ants
awild | July 2, 2009A while back, Mike Kaspari asked me if I might be able to produce an image that really captures the essence of the leaf litter ant fauna*. A conceptual shot that would be useful for presentations and the like. It wasn't immediately clear how to do this, as the leaf litter is a dark, dark place. Most of the inhabitants are blind. Not many photons there for a photographer to work with, and lighting it up with a flash sort of kills the native ambiance.
In any case, while in Florida I sat down with a charismatic Strumigenys trap-jaw ant and tried a few things. I came up with this:…
sjurvetson | June 26, 2009As I prepare to hand off this photoblog to Cobalt123, I thought I would share my favorite non-rocket photos. Each clicks through to a story or geeky observation.
Last Thoughts
Magic Toes
Fire & Ice
A Beautiful Computation
in the Wolfram sense
Curiosity
Diamond Age & Eyes
and even some people
Namaste.
awild | June 26, 2009A few months ago we learned via an unintentionally leaked press release that a team of researchers lead by Nicole Gerardo and Cameron Currie had won a Roche Applied Sciences grant competition. The team will be sequencing the complete genome of 14 players from the ant/fungus/microbe co-evolutionary system, including three attine ants from different genera.
The announcement is now official.
An Acromyrmex queen, with brood, in the fungus garden
awild | June 25, 2009
Paratrechina Nylanderia phantasma
Archbold Biological Station, Florida
Here's an ant I almost didn't notice. Paratrechina Nylanderia phantasma is one of the least known insects in North America, active at night and restricted to a particular type of sandy soil in Florida. Workers are only a couple millimeters long and the color of sand. In the field they appear as ghostly little shapes skirting across the ground, scarcely visible even to those looking for them.
Incidentally, N. phantasma was named and described by James Trager, a frequent commentator here at Myrmecos Blog. Perhaps, if…
awild | June 24, 2009...when I disappeared to Argentina recently, I was with my wife.
Here she is, collecting ants in the mountains near Tafà de Valle:
photo details: Canon 17-40mm f4.0 L lens on a Canon EOS 20D
ISO 400, 1/250 sec, f11.0, with circular polarizer & gradient filter
on-camera fill flash
awild | June 23, 2009
An ant, climbing from the pit of a predatory ant lion.
The predator, buried in sand at the base of the pit, hurls a volley of debris towards its target.
Caught in the falling sand, the ant slides back into the pit.
The ant tries to escape, and again the unseen predator hurls a load of sand into her path.
No matter which way the ant turns, the ant lion adjusts its aim, sending up clouds of sand and preventing the ant from gaining traction on the steep walls of the pit.
In the end, the ant lion wins.
A tight crop of the previous image shows the jaws of the ant lion reaching up…
awild | June 22, 2009
Pogonomyrmex badius
The Archbold Biological Station hosts 100+ species of ants. Here are a few of them.
Trachymyrmex septentrionalis
Platythyrea punctata
Strumigenys rogeri
Cyphomyrmex rimosus (queen)
Dorymyrmex bureni
Brachymyrmex obscurior
Paratrechina longicornis
Xenomyrmex floridanus
Cardiocondyla emeryi
Camponotus floridanus
Pachycondyla stigma
Pheidole dentigula
Pyramica eggersi
Pseudomyrmex gracilis, with larva
awild | June 20, 2009So when we say ants can teach us something, itâs not that we should all aspire to live like an ant. That would be horrible. What ants can teach is that networks of labor distribution, where communications are good and where each groupâs work benefits the other, are effective.
Read the whole thing at the New York Times.
(Yes, I know I'm late in posting this. But I just returned from the field late last night...)
pontiff | June 19, 2009
Ant 1: Protect the queen!
Ant 2: Which one's the queen?
Ant 3: I'm the queen!
Ant 1: No you're not!
Homer: Nooo! [his head smashed the colony, and the ants float free]
Ant 1: Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!
Buzz: You fool! Now we may never know if ants can be trained to sort tiny screws in space.
awild | June 18, 20091. Temnothorax curvispinosus
2. Polyergus sp. nr. breviceps
3. Aphaenogaster tenneesseensis (queen)
4. Aphaenogaster fulva/rudis complex
5. Camponotus pennsylvanicus
6. Pyramica reflexa
awild | June 16, 2009As in the previous quiz, these ants are all found in Illinois:
#1
#2
#3
#4
#5
#6
Answers will be posted on Thursday.
awild | June 15, 2009A recent study by Gabriela Pirk in Insectes Sociaux provides me with an excuse to share this photo:
Minor workers of the seed harvester Pheidole spininodis (left) and the predatory Pheidole bergi lock jaws in combat. Jujuy, Argentina.
Pirk et al examined the diet of both Pheidole species in the Monte desert of Northern Argentina. Why would someone spend time doing this?  Ants are important dispersers of seeds, and these Pheidole are two of the most abundant seed-eating ants of the region. What they do with the seeds, which ones they choose to take, and how far they take them has…
awild | June 11, 2009
Image by Flickr user traviswilcoxen
Tomorrow morning I leave for a week at the Archbold Biological Station in the scrublands of central Florida. Archbold is a magical place filled with charmingly unique plants and animals. I spent a summer there in 1995; this will be my first visit since then. With any luck I'll return with a pile of new photographs. On the list to shoot: the Florida harvester ant, Platythyrea punctata, and a couple scrub endemics like the graceful Dorymyrmex elegans.
I've pre-scheduled a few posts while I'm away so the blog won't go quiet, but I may be slow…
awild | June 9, 2009You might recall how much I dislike DNA barcoding.
So you can imagine my frustration when, in spite of my best efforts to mount an empirical demonstration of what a waste of time it is, the technique turns out to be extraordinarily useful. I've been processing sequence data all day from the barcoding gene (COI) for a set of 7 Pheidole species distributed from Costa Rica to Argentina. The results are in hand, and here are the pairwise genetic distances:
See that blank spot in the middle? That shouldn't be there. If barcoding didn't work, that is.
For this sample of ants, then, any two…
awild | June 9, 2009Josh King writes in with the following:
Subject: Arthropod specimens available for analysis from large experiments in long-leaf pine forests.
We have material from 8100 pitfalls available for anyone (including enterprising students or post-docs) interested in studying the effect of disturbance or fire ant invasion on ground-dwelling arthropods in a variety of habitats.Â
We simply do not have the time to sort this material any time in the near future and we would prefer it not languish on a shelf for decades. The majority of this experimental work was conducted in and near the Apalachicola…
awild | June 9, 2009at the Washington Post:
This is the multi-generational public exhibition mentality at work: Every show should have something that makes each member of the family say wow. Ants fight, ants work, ants make things. Ants are just like us: "Text messaging is out, but they have other ways to communicate . . . " Which would be pheromones, or chemical signals, something Aristotle never could have detected when he distinguished merely social animals from the social animal par excellence, man, who can speak.
Details on the exhibit here.
awild | June 9, 2009
Aphaenogaster workers tasting the elaiosome of a bloodroot seed. Illinois.
Some plants have come to rely so heavily on ants to spread their seeds about that they offer the insects a tasty treat in exchange for the dispersal service. Seeds of these species bear a lipid-filled structure called an elaiosome, whose sole function appears to be the attraction of ants. A recent study suggests that plant lineages dependent on ants in this way speciate more rapidly than related ant-free lineages.
photo details (both photos): Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 50D
ISO 100, 1/160 sec…
grrlscientist | June 9, 2009tags: The Ant Whisperer, ants, hymenoptera, pheromones, EO Wilson, behavioral ecology, sociobiology, evolution, streaming video
If I owned a television, you can bet I'd be watching this Nova program on PBS tonight: The Lord of the Ants. This program describes some of EO Wilson's amazing discoveries about ant communication, behavioral ecology and evolution [3:40]
awild | June 7, 2009I sometimes get requests for stylistic pictures of dead ants. From pest control industry folks, usually. And I always have to beg off. Somehow, with my global image library of hundreds of different ant species, I've had nothing but live insects. Dead bugs never held much aesthetic appeal, I guess.
Well, Pest Control People. Just for you I've sold out. Here, at last, is your ex-ant.
(Incidentally, this ant wasn't even dead. It was knocked out with CO2 and walked off 5 minutes later.)
awild | June 6, 2009
Pyramica (or is it Strumigenys?) rostrata, Illinois
I've been thinking today about the Wikipedia edits to the Pyramica page, and my curiosity about the controversy prodded me to attempt a quick phylogenetic analysis. Before I get to the analysis, though, here is some background.
The Ants. Forests in warmer regions around the world hold a great number of tiny, sluggish ants covered with bizarre hairs of unknown function. These oddly ornate little insects are predators of other arthropods. Mites, springtails, and the like. Because of their size, their preference for below-ground…