awild | February 11, 2010
click to enlarge
The top-tier journal Nature doesn't often deal in purely phylogenetic research. So when such a study graces their pages we know it's big stuff.
Yesterday, Nature published a 62 gene, 75 species analysis of the evolutionary history of the arthropods. Arthropods, as readers of this blog likely know, are animals with a chitinous exoskeleton and jointed legs. They include the insects, arachnids, crustaceans, centipedes, and others. This is a staggeringly diverse group, and one found just about everywhere on the planet. Most animals are arthropods.
This study has been in the…
awild | February 10, 2010
Plectroctena mandibularis, South Africa
Every now and again someone asks how I get the white background on these sorts of stylized ant shots. Pretty simple: it's a sheet of cheap white printer paper. Overexposing the shot slightly by boosting the flash evens out the white.
I set the ant down on the paper under a petri dish or a lens cap, let her settle in, and remove the cover to get a few seconds of a relaxed ant before she's off to the races.
Photo details: Canon mp-e 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 20D.
ISO 100, f13, 1/250th sec, diffuse twin flash
awild | February 10, 2010It's no secret to anyone with an email inbox that the real internet is shadowed by a fake internet. The fake internet is full of fake blogs, fake web sites, fake discussion forums, and fake emails. All full of real links to real companies who pay someone money to increase their visibility by gaming the Google rankings using vast and vacuous link farms.
Anyway. I usually ignore this parallel universe, but this morning I found something entertaining and ant-related. Repeated instances of what looks like a bad student essay were splashed across dozens of sites in the spamoverse, each with…
awild | February 9, 2010Meinertellidae! It's a jumping bristletail. In California these flightless insects are common around harvester ant nests. I don't think they have any sort of specialized relationship with ants, except perhaps finding the warm microclimate of the mound surface agreeable.
Wings are an ancient adaptation, and most of our modern flightless insects represent an evolutionary loss of function from their flighted forebears. Not so with jumping bristletails. This group diverged from the remaining insects prior to the advent of wings- their line of ancestry has been earthbound since the beginning.…
awild | February 9, 2010
Figure 1. Relationship between normalized metabolic rate and body mass for unitary organisms and whole colonies (from Hou et al 2010)
The notion that insect colonies and their constituent individuals are analogous to multicellular organisms and their constituent cells has been a controversial idea for decades. Is it useful, for example, to think of an ant colony as a single individual? Do superorganisms really exist as coherent entities? Or do insect colonies function more as aggregations of individuals?
Last week, PNAS published the first application of empirical methods to test the…
awild | February 8, 2010What's this charming creature?
Ten points for the first person to get the family name right, too.
awild | February 7, 2010In honor of the big game, here's one of my favorite Super Bowl commercials from years past:
awild | February 5, 2010
A male western hercules beetle, Arizona.
Meet Dynastes granti. This behemouth of an insect is North America's heaviest scarab beetle, found in the mountains of the American southwest where adults feed on the sap of ash trees. I photographed these spectacular insects a few years ago while living in Tucson.
The impressive pronotal horn on the beetle pictured above indicates a male; females are considerably more modest in their armaments:
Male and female hercules beetles
As is so often the case in animals, males use their horns to fight each other for access to females, attempting to pry…
awild | February 4, 2010
Termite mounds visible in Australia's Northern Territory- I've circled three, but dozens are in the image.
Central Illinois still resembles the frozen lifeless tundra, so to get my bug-hunting fix I've been surfing about on Google Earth. Here at -13.066783, 130.847383 I've found something: Australia's magnificent magnetic termites. The green things are trees, but the little black pimply bits? Those are the termites. On the ground they look like this:
A magnetic termite mound in north Queensland, Australia.
Why "magnetic"?
The mounds are shaped as thin blades along a north-south…
awild | February 3, 2010...are at it again:
The twilight zone:
ambient light levels trigger activity in primitive ants
What's unfortunate about this title is that the judgement "primitive" has nothing to do with the research. It is unnecessary. The study is about how one species of ant uses ambient light levels to trigger foraging. It's a nicely done bit of work. But whether or not these ants are "primitive" has zilch to do with the science.
Back in the day, western anthropologists would study Primitive Culture. Such terms are no longer used in that field, and for good reason. It's not just that labeling other…
awild | February 2, 2010A reader asks:
I also have a MP-E lens with the MT-24EX flash unit. I was curious to know something I didnât see you mention in your recent blog post about this setup.
Could you share any technical points regarding how you achieve the visible backgrounds with that lens? In general, I get very nice shots with everything beyond the focused subject completely blacked out.
Since dark areas in photographs are the bits that aren't sending light to the camera, it follows that getting a visible backdrop means applying light behind the subject.
Earlier, I wrote that the black backdrop in insect…
awild | February 2, 2010Given that the current crop of video games is not nearly science-nerdy enough, my friend Rob Mitchell made this graphic as a helpful suggestion to anyone looking to design a new one. I'm just passing it along...
awild | February 1, 2010A first glance at Obama's proposed 2011 budget, and I feel relief. Given earlier rumors of a freeze on discretionary spending I had feared the worst, but it seems our government is investing heavily in science as way out of the current economic mess. The National Science Foundation (NSF) may see an 8% increase- great news for biologists! NSF is the primary source of support in this country for basic science, including myrmecology.
Incidentally, the New York Times' graphics department deserves a raise. Their simple interactive summaries of complex issues are absolutely brilliant- the…
awild | February 1, 2010According to a new study by Olivier Roux et al in PLoS One, she is spreading pheromones from a previously unknown gland:
Abstract: In Oecophylla, an ant genus comprising two territorially dominant arboreal species, workers are known to (1) use anal spots to mark their territories, (2) drag their gaster along the substrate to deposit short-range recruitment trails, and (3) drag the extruded rectal gland along the substrate to deposit the trails used in long-range recruitment. Here we study an overlooked but important marking behavior in which O. longinoda workers first rub the underside of…
awild | January 31, 2010You may know Michel Gondry as the director of off-beat films like "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind". Gondry has also made a great number of music videos, including this mesmerizing time lapse of a cross-country drive:
music is "Behind" by Lacquer
awild | January 30, 2010Pogonomyrmex badius Harvester Ants
Archbold Biological Station, Florida, USA
Photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 50D.
ISO 100, f/13, 1/250 sec, diffused twin flash