awild | February 13, 2009
Colliuris pensylvanica, long-necked ground beetle. Arizona.
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
awild | February 12, 2009
Here's a sharper version:
Parasitic Cotesia wasp attacks a Manduca larva
The story itself is amazing. It's been known for some time that Ichneumonid and Braconid wasps inject circular strands of DNA- called polydnaviruses- into their host insects along with their eggs. This DNA is encoded by the wasp genome but acts like a virus in their hosts, dismantling the immune system to protect the developing wasp larvae. In a study out this week in Science, a team headed by Jean-Michel Drezen pinpointed the origin of the polydnavirus as being a type of nudivirus. It seems that some ancient…
awild | February 12, 2009In honor of the old man's 200th, Myrmecos Blog is proud to feature Charles Darwin writing prophetically about the problems posed by social insects for his theory of natural selection.  The passage below is from the first edition of On the Origin of Species, and in it Darwin anticipates the same answers- kin and group selection- that later generations of biologists converged on to solve the riddle. Not bad for a barnacle taxonomist...
No doubt many instincts of very difficult explanation could be opposed to the theory of natural selection,âcases, in which we cannot see how an instinct could…
awild | February 11, 2009A few years ago I needed to image some ants for a short taxonomic paper. Lacking a decent specimen imaging system (like Entovision), I decided to snap the photos at home using my standard macro gear: a dSLR with the Canon MP-E lens. The images turned out fine and were published in Zootaxa with the paper.
Later, the Antweb team imaged the same species using their standard set-up: a high-res video camera on a Leica microscope, focus-stacking the images with specialized software. I decided to compare the two. Here they are (click on each to view the uncompressed file):
Pachycondyla…
awild | February 10, 2009 There's been a debate simmering among Argentine Ant researchers about the difference between the ant's ecology in its native South America and in the introduced populations. The heart of the disagreement is this: is the introduced Argentine ant dominant because its biology changed during introduction, or because the ecologies of the native and introduced ranges are different?
Like most scientific debates, some aspects are factual in nature while others are semantic. Sometimes the semantic and the factual become confused in a way that makes it difficult to tease the arguments apart…
awild | February 10, 2009I'm up for a busy day doing Scanning Electron Microscopy of some braconid wasps, so instead of enlightening you with my own witty repartée I'll direct you to the following:
Catalogue of Organisms brings on The Most Unbelievable Organisms Evah!
The New York Times has kicked into full Darwin mode. Read them all, but particularly Carl Zimmer's piece on the difficulty of visualizing the Tree of Life. It's a problem I'll be grappling with shortly as we start to put together the Beetle Tree.
Roberto Keller has some great SEMs of the stridulatory organ, the little thing that makes ants…
awild | February 10, 2009
Tenodera aridifolia, Arizona.
photo details: Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon EOS 20D
ISO 100, 1/250 sec, f/14, indirect strobe in a white box
awild | February 9, 2009
Simopelta sp. nr. pergandei, Venezuela
I've just started a project in collaboration with Daniel Kronauer, Jack Longino, and Andy Suarez to infer the phylogeny of species in the Neotropical ponerine genus Simopelta. If you happen to have any DNA-quality specimens of these unusual ants in your keep, we'd greatly appreciate a donation.
Why Simopelta? These insects are among the "other" army ants, the barely-known lineages that have also evolved the specialized nomadic lifestyle that characterizes the well-known, photogenic, and oft-televised ecitonine and doryline army ants. Yet…
awild | February 9, 2009Reader 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 occurs to me to explain that Aussies call the larger Myrmecia species "Bull Ants", and "Red" is used as a modifier. They aren't predators of energy drinks. Although if they were, those teeth could probably open a can.
awild | February 8, 2009From David Attenborough's brilliant Life in the Undergrowth:
Incidentally, Ed Yong's interview with Sir David is worth reading.
awild | February 8, 2009
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.  I do, however, have many years' worth of mostly accidental ant ingestion experience, enough to offer the following advice for choosing a species to coat in chocolate. Here's what to look for:
Medium-large species at least 6-10 mm in length. Smaller ants won't give your candy any noticeable crunch.
Species with a strongly acidic chemistry will yield an…
awild | February 7, 2009
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
awild | February 6, 2009
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)
awild | February 6, 2009As 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 Maculinea rebeli, to infiltrate nests of Myrmica schencki. The immature stages of the butterfly are parasites of ant colonies, and it seems the secret to their success is acoustic mimicry. The larvae and pupae squeak like queens, eliciting preferential treatment from the workers. Here's the abstract:
Ants…
awild | February 6, 2009
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
awild | February 5, 2009
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 efficiency by following the leaf-carrying ants instead of trying to pass their slower sisters. See also commentary by JEB and Wired.
source: Dussutour, A., Beshers, S., Deneubourg, J. L., Fourcassie, V. 2009. Priority rules govern the organization of traffic on foraging trails under crowding conditions in the…
awild | February 4, 2009It'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 Nogales, Mexico, 2006
awild | February 4, 2009
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 both to the base color of the body and to the attractive metallic refractions on the cuticle. But Aussies instead call this colorful species the "meat ant." Crass by comparison.
On the other hand, it'd probably not do my reputation of masculine bravado much good were I to stroll into a dusty pub in…