Euprenolepis procera (photo by Witte and Maschwitz) This is cool. A new paper by Volker Witte and Ulrich Maschwitz details a previously unknown behavior for ants: nomadic fungivory.  Here's the cite and the abstract: Witte, V. and U. Maschwitz. 2008. Mushroom harvesting ants in the topical rain forest. Naturwissenschaften, online early. Abstract: Ants belong to the most important groups of arthropods, inhabiting and commonly dominating most terrestrial habitats, especially tropical rainforests. Their highly collective behavior enables exploitation of various resources and is viewed as a key…
I am minutes away from shutting down this computer to pack it away for the long trip to Illinois tomorrow, but before I do that let me point out the New York Times' review of what may well be the most ambitious arthropod exhibit ever: The New Orleans Insectarium. If any of you have the opportunity to visit the Insectarium, drop me a line as to what you think.  I've not had the chance to see it, but I do have several photographs appearing in the displays and am curious about how they look.
Strategus aloeus - Ox Beetles, female (left) and male Arizona, USA Impressive pronotal horns mark the male in these sexually dimorphic scarabs. Strategus aloeus is found in the southern United States from Florida to Arizona. photo details, top photo: Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon 20D f/9, 1/200sec, ISO 100, indirect strobe in a white box bottom photo: Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon 20D f/14, 1/200sec, ISO 200, indirect strobe in a white box
Harpegnathos saltator - Jumping Ant I thought I would have to travel all the way to India (the horror!) to photograph one of the world's most charming insects, the jumping ant Harpegnathos saltator. But I recently learned that myrmecologist Juergen Liebig, a professor at Arizona State University, maintains dozens of captive colonies in his lab in Phoenix. Juergen studies these ants' rather unusual behavior. Unlike most ants that show a clear division between reproductive queens and sterile workers, Harpegnathos workers can mate and produce fertile offspring, leading to soap opera-style…
...documented in detail at the Photoshop Disasters Blog. The number of major corporations guilty of egregious image manipulation errors is surprising.
The more avid readers (that's you, mom!) may have noticed a lack of activity on the blog of late.  Life has intruded.  Next week I will be leaving my job at the University of Arizona and taking a new one in Illinois.  This means tying up loose ends on the beetle project, saying goodbye to friends, and moving a house.   Full-on blogging will resume by mid-August, I presume, once the dust has settled. There is much I will miss about Tucson, but on the other hand I'll be joining the Entomology Department at Champaign-Urbana, one of the world's finest centers of insect research.
Cotinus mutabilis - Fig Beetle Tucson, Arizona A few weeks ago we started noticing these giant green scarabs flying about Tucson.  They're about the same size and clumsiness in the air as carpenter bees, but brilliant green in color.  My wife- a bit of a bug geek herself- was given a few for her birthday last year by one of her customers at the market where she works. If you ever encounter a fig beetle larva, be prepared for something truly weird.  They ignore the fact that they have legs and walk upside-down, lying on their backs, their little legs pointed up. photo details, top photo:…
Oecophylla weaver ants are exceptionally cooperative subjects for photography, allowing for plenty of experimentation with lighting while the ants preen and pose. While developing the photographs from South Africa I discovered that strong backlighting allows a crystal-clear view of the tracheal system: Oecophylla longinoda, St. Lucia, KZN, South Africa The tracheae are visible as dark canals running through the body. These connect to the outside air in a series of circular spiracles and are essentially the lungs of the insect, channeling oxygen to the respiring cells and carrying away…
Apparently both Wordpress and Smugmug host images through Amazon's servers, and Amazon failed in a spectacular fashion this morning.  The outage took down both www.alexanderwild.com and many of the images for this blog, so if things appear to behave oddly, that's what's happening.
Funniest show ever.
I've had a week to digest the International Congress of Entomology (ICE) meeting held earlier this month in Durban, South Africa. Thousands of diverse presentations happening in 15 parallel sessions cannot easily be summed up in a single blog post, so I'll stick to a few of my own impressions of the conference. First, the bad. Durban was a terrible location. Lovely beaches aside, the city was not safe. Several people were mugged outside their hotels, and there is nothing relaxing about having to watch your back when venturing off the conference grounds. The crime had a surpressive effect…
Apatides fortis (Bostrichidae), the Horned Powder-Post Beetle Tucson, Arizona These robust wood-boring beetles have been common at my blacklight in early monsoon season. Good thing, too.  We collected a few for the Beetle Tree of Life study, and they've been one of the easier beetles to produce DNA sequence for our project. photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon 20D ISO 100, f/14, 1/250 sec indirect strobe in a white box
Leptogenys attenuata In spite of the southern winter, the coastal forests of Kwazulu-Natal had plenty of ant activity to keep me occupied last week. In addition to the beautiful Polyrhachis I posted earlier, here are portraits of a few of the species I encountered. Crematogaster tricolor Platythyrea cooperi Myrmicaria natalensis Plectroctena mandibularis Anochetus faurei Oecophylla longinoda (African Tailor Ant) Cataulacus brevisetosus Dorylus helvolus Pachycondyla (Bothroponera) mlanjiensis Atopomyrmex mocquerysi Pheidole megacephala (Big-Headed Ant) Solenopsis geminata (…
Among the more charismatic ants I saw during my visit to South Africa was a silver Polyrhachis that seemed all too happy to pose for me. With such an unusually cooperative subject, I was able to experiment with several different arrangements of the flash heads on my MT-24EX twin flash. Compare these two shots, differing only in the placement of one of the two heads: Polyrhachis schlueteri, St. Lucia, KZN, South Africa The top photo is the clear winner. The MT-24EX has detachable heads, and what I did here was remove one of them and hand-hold it under the leaf, facing upward at the ant.…
Who was that waspy-looking male ant I posted last week? Cephalotes rohweri, the Arizona Turtle Ant.  Workers like like this:
...it is now legal for Australians to be annoying.
While I was away the Photoshelter blog posted a recent interview I did with Allen Murabayashi, the company's CEO.  You can read it here, and I've also pasted it below the fold. I don't market my photos through an agency- my own sites work pretty well- but if I did, Photoshelter is one of the first companies I'd consider.  They've navigated the emerging internet market more successfully than the traditional photo agency giants like Getty and Corbis, but unlike the microstocks they also pay their photographers decently. Alex Wild is a biologist at the University of Arizona with a doctorate in…
Sunset over the St. Lucia Estuary I am happy to report that both parts of my trip- ant photography in the coastal forests of St. Lucia and the ICE conference in Durban- were a success. I'll try to put up a few posts in the coming week about both. A brief note about this photo: I used a 2-stop hard graduated filter to darken the upper 2/3 of the image, and because the sky lacked clouds I stood under a tree to add interest. Skies present interesting photographic challenges when the weather is clear, as it was for most of my brief Africa trip.
After a stroll through a Palo Verde woodland in the Tucson mountains I returned to my car to find this male ant sitting on the roof. I didn't immediately recognize it, and several hours later, after I figured it out, I wished I'd stuck around to looks for queens. What is it? I'll provide the answer next week. Update: the answer!
Chrysina (=Plusiotis) gloriosa - The Glorious Beetle Huachuca Mountains, Arizona Few of Arizona's beetles are as spectacular as the jewel scarabs in the genus Chrysina. They are most readily collected by blacklight (as in Kojun's handful o' beetles) in juniper forests in the weeks following the arrival of the monsoon. photo details: Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon 20D Indirect strobe fired into white box