entomology
awild | October 10, 2008Languria sp. Lizard Beetle (Erotylidae), California
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 | October 5, 2008Coccinella septempunctata
This weekend's project: to shoot a beetle in flight. I chose ladybirds not because they are pretty, but because they are the slowiest, clumsiest beetles I could find in any number.  An easy target.
I had a cast of several beetles from two species, the seven-spotted ladybird Coccinella septempunctata and the multi-colored ladybird Harmonia axyridis. I placed the beetles inside a whitebox with a backdrop of leaves, along with my Canon 550 speedlite flash, and tried to capture the beetles as they launched themselves into the air. The timing was tricky, as it…
awild | October 3, 2008
Megacyllene robiniae - Locust Borer
Champaign, Illinois
Goldenrod flowers are a magnet for late summer insects, and among the most spectacular attractions is the locust borer, a wasp-striped longhorn beetle. They gather on the flowers to mate and to feed on pollen.
Megacyllene larvae are pests of black locust trees. Their burrows in the wood damage trees directly, but more seriously, the wounds expose the tree to an even more damaging fungus. Pesty or no, they are charismatic insects and much more cooperative photographic subjects than the ants I usually shoot.
photo details (top 3…
awild | September 29, 2008
Heterospilus sp., head & compound eye, Costa Rica
Here are some shots from my training session this morning at the Beckman Institute's Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). I haven't used SEM for years- wow! Great fun. Click on each image to enlarge.
Heterospilus sp. mesosoma
Heterospilus sp., ovipositor
For contrast, here's a photo of a wasp in the same genus taken with my standard Canon macro gear:
Heterospilus sp. Costa Rica, taken with a Canon 20D dSLR & macro lens
We'll be deciding over the coming months which type of images to use for our project. As you can see,…
awild | September 27, 2008Atta 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 26, 2008The lab I work in at the University of Illinois has recently acquired funding for several graduate student positions. If you are considering a career in taxonomy, genomics, phylogenetics, biodiversity, tropical ecology, or parasitoid wasps, click here for information about the positions.
Ponder the following: you'd get your graduate degree from one of the finest entomology institutions in the world. Plus, it's paid for. And, if you choose the Heterospilus project, you'll get the rare honor of working with, um, me.
awild | September 26, 2008Popillia japonica - Champaign, Illinois
The ever colorful Popillia japonica has been in North America for nearly a century. In spite of an unmistakable charisma, the charms of this unintentional visitor are largely lost among the ruins of chewed up rose bushes, grape vines, and raspberry plants left in its wake. This beetle is a serious pest, and I don't know many gardeners who have welcomed its spread across the continent.
For those with a camera, however, Japanese beetles are hard-to-resist eye candy. The insects' metallic surfaces render photography a bit tricky, though, as glare…
awild | September 24, 2008Can't devote much to blogging at the moment, but since we're feeling sorry for the dipterists this week here's a fly for you to look at:
Gall Midge, Cecidomyiidae - California
Maybe one of you fly folks could explain in the comments why Cecidomyiids are so cool. Aside from looking like little fairies, that is.
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 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…
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, 2008Platythyrea 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 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 12, 2008
Prionocyphon Marsh Beetle (Scirtidae)
New York
Scirtidae is a small family of mostly small beetles found in wet, swampy habitats all over the world. Taxonomists find them to be difficult creatures, the larvae are archaic in appearance but the adults share some similarities with the elateriforms- click beetles, fireflies, and the like. Recent research based on ribosomal DNA sequences showed why their evolutionary relationships have been so hard to peg. Rather than fitting neatly inside one of the 4 beetle suborders, these insects are surprisingly old, diverging from the lineage that led…
awild | September 10, 2008
Meet the European Paper Wasp, Polistes dominulus. Or is it Polistes dominula? Most biologists I know refer to this common Holarctic insect as P. dominulus, but I've just learned via Bugguide.net that the common spelling is a grammatical misunderstanding of the original latin:
Explanation of Names
Female ruler, lady, mistress:
From Latin dominus- "lord, ruler, master" (related English words: dominion, domain, dominate) + the diminutive suffix -ul- which adds the meaning "little", and a feminine ending.
Until recently treated as an adjective describing the masculine noun "Polistes",…
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!