ants
zooillogix | March 31, 2009In the 1930s, Australian ecologists shortsightedly introduced the Cane Toad, a species indigenous to South America, to their isolated continent to eat agricultural pests. This famously proved to be a complete disaster with the toxic toads running rampant and native species poisoning themselves when they tried to make snacks of the delicious, dimwitted amphibians.
Now a team of Australian researchers from the University of Sydney think they may have found an elegant solution that absolutely, positively, cannot backfire into a 1970 C minus horror movie: Meat Ants. The gentle meat ant lives…
awild | March 24, 2009
Procryptocerus mayri, Venezuela.
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 20D
ISO 100, 1/250 sec, f/13, flash diffused through tracing paper
awild | March 22, 2009From the recent documentary Ants: Nature's Secret Power, a glimpse of how researchers study ant behavior in the lab:
awild | March 17, 2009Since you're all being so well-behaved while I'm in the field, here's a new wallpaper for your 1680 x 1055 desktop:
edyong | March 8, 2009
Imagine that you're driving along a country lane. As often happens, the road suddenly transforms from a well-paved street to a pothole-ridden nightmare. As your suspension and your stomachs start to tire, your friends in the back suddenly force you to stop the car.
To your amazement, they jump out and lie across the potholes, beckoning you to drive your car over them. It may seem like a far-fetched scenario, but if you were an army ant, such selfless behaviour would be a matter of course.
Army ants are some of the deadliest hunters of South America. Amassing in legions of over 200,000 ants…
awild | March 6, 2009
Near Cruz de Eje, Argentina
Tomorrow I leave for three ant-filled weeks in northern Argentina. Don't despair, though, the Myrmecos Blog will not go into remission. Scott Powell will be taking the reins for the rest of the month, and Eli Sarnat will drop in once or twice to regale us with shocking-but-true ant adventures from the South Pacific. I've also pre-scheduled a few Friday Beetles and Sunday Movies.
We've got several goals for the expedition. First, Jo-anne and I are trying to get a better sense of the biology of the closest relatives of the Argentine ant Linepithema humile.…
awild | March 4, 2009Achenbach, A., Foitzik, S. 2009. FIRST EVIDENCE FOR SLAVE REBELLION: ENSLAVED ANT WORKERS SYSTEMATICALLY KILL THE BROOD OF THEIR SOCIAL PARASITE PROTOMOGNATHUS AMERICANUS . Evolution, Online Early, doi: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2009.00591.x
Abstract: During the process of coevolution, social parasites have evolved sophisticated strategies to exploit the brood care behavior of their social hosts. Slave-making ant queens invade host colonies and kill or eject all adult host ants. Host workers, which eclose from the remaining brood, are tricked into caring for the parasite brood. Due to their high…
awild | February 28, 2009
Gnamptogenys mordax, Venezuela.
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 20D
ISO 100, 1/250 sec, f/13, flash diffused through tracing paper
awild | February 28, 2009Those of you who were into ants in the early '90s might remember SimAnt, a simulation game where you control the decisions your ants make to steer a colony to dominance over a competing species in a suburban lawn.
The game is based, in part, on the optimality equations summarized in Oster & Wilson's 1978 text "Caste and Ecology in the Social Insects". The book lays out mathematical foundations for determining the investments a colony should place in workers, queens, and males in order to optimize Darwinian fitness over a range of ecological conditions. If you knew the equations,…
awild | February 26, 2009A comment left on this blog last week alerted me to the sublime glasswork of artist Wesley Fleming. Wow. Not only are the pieces aesthetically stunning, they are also largely anatomically accurate. Legs attached to the right spots, tarsal segments counted out, tibial spurs in place.
If you have a few minutes, do yourself a favor and visit Fleming's gallery.
awild | February 25, 2009
Solenopsis geminata, the tropical fire ant
The latest upload concerns three species in the subfamily myrmicinae that have been traveling about the globe with human commerce. Solenopsis geminata, the tropical fire ant, is the most worrying of these tramps, but the other two, Pheidole moerens and P. obscurithorax, are rather poorly known and probably merit more study than they receive. Click to visit the gallery.
Incidentally, if I'd known at the time that Solenopsis geminata confers hero status on their collectors, I'd defintely have spent more time pointing them out to everyone within…
awild | February 23, 2009What's new in ant science this week? Lots.
Atopomyrmex mocquerysi, South Africa
Myrmecological News has posted a pair of studies online. The first, by Martin Kenne et al, observe the natural history of one of Africa's most conspicuous yet chronically understudied arboreal ants, Atopomyrmex mocquerysi. The second, by Jim Wetterer, is part of a continuing series on the global spread of pest ants. This installment targets Monomorium destructor.
Onychomyrmex sp., Australia
The Australian Journal of Entomology counters with a pair of its own ant studies. In the first, Hiroki Miyata et…
awild | February 23, 2009
Stenamma sp., California.
This request comes from Michael Branstetter:
I am working on a broad-scale phylogeny of the ant genus Stenamma and am in search of fresh specimens from the Old World. Stenamma is a cryptic genus that is most often collected in forest leaf litter. The genus is primarily Holarctic in distribution, but also has representatives in the New World tropics. Producing a phylogeny of the genus will help me in my quest to better understand the genus as a whole and to revise the Mesoamerican species. In the Old World there are species records from Europe, northern…
awild | February 23, 2009From my inbox, a postdoctoral job announcement:
The Department of Botany, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia seeks to appoint a Postdoctoral Fellow to conduct research in Invasion Biology on Christmas Island. Over the last decade, supercolonies of the invasive yellow crazy ant Anoplolepis gracilipes have spread across island rainforest and caused a variety of significant impacts. High ant densities are consistently associated with high densities of exotic honeydew-secreting scale insects. This project will determine the dependence of ant supercolonies on associated scale insects…
awild | February 22, 2009I've created a set of desktop wallpapers to fit the newer 1680 x 1050 widescreen monitors. To put any of the following on your desktop, click on the image. Once the large version loads to your browser, right-click and select "Set as desktop background."
awild | February 21, 2009
The port at Mobile, Alabama, photographed from across the bay.
The port city of Mobile, Alabama holds special significance for students of ant science. Jo-anne and I took a weekend trip down to the gulf coast in January, and as we are both myrmecologists we felt compelled to stop and take a few photographs. Not only is Mobile the childhood home of ant guru E. O. Wilson, but the city's docks have been the point of introduction into North America for some notorious pest ants. We'd have neglected our intellectual heritage to just drive through.
Mobile's busy international commerce has…
awild | February 19, 2009
A query from the inbox:
Hi, my question is regarding the gender of the worker ants (and the ant queen). As we all know; they are female, however was this discovered many centuries ago or is this a recent discovery?
I plead ignorance. I know apiculturists had figured out the sex of worker bees in by the late 1700s, and that by the 1800s it was widely accepted that ant workers were also female. But that's the extent of my knowledge.
So I'm punting to my diligent readers. Do any of you know who first observed that ant workers are female?
awild | February 19, 2009
Leptomyrmex rufipes, the red-footed spider ant. Queensland, Australia.
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS D60
ISO 100, 1/200 sec, f/11, flash diffused through tracing paper
awild | February 17, 2009
Pheidole dentata, older worker with larva.
A study out in pre-print by Muscedere, Willey, and Traniello in the journal Animal Behaviour finds little support for a long-held idea that worker ants change specializations to perform different types of work as they age. By creating colonies out of different age classes in the ant Pheidole dentata, the researchers showed that older workers were good at pretty much everything, while younger ants performed only a few tasks, but did those less efficiently. Here is the abstract:
Age-related task performance, or temporal polyethism, is a prominent…