Insect Links

The U.K.-based film company Ammonite has been blogging their ant-filming experiences in Costa Rica and Spain. The glamor of making nature documentaries apparently includes skin parasites and volcano-related travel limbo. The journal Myrmecological News has a trio of new articles, including descriptions of two new myrmicine species. Ted MacRae thinks ant taxonomy is entirely too complicated and proposes an alternative. Ant developmental biologist Ehab Abouheif is featured in a short but excellent documentary (French language). (h/t Archetype). Marvel's Ant-Man inches closer to the big screen…

The magical mystery lump from last night? As many astute readers noted, they are insects in the enigmatic order Strepsiptera.  They live as parasites in the bodies of other insects. Considering the host species (Isodontia mexicana, a sphecid wasp), the streps are probably in the genus Paraxenos.  Here are a couple more shots: Assuming my math is correct, here's your point breakdown: Ted McRae: 20 macromite: 20 Joshua King: 20 Gordon Snelling: 10 Scot Waring: 10 Invictacidal: 10 Chris: 10 tuckerlancaster: 5 I gave ten points for identifying the mystery as a Strepsiptera, five for picking…

Timema sp. stick insect, California I've created a new gallery to hold my photographs of stick insects.  Check it out here: Stick Insect Photos

What's going on here? Five points for naming the organism, and five points for the behavior.

From the amazing BBC series Life in the Undergrowth:

What's this charming creature? Ten points for the first person to get the family name right, too.

fierce competition on wings and chitinous legs: hexapod haiku!

Termite mounds visible in Australia's Northern Territory- I've circled three, but dozens are in the image. Central Illinois still resembles the frozen lifeless tundra, so to get my bug-hunting fix I've been surfing about on Google Earth. Here at -13.066783, 130.847383 I've found something: Australia's magnificent magnetic termites. The green things are trees, but the little black pimply bits?  Those are the termites.  On the ground they look like this: A magnetic termite mound in north Queensland, Australia. Why "magnetic"? The mounds are shaped as thin blades along a north-south…

This looks fun: image source

Mark this on your calendar: February 27 is the 27th annual Insect Fear Film Festival. Hosted by the entomology graduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the festival showcases two (usually terrible) arthropod movies.  This year's delectable offerings are The Black Scorpion (1957) and Ice Crawlers (2003). If bad movies aren't your thing, the festival also has an insect art competition, live insect displays, face painting, and other buggy entertainment.  As way of a preview, Jo-anne posted her pics of last years event here.  I've put the full announcement below:…

Tomorrow's NOVA on PBS covers the great orange butterflies on their migration to Mexico: Orange-and-black wings fill the sky as NOVA charts one of nature's most remarkable phenomena: the epic migration of monarch butterflies across North America. NOVA's filmmakers followed monarchs on the wing throughout their extraordinary odyssey. To capture a butterfly's point of view, camera operators used a helicopter, ultralight, and hot-air balloon for aerial views along the butterflies' transcontinental route.

...and it's about ants, of course: The Trailhead Queen was dead. At first, there was no overt sign that her long life was ending: no fever, no spasms, no farewells. She simply sat on the floor of the royal chamber and died. As in life, her body was prone and immobile, her legs and antennae relaxed. Her stillness alone failed to give warning to her daughters that a catastrophe had occurred for all of them. She lay there, in fact, as though nothing had happened. She had become a perfect statue of herself. While humans and other vertebrates have an internal skeleton surrounded by soft tissue…

Christopher Taylor on the evolution of insect wings Get your fix of the Daily Parasite. Remember Phase IV, the classic '70s ant sci-fi film?  You can now watch the entire movie online. Macromite is back. Entomologists telling jokes, at Bug Girl's blog.

Benoit Guenard notes that 2009 was a busy year for new ant genera The NCSU insect blog has moved to a new URL: http://blog.insectmuseum.org/ Bug Girl blogs snow fleas This is an amazing wasp xkcd shows the difference between movie science and real science Also, this:

Paraneuretus (Formicidae:Aneuretinae), photo by ebay seller rmvveta Here's something unusual for the well-financed collector: Paraneuretus, an extinct genus from a nearly extinct subfamily of ants.  This pair of fossilized worker ants is selling on ebay today for over $400. Out of my budget for these sorts of things. Most amber ants up for auction belong to common extinct species: Azteca, Tapinoma, Camponotus and so forth, usually from the Dominican or Baltic amber deposits and pertaining to extant genera. This is the first aneuretine I've seen. What's interesting about these ants? Well,…

Earlier I listed my pick of the best insect photos of the year taken by other photographers. Now it's my turn. In 2009, I snapped 8000 exposures to produce 805 processed, saleable images of live insects. Below are my favorites. A parasitic Pseudacteon fly targets a fire ant in Argentina Male size variation in Onthophagus dung beetles Aphaenogaster ants are tempted by the elaiosome of a bloodroot seed, Illinois Eastern treehole mosquito larvae, Illinois Trophallaxis in wood ants, Wisconsin Face to face with a giant water bug, Illinois male and female northern walking sticks,…

The annual Entomological Society of America meeting is next week (Dec 13-16) in Indianapolis.  I'm giving two presentations- one on Pheidole and one on Heterospilus- that the sadistic conference organizers scheduled for the very last day when no one is around.   So if you are attending and happen to miss your flight out, consider heading back to the conference center to catch my talks. The 2009 meeting will be a good one for we social insect people.  I am especially looking forward to the Hoelldobler & Wilson symposium, but the rest of the program is packed with goodies. Also. …

Over at IB401, the entomology students are blogging faster than a swarm of locusts in a candy shop*: Caterpillars I have known Beetle's Threat to Baseball Ants on Stilts Pink Mantids! Keeping a Praying Mantis Fig Wasp Beats Deforestation Hungry Crickets Drop by and leave them some comments! *or, whatever.

I'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.

The students of IB 401: Introduction to Entomology here at UI have started a bug blog, and they've taken to it like...um... belostomatids to water. Go pay them a visit and leave some comments.