awild | February 3, 2009
Mark your calendar. The 26th annual Insect Fear Film Festival will be held February 28th at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This year's theme is "Centipede Cinema".
The film festival is legendary. I've heard about the event for years, and its lineup of bug flicks, live displays, and art contests have received widespread media coverage. Now that I live in Champaign I'll be able to attend my first one.
The announcement:
The Insect Fear Film Festival - scaring the general public with
horrific films and horrific filmmaking since 1984
The…
awild | February 3, 2009Since the device we commonly use to capture insects is called an aspirator, does that mean the insects we collect are aspirations?
Discuss.
awild | February 3, 2009
Cyborg beetles. Seriously. (h/t Cicindela)
The Other 95% hosts the Circus of the Spineless #35.
Coleopterist, photographer, and author Art Evans launches a new blog called What's Bugging You?
Archetype illustrates the counterintuitive segmentation of ant body parts.
Beetles in the Bush blogs about dung beetles that have kicked the fecal habit.
Some days I wish I could read Hebrew, because this might be the most awesome blog ever, judging from all the ant pix.
awild | February 2, 2009Among the least understood technical aspects of photography, at least for novices, is aperture. Yet aperture has profound effects on the resulting image. Consider the following series of photos, each taken with a macro setup of an MP-E lens on a Canon dSLR camera, focused at the foremost tip of an ant head head shot at increasingly smaller apertures:
What's going on?
Most lenses contain a diaphragm that can constrict from full open down to a little hole, controlling the amount of light that travels through the lens on its way to the film or sensor. The size of the hole is called the…
awild | February 2, 2009Where do all the cool kids hang out?
The Nature Blog Network, apparently. NBN hosts a directory of science/nature blogs sorted by category and traffic rank.  It's a great place to trawl for new reading fodder.
awild | February 2, 2009
Explaining the evolutionary tree of life is always a tricky proposition, as narratives are inherently linear but evolution spirals outwards in countless messy directions at once. To tell a story from the tangled bank requires picking a single thread and following it, yet it is precisely our tendency to follow single threads that causes so much misunderstanding of how evolution works.
Attenborough grapples with the problem using an animation that permeates the video, showing graphically the complexity of an ever dividing tree in the background as he traverses time from ancient to modern. …
awild | January 31, 2009
My earlier list of the most-studied ant species contained a few omissions. Here is a more inclusive list:
Ant species sorted by number of BIOSIS-listed publications, 1984-2008
The Top 10 Species
Publications
Solenopsis invicta
984
Linepithema humile
343
Lasius niger
250
Formica rufa
167
Atta sexdens
163
Formica polyctena
160
Solenopsis geminata
151
Myrmica rubra
142
Monomorium pharaonis
121
Atta cephalotes
112
The Rest
Publications
Oecophylla smaragdina
111
Solenopsis richteri
110
Pheidole megacephala
104
Tetramorium "caespitum"
93
Formica…
awild | January 29, 2009
Pheidole moerens, major worker, Louisiana
Pheidole moerens is a small, barely noticeable insect that travels about with human commerce, arriving without announcement and slipping quietly into the leaf litter and potted plants about town.  As introduced ants go, P. moerens is timid and innocuous- it's certainly no fire ant. The species is now present in the southeastern United States, a few places along the west coast, and Hawaii. Conventional wisdom suggests that P. moerens originated in the Greater Antilles, but even though the ant was first described from Puerto Rico a century ago…
awild | January 28, 2009I'll be giving an hour-long seminar on insect photography this coming Monday, February 2nd, as part of the University of Illinois Ecology and Evolutionary Biology "Ecolunch" series. Here are the details:
Alex Wild at Ecolunch
"Insect Photography: A How To For You Too"
***
February 2, 12-1pm
176 Burrill Hall
407 S Goodwin Ave
University of Illinois
Urbana, IL 61801
I'll be covering a few basic aspects of macro photography, including equipment, composition, and working with live insects.
awild | January 27, 2009Cicindela has been playing with scanners and saturniid moths, to great result:
The original file must be huge! Â Worth noting that Cicindela is taking a lead from Joseph Scheer, who first perfected the technique.
awild | January 27, 2009
Widow spider and harvester ants. Hallelujah Junction, California
This young black widow (Latrodectus hesperus) set up shop above the nest entrance of a colony of Pogonomyrmex harvester ants. It's an all-you-can-eat buffet, allowing the spider nearly unlimited pickings as the ants come and go.
The spider's mottled coloration is typical of young widows; they don't acquire the striking black and red warning garb until maturity.
photo details: Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon EOS D60
ISO 100, 1/200 sec, f/11, MT-24EX twin flash
awild | January 26, 2009Owing to a volume of incoming specimen requests, I've added a tab in the top menu for Myrmecology News to hold items like specimen requests and miscellaneous ant-related announcements so they don't scroll off the bottom of the blog too quickly.
If you've got something to post, please email me, alexwild -at- illinois.edu (but replace the "-at-" with @, of course).
awild | January 26, 2009Ted Schultz writes:
Postdoc Scott Solomon has arrived here at the Smithsonian to work on the systematics and phylogenetics of Trachymyrmex and Acromyrmex ants and fungi. Scott has spent a fair amount of time collecting in South America, but we want to be sure that we have an exhaustive representation of species as well as multiple examples of species from across their ranges. Â To that end, we're contacting folks to inquire about whether they might have Trachymyrmex or Acromyrmex specimens that we can use in this project, particularly from undercollected localities.
Ideally, we require…
awild | January 26, 2009
Rachelle Adams writes:
I have begun a one year postdoc molecular project focusing on the species in the Solenopsidini tribe with Ted Schultz and Seán Brady at the Smithsonian, Washington DC. Due to the vastness of this tribe and its taxonomic challenges, I want to thoroughly sample each genus currently classified in the tribe as well as those that were historically classified as solenopsidines. ANY samples that belong in the genera listed below are needed. I have also included a species âwish listâ that will complement a morphological study done by Juanita Rodriguez and my dissertation…
awild | January 25, 2009
Tonight's selection was suggested for your viewing pleasure by Jack Longino.
awild | January 25, 2009
Figure 1. For the 32 most-studied ant species, the percentage of publications 1984-2008 in various contexts.
In thinking about where the myrmecological community ought to devote resources in the age of genomics, it occcured to me that putting some numbers on where researchers have previously concentrated their efforts might be useful. So I went to BIOSIS previews and quantified the number of publications in 5-year intervals from 1984 to 2008 recovered under searches for various well-studied ant species (methods and full data here). Here's what I found:
Number of publications 1984-2008…
awild | January 23, 2009
Amblycheila cylindriformis, New Mexico
The Giant Tiger Beetle Amblycheila cylindriformis is a tank of an insect, at 35mm in length the largest tiger beetle in North America.  Unlike the more familiar day-active Cicindela tiger beetles, the flightless Amblycheila lumbers about at night, catching hapless insects in its massive jaws.
Photographing Amblycheila was difficult on account of the insect's shiny integument, so I used a white-lined cardboard box as a miniature studio. A strobe fired into the box produced a diffuse white light.
On display at the Audubon Insectarium.
photo…
awild | January 22, 2009Dalantech over at the No Cropping Zone writes:
From time to time I see people argue about the backgrounds in macro images, and about how dark backgrounds donât look natural âwhatever the heck that means. Seriously whatâs natural about macro photography? Do you see all the detail in a beeâs compound eye or the tiny âhairsâ that cover most leaves without the aid of some sort of magnifier?
I think Dalantech is entirely correct in that arguments about the naturalness of black backdrops are unconvincing. There are many reasons to take photographs, and capturing an animal in a particular…
awild | January 21, 2009I know you're terribly bored with ants, ants, ants all the time here at Myrmecos Blog. So that's why we're bringing you something different. It's an ad from the 60's letting you know about an exciting new product for putting on a few pounds:
For some reason it was lying around the entomology office this morning. Entomology leads to emaciation? Thin people don't attract enough insects? I can't figure it.
(h/t Suarez)