anochetus
awild | November 30, 2009
Anochetus mayri
Anochetus mayri is an ant most North American myrmecologists will not have encountered in the field. This toothy exotic is a small brown insect, less than half a centimeter long, known in the United States only from scattered locations in suburban Florida. I photographed one this summer on a collecting trip to West Palm Beach.
Anochetus mayri illustrates a couple recurring themes in myrmecology.Â
First is just how inadequate our taxonomic understanding of ant species remains.  While identifying this ant in West Palm Beach is easy enough- A. mayri is the only…
awild | September 2, 2008I'm on a roll! Myrmecos.net has a new series covering several species of trap-jaw ants:
Go see!
awild | May 28, 2008
Odontomachus coquereli - Madagascar
Myrmecology continues to lead the way in online taxonomy. Today saw the release of the very first taxonomic paper published by the top-tier open access science journal, PLoS One.
Brian Fisher and Alex Smith combine alpha taxonomy with DNA barcoding to produce a revision of the Malagasy trap-jaw ants. The revision includes mitochondrial DNA sequences from some 500 individual ants and resulted in the inference of several new species. I've got plenty to say about DNA barcoding, but I'll leave that for a later post and instead point you to the thoughtful…