awild | November 9, 2008Aenictus aratus - Queensland
In my utterly unbiased opinion, Australia hosts the most charismatic ant fauna of all the continents. Except for their army ants, that is. While South America is bursting at the seams with scores of Eciton, Labidus, and Neivamyrmex, and Africa has hoardes of Dorylus, Australia's army ants are limited to a few small species of Aenictus, a genus that is likely a recent arrival, in a geological sense, from Asia.
In any case, Steve Shattuck continues his taxonomic march through the Australian ants, reviewing the Australian Aenictus in a paper appearing Friday in…
awild | November 7, 2008Chrysina beyeri - Beyer's Scarab - Arizona
Arizona's Jewel Scarabs emerge after the onset of summer rains. These large insects have something of a cult following among collectors, and enthusiasts from around the world descend on the Sonoran desert every monsoon season with their mercury vapor lamps and blacklights to entice the lumbering beetles into their traps. The effects of this mass harvesting on Chrysina populations have not been studied, but they should be. I'd hate to lose such an attractive species.
Beyer's scarab, the largest Chrysina in the United States, feeds on oak foliage…
awild | November 6, 2008Another myrmecologist joins the blogosphere!
Scott Solomon is a biologist who studies Brazilian leafcutter ants. He also happens to be a fine writer, and his blog is full of stories about hunting ants in remote jungles.
awild | November 5, 2008As I've gotten more serious about photography, the single biggest change I've made is to premeditate my photo sessions. Instead of haphazardly shooting whichever subjects happen across my lens- my habit during my first few years with a camera- I tend now to have a particular image in mind well in advance of a shoot. The timing and location of a session, the equipment, and the lighting are all planned accordingly.
Cephalotes atratus, the gliding ant. Panama, 2007.
This gliding ant in mid-air is a good example. A small insect in free fall is not the sort of thing one happens to point-and-…
awild | November 4, 2008...and the woman behind me was holding a tearful and very disappointed three year old girl.
"She thought we were going 'boating'," she explained.
awild | October 31, 2008
Braconid wasps attacking caterpillar - pumpkin by Lorenzo Rodriguez
Urbana, Illinois
awild | October 29, 2008
My main blogging computer has gone down again. So, light posting the next few days.
I'm trying to decide whether to fix my 3-year old PC desktop, or just suck it up and drop the money for a new Mac. Windows Vista- which I've been using in the lab- is terrible and I can't see myself going back to Microsoft.
awild | October 28, 2008
I could spend hours looking at Princess Peppercloud's playful, stylistic take on the lives of ants. Do yourself a big happy favor and pay the princess a visit.
awild | October 27, 2008
Jim Wetterer has a paper out in Myrmecological News detailing the global spread of the ghost ant Tapinoma melanocephalum. This diminutive dolichoderine is quite possibly the most widely distributed ant in the world, a hitchhiker on human globalization, thriving in the wake of human-wrought ecological destruction. Their cosmopolitan dominance reflects our own.
Oddly enough, we still don't even know where they originally lived.
Ghost Ants - photo by Picasa user Aimeric
citation: Wetterer, J. K. 2008. Worldwide spread of the ghost ant Tapinoma melanocephalum (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). …
awild | October 26, 2008A True Fruit Fly - Tephritidae
Fruit flies are a family, Tephritidae, containing about 5,000 species of often strikingly colored insects. As the name implies, these flies are frugivores. Many, such as the mediterranean fruit fly, are agricultural pests.
Drosophila melanogaster, the insect that has been so important in genetic research, is not a true fruit fly. Drosophila is a member of the Drosophilidae, the vinegar or pomace flies. They are mostly fungivores, and their association with fruit is indirect: they eat the fungus that lives in rotting fruit. Some pointy-headed…
awild | October 24, 2008
Chrysochus auratus - Dogbane Leaf Beetle
New York
At first glance one might mistake the dogbane leaf beetle for a creature of the tropical jungle, an exotic jewel sought after by the most discerning of collectors. But no. It's a rather common beetle in northeastern North America, where it feeds on plants in the Dogbane family Apocynaceae. I photographed this one a few years ago on a rainy summer day in upstate New York.
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon D60
ISO 100, f/13, 1/200 sec, flash diffused through tracing paper
awild | October 22, 2008
Adetomyrma sp. "mad-01", larvae and adults
Madagascar
With a name like "dracula ant" you'd think these waspy little Adetomyrma might suddenly lunge for your jugular. But they are shy creatures, drinking not the blood of hapless victims but sparingly from the hemolymph of their own larvae. It's an odd behavior, yet one that makes a certain amount of sense when considering the haphazard way that evolution works.
Here's the problem: ants have a skinny little waist through which their digestive tract must pass. Solid food would lodge in the bottleneck and kill the ant, so the ants can't eat…
awild | October 22, 2008
Take that, vertebrate scum!
Incidentally, my wife used to have one of these Nephila spiders nesting in the high ceiling of her living room when she was living in Queensland. I guess she used it to dissuade potential suitors, but somehow I made it through.
awild | October 21, 2008Argentine ants tending scale insects
Three years after finishing my Ph.D., I have finally published the last bit of work from my dissertation. It's a multi-locus molecular phylogeny of the ant genus Linepithema, a group of mostly obscure Neotropical ants that would be overlooked if they didn't happen to contain the infamous Argentine Ant. In less jargony language, what I've done is reconstruct the evolution of an ant genus using genetic data. Here's the citation:
Wild, A. L. 2008. Evolution of the Neotropical Ant Genus Linepithema. Systematic Entomology, online early, doi: 10.1111/j.…
awild | October 20, 2008I've blogged a lot about lady beetles recently. That's because we have been inundated by them ever since moving to Illinois. The beetle deluge is not a good thing, though, as ours are nearly all Harmonia axyridis, an extraordinarily pesty species imported from Asia in what must rank as one of the most poorly executed biological control projects ever. In the wake of the alien lady beetle invasion, our native species have all but disappeared.
Enter the Lost Ladybug Project. The project is a citizen-science initiative out of Cornell University to gather information on the distribution of…
awild | October 19, 2008Count me among the skeptics who find that "DNA barcoding" is oversold for what it actually delivers. Nonetheless, here's a well-written piece about the approach in Wired.
awild | October 17, 2008
Cycloneda munda - Polished Lady Beetle
Champaign, Illinois
It's a depressing time to be a lady beetle aficionado in the midwest. Most of the beetles I've seen around town are pesty invasives like the multi-colored lady beetle (from Asia) and the seven-spotted lady beetle (from Europe). But one native species, Cycloneda munda, is hanging on, perhaps because it is smaller than the competition and able to subsist on smaller prey. A couple weeks ago I photographed this pair enjoying an intimate moment on the fall goldenrod.
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon 20D
ISO…
awild | October 16, 2008
Pheidole rugithorax Eguchi 2008 - Vietnam
In today's Zootaxa, Katsuyuki Eguchi has a taxonomic revision of the northern Vietnamese Pheidole, recognizing six new ant species for a genus that is already the world's most diverse. The revision also contains several nomeclatural changes and a key to the thirty or so species occurring in the region.
As in most tropical taxonomy this research has a comedic/tragic effect of adding several more species, about which nothing is known, to a catalog already overflowing with equally mysterious species. We don't know what they eat, how long they live,…