ants
awild | December 1, 2009
Cephalotes grandinosus, an herbivorous ant
Why are there so many ants?
This is a more perplexing question than it may seem. At first glance ants are predators and scavengers. Yet predators should be few in number, balanced on a narrow trophic peak and depending on high prey biomass to exist. Why are terrestrial ecosystems dominated by these little hunters?
A landmark study several years ago by Dinah Davidson provided an answer: many ants are not predators at all. They're herbivores. Sure, they snack now and again on flesh. But ants get most of their energy from plants, either…
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…
zooillogix | November 30, 2009An Indonesian Zooillogix reader, Harianto Talim, grossly overestimated our entomological abilities and asked us to help him identify an Indonesian ant that he has never seen before. In this blurry series of photos, you can see that the ant is bright orange and green and may or may not smoke cigarettes. It should be noted however that when confronted about the lighter in the ant's pocket by its mother, the queen, the ant claimed it just carries the lighter around to light other ants' cigarettes to look cool.
So nerdy readers, time to prove your mettle by identifying this random blurry ant!…
awild | November 23, 2009
Azteca instabilis, Guatemala
An urgent bleg to Myrmecos readers:
If you have recent collections of Azteca ants suitable for molecular work, and you can mail them out within the week, please consider sending me any samples you can spare. I'd be especially grateful for species like Azteca instabilis, A. trigona, or A. velox that do not live in Cecropia.
Why the rush? I am writing an NSF grant with a group of ecologists and plant systematists to look at evolutionary patterns in the famous Cecropia-Azteca ant-plant system. To make our case to NSF we need preliminary data as a proof of…
awild | November 22, 2009
Sericomyrmex ants in a laboratory fungus garden
The textbook version of the leafcutter ant and its fungus is a simple story: attine ants cultivate an edible fungus in their nests. They are obligate farmers, eating only the fungus, and the fungus is a specialized cultivar found only in ant nests.
It's a nice tale, but as researchers probe deeper they continually uncover just how complex the ant-fungus interaction is. For example, about a decade ago Cameron Currie discovered that ants employ bacterial antibiotics to keep the garden clean of diseases. Microbes, too, are integral to the…
edyong | November 21, 2009
Hardly a natural history documentary goes by without some mention of leafcutter ants. So overexposed are these critters that I strongly suspect they're holding David Attenborough's relatives to ransom somewhere. But there is good reason for their fame - these charismatic insects are incredibly successful because of their skill as gardeners.
As their name suggests, the 41 species of leafcutter ants slice up leaves and carry them back to their nests in long columns of red and green. They don't eat the leaves - they use them to grow a fungus, and it's this crop that they feed on. It's an old…
awild | November 17, 2009
The chaotic evolution of colony size in ants. (Tree re-analyzed from Brady et al 2006, colony data taken from Hoelldobler & Wilson 1990 and other sources)
This tree depicts how colony size evolves in ants. The purple/blue colors represent small colonies with only a few to a few dozen ants, while the yellows and oranges represent species with enormous colonies of tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals. What's exciting about this rainbow-colored figure?
If you were expecting ant evolution to be an inexorable march towards larger and more complex societies, this tree should…
awild | November 16, 2009from an interview with Survivor contestant Kelly Sharbaugh:
When your name showed up, you looked flabbergasted, shocked, dumbfounded.
All of the above. I had no idea that Russell had the idol. When [host Jeff Probst] said my name, I was like. âWhat just happened? What did I do?â I was so emotional because I was so unprepared. I didnât even wear my favorite boots to tribal because the thought that I could go never crossed my mind.
Did you ever get them back?
No, fire ants nested in them so I left them in Samoa and after the tsunami Iâm pretty sure they got washed away.
Good for Kelly, I say,…
awild | November 12, 2009
Ross Crozier last week at the Chicago Field Museum
I learned this morning that pioneering ant biologist Ross Crozier has passed away. This is terrible news, and entirely unexpected.
Ross- a soft-spoken Australian- ushered social insects into the age of molecular biology. He karyotyped hundreds of ant species. He sequenced the honeybee mitochondrial genome. He documented natural selection in ant immune genes. He studied colony structure in termites, and speciation in ants. There's almost nothing in social insect genetics that Ross didn't do first.
Ross's passing is quite a shock-…
awild | November 11, 2009Solenopsis pergandei queen and workers
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
awild | November 10, 2009
An oversized tyrannosaur photo-bombs the Global Ant Project group portrait, November 5-7 2009 at the Chicago Field Museum (photo by Darolyn Striley).
Last week I attended a conference ambitiously titled "Global Ant Project synthesis meeting II". Partly, I went out of curiosity about what this "Global Ant Project" might be. But mostly, I went for the chance to catch up with old myrmecological friends, eavesdrop on the latest ant gossip, and visit Chicago's fabulous Field Museum of Natural History. How'd it go? Mission accomplished on all counts. You can see my photos of the event…
awild | October 28, 2009I'm busy today with lab work. But if you need an ant blog fix, let me point you in the direction of "Historias de Hormigas" ("Stories of Ants"). It's a Spanish blog by José MarÃa Gómez Durán, and the current entry is an amazing series of action shots documenting an ant-hunting Crabronid wasp.
awild | October 27, 2009
A Solenopsis invicta queen attempts to escape a pair of tormentors
Life is perilous for young ant queens. This fire ant (Solenopsis invicta) is being pursued by native Forelius ants after her mating flight in central Florida. She frantically climbs a grass blade to escape, but to no avail- the attackers follow. She will make an excellent source of protein to feed the Forelius larvae.
Two larger points about this photo. First, establishing new colonies is tremendously difficult. The founding stage is when most colony-level mortality happens, and this excessive mortality is why ant nests…
awild | October 21, 2009
Click to Gigapan this Linepithema ant head
Gigapan is a technology that stitches together hundreds of individual images to form a massive single image. It's hard to appreciate its power from just the small SEM image shown above, but if you click on the photo you'll be able to zoom to a marvelous level of detail.
More clickable gigapan ants below the fold.
awild | October 21, 2009Over at the Ant Farm Forum they're having another round of Name That Ant:
the mystery ant - photo by forum participant 'Harpegnathos'
Lodge your answer here.
While I'm on the topic of the Ant Farm Forum... The internet strikes me as a tremendous boon for ant enthusiasts. Anting is not one of those hobbies like, say, model rocketry or gardening, with sufficient interest to sustain local clubs that meet regularly. So ant people have historically carried out their activities in solitude.
Now that the internet allows ant enthusiasts from around the world to interact, it's probably much…
awild | October 19, 2009
Formica obscuripes
Trophallaxis- the social sharing of regurgitated liquids- is a fundamental behavior in the biology of most ant colonies. One ant approaches another, asks for a droplet of food, and if her partner is willing the two spend anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes in what is best described as a myrmecological french kiss. The behavior is so central to the life of ants that the insects have an entire stomach, separate from their digestive gut, devoted as a reservoir for social sharing.
Although the act involves a transfer of food, it would be a mistake to think of…
edyong | October 17, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Imagine you get a bad cold, but you decide to put on a brave face and go into work anyway. Instead of jokingly covering their mouths and making jibes about staying away from you, your colleagues act perfectly normally and some even and start rubbing up against you. It's a weird scenario, but not if you were an ant.
With their large colonies and intense co-operation, ants are some of the most successful animals on the planet. But like all social insects and animals, their large group sizes make them…
awild | October 16, 2009
Tetraponera merita Ward 2009, Madagascar
Tetraponera merita Ward 2009 is one of many aculeate species described in the pages of a new festschrift honoring Roy Snelling. I can't link to it, unfortunately, as the festschrift is printed the latest issue of the paper-only Journal of Hymenoptera Research.
All the same, if you can get your hands on a copy the effort is worth it, especially for a touching biography penned by Jack Longino and Roy's son, Gordon Snelling. The festschrift also holds a couple dozen articles spanning the ecology, chemistry, evolution, and systematics across a broad…