, 2009
Chrysina lecontei, Arizona.
Jewel scarabs emerge during Arizona's summer monsoon, and collectors from around the world descend on the region with their blacklights and mercury vapor lamps to attract the beetles. Chrysina lecontei is the smallest and rarest of the three Arizona species.
Chrysina leconte, Arizona.
photo details (both photos): Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon EOS 20D
ISO 100, 1/250 sec, f/18, indirect strobe in white box
awild | February 19, 2009
A query from the inbox:
Hi, my question is regarding the gender of the worker ants (and the ant queen). As we all know; they are female, however was this discovered many centuries ago or is this a recent discovery?
I plead ignorance. I know apiculturists had figured out the sex of worker bees in by the late 1700s, and that by the 1800s it was widely accepted that ant workers were also female. But that's the extent of my knowledge.
So I'm punting to my diligent readers. Do any of you know who first observed that ant workers are female?
awild | February 19, 2009
Leptomyrmex rufipes, the red-footed spider ant. Queensland, Australia.
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS D60
ISO 100, 1/200 sec, f/11, flash diffused through tracing paper
awild | February 17, 2009
The Taliban Beetle, a specimen at the Naturhistorisches Museum Basel, Switzerland.
Meet the Taliban Beetle.
I took this picture in 2004 while visiting the collections at the Natural History Museum in Basel, Switzerland. For reasons I was unable to discern, a coleopterist working in the collection in the late 1990's had intended to name this new Afghani ground beetle after the country's ruling party at the time. Whether he came to regret this decision in the post 9/11 world, I do not know.
No formal description of the Taliban beetle was ever printed. So despite the official looking…
awild | February 17, 2009
Pheidole dentata, older worker with larva.
A study out in pre-print by Muscedere, Willey, and Traniello in the journal Animal Behaviour finds little support for a long-held idea that worker ants change specializations to perform different types of work as they age. By creating colonies out of different age classes in the ant Pheidole dentata, the researchers showed that older workers were good at pretty much everything, while younger ants performed only a few tasks, but did those less efficiently. Here is the abstract:
Age-related task performance, or temporal polyethism, is a prominent…
awild | February 16, 2009
Myrmecologist extraordinaire Mike Kaspari sends out the following call to arms:
I am working on a project with Jamie Gillooly examing how various life history traits scale in ant colonies. Specifically, we are testing the hypothesis that when total colony mass is used (instead of the mass of an individual in the colony) social insects scale much like their unitary counterparts.
From the subject heading, you can see where I am going with this. Allometries need to be tested across the entire natural range of variability, and a regression of total worker mass against queen mass (of monogyne…
awild | February 15, 2009
Lasius (Acanthomyops) arizonicus with mealybug, Huachuca Mountains, Arizona.
Students of the North American myrmecofauna will undoubtedly recognize this ant. Pudgy, pleasingly orange in color, and smelling sweetly of citrus, the Citronella ant is an endearing creature.  This Nearctic endemic is among our most common ants, living in underground empires farming root aphids and mealybugs for sustenance.
Yet few people ever encounter these shy insects. They emerge above ground for only a few hours each year, in late summer to see off the colony's winged reproductives.
The dozen or so…
awild | February 14, 2009Who is supposed to read The Superorganism?
I can't really tell. While I'm enjoying Holldobler & Wilson's latest tome, I am perplexed at the book's target audience. The text switches between broadly anthropomorphic prose clearly aimed for a general audience and obtuse jargon digestible only by the experienced biologist.
I get the feeling that the authors- at least one of them, anyway- desired a technical book more along the lines of Bourke & Franks, while the marketing department at Harvard University Press wished to trade on the authors' name recognition with a glossy coffee-table…