awild | September 23, 2008
Battle of the Pavement Ants, definitely not Tetramorium caespitum
While walking through the park yesterday, I happened across a sidewalk boundary dispute between two colonies of Pavement Ants. As is their habit, these little brown ants opted to dispense with diplomacy in favor of all-out warfare.
Incidentally, if I had to pick one thing that annoys me about the purely molecular systematists, it is their tendency to avoid dealing with the taxonomic consequences of their work. A recent paper by Schlick-Steiner et al (2006) gave a detailed picture of the genetic structure within the…
awild | September 22, 2008
Relevant to our earlier discussion, google search statistics suggest "flies" should be able to hold their own against "ants" in the public eye.
Caveat: additional meanings of "flies" (such as, the conjugate of the verb " to fly") may overestimate the fly tally.
awild | September 21, 2008
The BBQ Song. Once this gets in your head, good luck. It won't come out.
awild | September 20, 2008
Dipterist Keith Bayless exposes a pernicious case of media bias:
Six new families of Diptera were described from newly discovered species in the last 6 years! None of these flies received the press coverage given to Martialis. There are a variety of explanations for this, including that
1) The fly descriptions were published in lower profile journals than PNAS
2) Many of the the new fly families evolved more recently than the first ant in the Martialis lineage
3) The level of public and scientific interest in ants inclines them to be better covered or
4) People who study ants are better at…
awild | September 18, 2008Speaking of bad science reporting...
Not the right ant.
Nope.
Camponotus? You've gotta be kidding.
It isn't Lasius, either.
Nor Ectatomma. (And isn't that Corrie Moreau's copyrighted photo?).
awild | September 18, 2008The New York Times has a short piece on the discovery of Martialis and the story behind the name.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/science/18ant.html
The annotated specimen photo seems an effective way to point out key parts of the insect. I've got to say, I'm continually impressed by the extra effort the NY Times puts into their science reporting. They're a bright point in a sea of science reporting mediocrity.
awild | September 17, 2008
Platythyrea pilosula - Image by April Nobile/Antweb
Yesterday, the above photograph was uploaded to Antweb's databases.  Platythyrea pilosula is the final species to be imaged for the Ants of Paraguay project, marking the end of a sporadic and meandering study that I started in 1995 as a hobby during my stint in the Peace Corps. After combining several years' worth of my field collections with the holdings at 19 entomological museums, I tallied 541 species for the country. This turns out to be too many species to keep track of in my head (I max out at about 300 or so), so I've found…
awild | September 16, 2008Here's something that bugs me. Instead of emphasizing the real significance of the find, a discovery like the "Mars ant" Martialis heureka is usually condensed down to "Wow, this ant is weird!".
I've pasted below a sampling of leads:
Newly-Discovered Bizarre Ant - Boing Boing
'Ant From Mars' Discovered in Amazon Rainforest - Fox News
'Ant from Mars' found in Amazon jungle - Science News
But weirdness misses the point. We have weird ants already. The suicidal exploding Camponotus is plenty weird. So are the gliding ants, and the ants that swim. The real story here is the…
awild | September 15, 2008Martialis heureka Rabeling & Verhaagh 2008
drawing by the inimitable Barrett Klein for PNAS
Most scientific discoveries these days emerge through carefully planned and controlled research programs. Every now and again, though, something unexpected just pops up in a distant tropical jungle. Martialis heureka is a fantastic discovery of that old-fashioned kind. This little ant simply walked up to myrmecologist Christian Rabeling in the Brazilian Amazon. It is not only a new species, but an entirely different sort of ant than anything known before.
The remarkable find was…
awild | September 14, 2008
Pheidole megacephala
Go see!
Incidentally, you might want to surf back here to Myrmecos Blog on Monday afternoon. There's been a very, very exciting discovery...
awild | September 14, 2008
Camponotus castaneus
Champaign, Illinois
I photographed this ant's nest yesterday afternoon. A couple hundred large, orange ants with piles of silken cocoons under a board in the park next to our house. I feel vaguely guilty about this now, as the soggy remains of Hurricane Ike are blowing through town this morning and everything is underwater. If I disturbed the structure of their nest too much, the ants might not have had time to repair their water-proofing. I suppose I should check in on them again once the weather improves.
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a…
awild | September 12, 2008A few links to make your weekend just that much more fun:
Photo.net has posted their Editors' 2008 picks for best macro.
Haje Jan Kamps explains how to make a macro lens from an old Pringles can.
Brian Valentine has an amazing series of a dance fly absolutely covered in mites.
If you've not yet seen it, stop by Piotr Naskrecki's portrait gallery.
And finally, the North Carolina Entomological Society is holding a photo competition. The NCSU insect blog explains how to submit your best bug photos. Deadline is October 20th.
awild | September 12, 2008
Prionocyphon Marsh Beetle (Scirtidae)
New York
Scirtidae is a small family of mostly small beetles found in wet, swampy habitats all over the world. Taxonomists find them to be difficult creatures, the larvae are archaic in appearance but the adults share some similarities with the elateriforms- click beetles, fireflies, and the like. Recent research based on ribosomal DNA sequences showed why their evolutionary relationships have been so hard to peg. Rather than fitting neatly inside one of the 4 beetle suborders, these insects are surprisingly old, diverging from the lineage that led…
awild | September 11, 2008My favorite upstart stock photography business, the Photoshelter Collection, has decided that their experiment was not successful enough to continue.  This is a shame. The quality of imagery at Photoshelter is competitive with the industry giants, yet they treated photographers more fairly than the traditional agencies and used a more democratic, more merit-based criteria to recruit their talent. According to CEO Allen Murabayashi, the problem was one of competion with the entrenched corporate heft of the traditional agencies, especially Getty:
The largest consumers of stock…
awild | September 10, 2008
Meet the European Paper Wasp, Polistes dominulus. Or is it Polistes dominula? Most biologists I know refer to this common Holarctic insect as P. dominulus, but I've just learned via Bugguide.net that the common spelling is a grammatical misunderstanding of the original latin:
Explanation of Names
Female ruler, lady, mistress:
From Latin dominus- "lord, ruler, master" (related English words: dominion, domain, dominate) + the diminutive suffix -ul- which adds the meaning "little", and a feminine ending.
Until recently treated as an adjective describing the masculine noun "Polistes",…
awild | September 9, 2008All the better to steal your brood with, my little red riding ant...
Polyergus
Champaign, Illinois
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 | September 8, 2008Here's an example of the power of evolutionary theory. Suefuji et al just published a paper in Biology Letters describing the relationship between the number of queens in an ant nest and the rearing of new reproductives. That'd be a cool enough paper on its own, but there's more. Evolutionary theory makes some specific predictions about when sexuals ought to be produced under different numbers of queens. If the selfish-gene hypotheses of evolution are true, then nests with multiple queens should race to produce sexual brood earlier than nests with single queens. And that is exactly…
awild | September 8, 2008The much-hyped Encyclopedia of Life has started adding content for the ants, mostly by harvesting photos and text from Antweb. The interface is a little odd, as EoL layers Antweb's up-to-date information over the obsolete ITIS taxonomy, losing taxa whose status has changed over the past decade. We clearly need a centralized taxonomic infrastructure if EoL is going to run smoothly. As it stands, we're still better off just going to Antweb directly.
awild | September 7, 2008In an earlier discussion on the merits of megapixels, commentator and snail guru Aydin notes:
Megapixel counts matter if you need to crop out large sections of an image & still need to retain enough pixels for a large enough print.
To illustrate Aydin's point, I've taken a full photo of an Australian Monomorium nest and cropped it away to show just the queen ant:
Viola! Instant magnification. I can get away with a tight crop because the original photo spans over 6 million pixels. Blog photos only need 100,000 pixels. Plenty of pixels to spare. Once I get my hands on the Canon 50D…