formicidae
awild | March 4, 2010
Who's that odd ant out?
While in sunny Florida last summer (ah, sunshine! I vaguely remember what that looks like), I spent an hour peering into a nest of little Dorymyrmex elegans. These slender, graceful ants are among Florida's more charming insects.
Every few minutes, though, the flow of elegant orange insects out of the nest was interrupted by a darker, more robust ant: Dorymyrmex reginicula. Who was this interloper?
Dorymyrmex reginicula is a temporary social parasite. Mature colonies behave pretty much like normal ants. Workers guard the nest, forage for food, and tend the larvae.…
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 | March 22, 2009From the recent documentary Ants: Nature's Secret Power, a glimpse of how researchers study ant behavior in the lab:
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 6, 2009As if butterflies weren't flamboyant enough already, it seems that some of them actively impersonate queens.
Queen ants, that is. A report by Francesca Barbero et al in today's issue of Science documents a clever strategy employed by a European butterfly, the Mountain Alcon Blue Maculinea rebeli, to infiltrate nests of Myrmica schencki. The immature stages of the butterfly are parasites of ant colonies, and it seems the secret to their success is acoustic mimicry. The larvae and pupae squeak like queens, eliciting preferential treatment from the workers. Here's the abstract:
Ants…
awild | February 4, 2009
The blue-green iridescence on these Iridomyrmex purpureus workers shines from microscopic sculpturing on the ants' cuticle.
I've never taken to the Australian vernacular for one of their most conspicuous insects. The latin Iridomyrmex purpureus translates as "purple rainbow ant", referring both to the base color of the body and to the attractive metallic refractions on the cuticle. But Aussies instead call this colorful species the "meat ant." Crass by comparison.
On the other hand, it'd probably not do my reputation of masculine bravado much good were I to stroll into a dusty pub in…
awild | January 31, 2009
My earlier list of the most-studied ant species contained a few omissions. Here is a more inclusive list:
Ant species sorted by number of BIOSIS-listed publications, 1984-2008
The Top 10 Species
Publications
Solenopsis invicta
984
Linepithema humile
343
Lasius niger
250
Formica rufa
167
Atta sexdens
163
Formica polyctena
160
Solenopsis geminata
151
Myrmica rubra
142
Monomorium pharaonis
121
Atta cephalotes
112
The Rest
Publications
Oecophylla smaragdina
111
Solenopsis richteri
110
Pheidole megacephala
104
Tetramorium "caespitum"
93
Formica…
awild | January 29, 2009
Pheidole moerens, major worker, Louisiana
Pheidole moerens is a small, barely noticeable insect that travels about with human commerce, arriving without announcement and slipping quietly into the leaf litter and potted plants about town.  As introduced ants go, P. moerens is timid and innocuous- it's certainly no fire ant. The species is now present in the southeastern United States, a few places along the west coast, and Hawaii. Conventional wisdom suggests that P. moerens originated in the Greater Antilles, but even though the ant was first described from Puerto Rico a century ago…
awild | November 20, 2008
Atta cephalotes
Leafcutting ants of the genus Atta have perhaps the most complex caste systems of all the social insects. Mature colonies contain millions of workers of varying shapes and sizes. Here are two sisters from opposing ends of the spectrum.
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 20D
ISO 100, f/13, 1/250 sec, flash diffused through tracing paper
awild | November 16, 2008
Pyramica ludovici - KZN, South Africa
I am still working through the South African ant photos I took this July. Progress is slow. I'm not terribly familiar with the African fauna, and the species have to be keyed out and checked against the literature so I can post images with the proper identification. All the same, I'm not 100%.
What I've learned in the process is that Brian Taylor's Ants of Africa site is indispensable. The interface is a bit web-1.0-clunky, but the content is exactly what I need. This morning I keyed the above Pyramica to the pan-African species P. ludovici in…
awild | November 12, 2008
Kaspari et al. discover that coastal ants avoid salt while inland ants can't get enough.
Kaspari, M., Yanoviak, S. P., and Dudley, R. 2008. On the biogeography of salt limitation: a study of ant communities. PNAS early edition, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0804528105.
Barry Bolton and Brian Fisher continue their taxonomic work on the African ponerines in a recent issue of Zootaxa. The paper establishes a new genus, Feroponera.
Bolton, B. & Fisher, B. L. 2008. Afrotropical ants of the ponerine genera Centromyrmex Mayr,…
awild | November 10, 2008
Neivamyrmex army ants attacking a pavement ant, California
I see this morning that Daniel Kronauer has published a review of army ant biology in Myrmecological News. The paper, among other topics, attempts to straighten out some key terminology:
AenEcDo army ant: a connotation free abbreviation that is introduced here to avoid the term "true" army ant. It collectively refers to species in the three subfamilies Aenictinae, Ecitoninae, and Dorylinae and is strictly taxonomically defined.
Army ant: any ant species with the army ant adaptive syndrome.
Army ant adaptive syndrome: a life-…
awild | October 14, 2008
Iridomyrmex reburrus
Highlights from the recent technical literature:
Savanna ants more resistant to fire than forest ants. Parr & Andersen. 2008. Fire resilience of ant assemblages in long-unburnt savanna of northern Australia. Austral Ecology. doi: 10.1111/j.1442-9993.2008.01848
Abstract: Tropical savannas and rainforests contrast in their flammability and the fire resilience of their associated species. While savanna species generally exhibit high resilience to burning, there is much debate about the fire resilience of forest-associated species, and the persistence of forest patches…
awild | October 6, 2008
Phrynoponera transversa Bolton & Fisher 2008
Gabon
Barry Bolton and Brian Fisher have revised the African ponerine genus Phrynoponera, in a monograph appearing today in Zootaxa. Phrynoponera are stout, heavily-armored predatory ants comprising a handful of poorly known species. Bolton and Fisher describe two new species, P. pulchella and P. transversa, to bring the tally of known species to five.
Source: Bolton, B. and B. F. Fisher. 2008. The Afrotropical ponerine ant genus Phrynoponera Wheeler (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Zootaxa 1892: 35-52.
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 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 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 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.