ants
awild | October 2, 2008
Prenolepis imparis - The Winter Ant
Champaign, Illinois
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
awild | October 1, 2008
Lachnomyrmex amazonicus - Feitosa and Brandão 2008
The new world tropics continue to be a rich source of species discovery. Today's issue of Zootaxa contains a monograph by Rodrigo Feitosa and Beto Brandão revising the ant genus Lachnomyrmex, a small yet delightfully wrinkled group of soil-dwelling ants. Of the 16 species recognized in the new paper, ten were previously unknown. For the mathematically-challenged, that's more than half.
Lachnomyrmex amazonicus, pictured above, is one of the new species. It has been recorded from lowland humid forests in the states of Amazonas, Para…
awild | September 30, 2008...are queens in the African driver ant genus Dorylus, captured on video here:
awild | September 27, 2008
Atta texana queen and worker
Ant queens are those individuals in a nest that lay the eggs. They're pretty important, of course, as without reproduction the colony dwindles and disappears.
Understandably, ant-keepers have an interest in making sure their pet colonies have queens. Conversely, pest control folks trying to get rid of ant colonies need to be sure that they've eliminated queens. Whether your interest is live ants or dead ants, I'll give some pointers in this post for recognizing queens.
In many species the difference between workers and queens is obvious. Consider the…
awild | September 23, 2008
Battle of the Pavement Ants, definitely not Tetramorium caespitum
While walking through the park yesterday, I happened across a sidewalk boundary dispute between two colonies of Pavement Ants. As is their habit, these little brown ants opted to dispense with diplomacy in favor of all-out warfare.
Incidentally, if I had to pick one thing that annoys me about the purely molecular systematists, it is their tendency to avoid dealing with the taxonomic consequences of their work. A recent paper by Schlick-Steiner et al (2006) gave a detailed picture of the genetic structure within the…
awild | September 22, 2008
Relevant to our earlier discussion, google search statistics suggest "flies" should be able to hold their own against "ants" in the public eye.
Caveat: additional meanings of "flies" (such as, the conjugate of the verb " to fly") may overestimate the fly tally.
awild | September 20, 2008
Dipterist Keith Bayless exposes a pernicious case of media bias:
Six new families of Diptera were described from newly discovered species in the last 6 years! None of these flies received the press coverage given to Martialis. There are a variety of explanations for this, including that
1) The fly descriptions were published in lower profile journals than PNAS
2) Many of the the new fly families evolved more recently than the first ant in the Martialis lineage
3) The level of public and scientific interest in ants inclines them to be better covered or
4) People who study ants are better at…
bleimanb | September 18, 2008Subterranean...blind...predatory...smokin' hot AILF! These are all adjectives that you could use to describe a newly discovered ant from the Amazon rainforest. Dubbed the Martialis heureka or "Ant from Mars" (not kidding), the sightless creature lives inside the soil and presumably hunts prey with massive mandibles. The Ant from Mars also represents a new subfamily of ant, a discovery that hasn't happened since 1923 (Note: see comments for various competing view points).
Take me to your watermelon.
After evaluating the DNA of the ant, researchers have concluded that this ant is on the bottom…
awild | September 18, 2008Speaking of bad science reporting...
Not the right ant.
Nope.
Camponotus? You've gotta be kidding.
It isn't Lasius, either.
Nor Ectatomma. (And isn't that Corrie Moreau's copyrighted photo?).
awild | September 18, 2008The New York Times has a short piece on the discovery of Martialis and the story behind the name.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/science/18ant.html
The annotated specimen photo seems an effective way to point out key parts of the insect. I've got to say, I'm continually impressed by the extra effort the NY Times puts into their science reporting. They're a bright point in a sea of science reporting mediocrity.
awild | September 17, 2008
Platythyrea pilosula - Image by April Nobile/Antweb
Yesterday, the above photograph was uploaded to Antweb's databases.  Platythyrea pilosula is the final species to be imaged for the Ants of Paraguay project, marking the end of a sporadic and meandering study that I started in 1995 as a hobby during my stint in the Peace Corps. After combining several years' worth of my field collections with the holdings at 19 entomological museums, I tallied 541 species for the country. This turns out to be too many species to keep track of in my head (I max out at about 300 or so), so I've found…
awild | September 16, 2008Here's something that bugs me. Instead of emphasizing the real significance of the find, a discovery like the "Mars ant" Martialis heureka is usually condensed down to "Wow, this ant is weird!".
I've pasted below a sampling of leads:
Newly-Discovered Bizarre Ant - Boing Boing
'Ant From Mars' Discovered in Amazon Rainforest - Fox News
'Ant from Mars' found in Amazon jungle - Science News
But weirdness misses the point. We have weird ants already. The suicidal exploding Camponotus is plenty weird. So are the gliding ants, and the ants that swim. The real story here is the…
awild | September 15, 2008Martialis heureka Rabeling & Verhaagh 2008
drawing by the inimitable Barrett Klein for PNAS
Most scientific discoveries these days emerge through carefully planned and controlled research programs. Every now and again, though, something unexpected just pops up in a distant tropical jungle. Martialis heureka is a fantastic discovery of that old-fashioned kind. This little ant simply walked up to myrmecologist Christian Rabeling in the Brazilian Amazon. It is not only a new species, but an entirely different sort of ant than anything known before.
The remarkable find was…
awild | September 14, 2008
Pheidole megacephala
Go see!
Incidentally, you might want to surf back here to Myrmecos Blog on Monday afternoon. There's been a very, very exciting discovery...
awild | September 14, 2008
Camponotus castaneus
Champaign, Illinois
I photographed this ant's nest yesterday afternoon. A couple hundred large, orange ants with piles of silken cocoons under a board in the park next to our house. I feel vaguely guilty about this now, as the soggy remains of Hurricane Ike are blowing through town this morning and everything is underwater. If I disturbed the structure of their nest too much, the ants might not have had time to repair their water-proofing. I suppose I should check in on them again once the weather improves.
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a…
awild | September 9, 2008All the better to steal your brood with, my little red riding ant...
Polyergus
Champaign, Illinois
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 | September 8, 2008Here's an example of the power of evolutionary theory. Suefuji et al just published a paper in Biology Letters describing the relationship between the number of queens in an ant nest and the rearing of new reproductives. That'd be a cool enough paper on its own, but there's more. Evolutionary theory makes some specific predictions about when sexuals ought to be produced under different numbers of queens. If the selfish-gene hypotheses of evolution are true, then nests with multiple queens should race to produce sexual brood earlier than nests with single queens. And that is exactly…
awild | September 8, 2008The much-hyped Encyclopedia of Life has started adding content for the ants, mostly by harvesting photos and text from Antweb. The interface is a little odd, as EoL layers Antweb's up-to-date information over the obsolete ITIS taxonomy, losing taxa whose status has changed over the past decade. We clearly need a centralized taxonomic infrastructure if EoL is going to run smoothly. As it stands, we're still better off just going to Antweb directly.
awild | September 2, 2008I'm on a roll! Myrmecos.net has a new series covering several species of trap-jaw ants:
Go see!