awild | September 2, 2008I'm on a roll! Myrmecos.net has a new series covering several species of trap-jaw ants:
Go see!
awild | August 31, 2008This video clip looks like it is straight off cute overload, but the sweetness is offset by Of Montreal's dark sense of humour and heavy bass-line. This song is Wraith Pinned to the Mist (and Other Games), from the album The Sunlandic Twins.  I wonder if somewhere a student writing a thesis on their song titles...
Have a great weekend!
-J
awild | August 30, 2008As you may have noticed, for a photography blog I don't write much about camera gear. Partly this is because I'm not the sort of person who chases the latest gadgets and gizmos, but partly because I think all the focus on equipment obscures the most important aspects of photography. Good photography comes from the artistry of the photographer. Megapixel count has hardly anything to do with it.
I bring this up because Canon has just announced the first bit of gear I've been excited about in years. The Canon 50D. Ignore the bits about the 15 megapixels (irrelevant for macro) and the 6.3…
awild | August 29, 2008
Juergen Heinze has a must-read piece in the latest edition of Myrmecological News about how ant colonies are not often simple families as we like to think of them:
Abstract: The social systems of ants are far more variable than has traditionally been believed. In addition to variation in queen number and queen mating frequency, recent research has documented such bizarre phenomena as the parthenogenetic production of females from unfertilized eggs or genetic caste determination. All these affect the genetic structure of ant societies, and it appears that in a large percentage of species…
awild | August 29, 2008
Microphotus angustus - Pink Glowworm
California Coast Range
Believe it or not, this squishy pink thing is an adult beetle.
Now and again, evolution produces a species that loses the complexities of the adult form. These animals simply retain a larval appearance into their adult life, later gaining only the ability to mate and have offspring independent of the other trappings of maturity. Perhaps the adult traits of large eyes, large brains, long legs, and big wings are so expensive that just skipping all that extra development allows an animal to get on that much more efficiently with the…
awild | August 28, 2008
A perpetually happy Venezuelan Leptogenys
We don't really know why some species of Leptogenys hunting ants sport a permanent grin. The oddly ecstatic mandible shape might, however, have something to do with handling the broadly curved exoskeleton of their preferred prey: isopods (the sow bugs and pill bugs).
Flickr user "venwu225" recently uploaded a fantastic series of the related species L. falcigera in action. Some of the shots show how the mandibles allow the ant to grip the isopod both above and below its wide skirt of armor. Cool stuff.
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro…
awild | August 22, 2008
Ochthebius sp. Minute Moss Beetles (Hydraenidae)
Pyramid Lake, Nevada
Tiny flea like specks
Move among the algal slime.
Oh! Hydraenidae!
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 | August 21, 2008
On my recent visit to the coastal forests of Kwazulu-Natal I noticed basketball-like growths on many of the Acacia trees. In North America, any large gray ball you see hanging off a tree branch is liable to be a hornet's nest. In South America, it's probably a carton nest of fierce little Azteca ants. The equivalent in South Africa? I didn't know.
A little bit of poking around in the acacias revealed the culprit. It was Crematogaster tricolor, an orange ant about half a centimeter long:
They didn't appreciate the disturbance, apparently, because they came after me without…
awild | August 19, 2008I've always been fond of playful and irreverent scientific names, so imagine my delight when I discovered that Paul Marsh, the taxonomist I will be working with over the coming year, is the same Paul Marsh who brought us the classic wasp names Heerz tooya, Heerz lukenatcha, and Verae peculya.
I'll be supporting Paul's morphological studies in the taxonomically troublesome wasp genus Heterospilus with molecular genetic data, but be warned. There are several hundred species yet to be named in the genus, and who knows what sort of nomenclatural mischief awaits.
awild | August 18, 2008
Both nature and nurture control caste development in harvester ants, forthcoming in The American Naturalist. (via Physorg).
An ant slave rebellion? Temnothorax often kill their Protomognathus captors.
awild | August 17, 2008
Tetramorium sericeiventre
2008, Canon MP-E 65mm macro lens, MT-24EX twin flash
One nice thing about my recent trip to South Africa was that I could revisit the same species I shot on my last visit in 2003. Only, with decent equipment this time around. Check out the difference between the SLR (above) and the little coolpix digicam (below).
Tetramorium sericeiventre
2003, Nikon Coolpix 995, onboard flash
An obvious contrast is the stronger magnification of the SLR system, but I'd hold that the most important aspect is the flexibility of the off-camera flash, allowing for tight control over…
awild | August 16, 2008
Dorylus helvolus, KZN, South Africa
Last night the internet arrived at our new house. I've celebrated the occasion by tackling the backlog of photo uploads.
Over at myrmecos.net the South Africa photos are starting to go up. The first batch covers Dorylus helvolus, a subterranean predatory ant. Meanwhile, the fine art galleries at www.alexanderwild.com have also been beefed up with new material, including some stylized ant portraiture and the first of the Illinois scarabs.
On an unrelated note, Jo-anne has been sending along updates from the famous Ant Course in Venezuela. Word is that…
awild | August 15, 2008
Pelidnota punctata - Grapevine Beetle
Champaign, Illinois
Here it is: the first insect I've photographed since moving to Illinois last week. I've been posting a lot of scarab beetles recently, but can you blame me? They're so pretty.
photo details: Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon 20D
ISO 100, f/11, 1/200 sec, indirect strobe in white box.
awild | August 13, 2008Our first paper from the Beetle Tree of Life study has been published. Here's the citation:
Wild, A. L. & Maddison, D. R. 2008. Evaluating nuclear protein-coding genes for phylogenetic utility in beetles. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, doi: 10.1016/j.ympev.2008.05.023
My co-author David Maddison once summarized the point of the paper as "Hey guys! New genes!"
What we've done is develop lab protocols for sequencing 8 nuclear genes that should be particularly useful for inferring the evolutionary history of beetles. It's a foundational paper. We created the methods that will…
awild | August 12, 2008
This shot wasn't too difficult. The ant was following my finger about menacingly, as seen here, so I only needed to lift my hand just above the viewing frame to get her to pose.
awild | August 11, 2008
Asphinctopone differens Bolton & Fisher 2008
A new species from the Central African Republic
Bolton & Fisher Revise Asphinctopone (Zootaxa)
Shattuck Revises the Indo-Pacific Prionopelta
All imported Fire Ants in the U.S. are descended from 9-20 initial foundress queens
[summary in ScienceDaily]
ZooKeys: A new open-access journal for biodiversity & taxonomy
awild | August 10, 2008Our yard here in Champaign is about the size of a postage stamp, but it is in an older part of town and the ant fauna isnât half bad. In moving up from Tucson Iâve traded my desert harvester ants for a more midwestern fauna. Hereâs what I uncovered yesterday in a few minutes of looking around:
Camponotus pennsylvanicus
Camponotus nearcticus
Lasius neoniger
Formica pallidefulva group sp.
Paratrechina sp.
Tapinoma sessile
Myrmecina americana
Tetramorium âsp. Eâ
Ponera pennsylvanica
As a rule of thumb, older parts of town are better for ant diversity than newer developments. Iâve found this…
awild | August 8, 2008
Cicindela lemniscata - White-Lined Tiger Beetle
Arizona, USA
This one is for Ted, who has an excellent blog about Tiger Beetles.
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon 20D
ISO 100, f/13, 1/250 sec, flash diffused through tracing paper.