Insect Links
awild | September 30, 2009The North Carolina Entomological Society has announced their annual photo contest. The deadline to submit your best arthropod shot is October 19th.
awild | September 16, 2009
Lethocerus sp., California
I don't know how I missed it when it came out, but The Dragonfly Woman has a post up on how to identify the three North American genera of giant water bugs. Check it out.
awild | September 15, 2009
Ainsley Seago draws a fungus beetle
Rick Lieder shoots a firefly at sunset
Clay Bolt mows with the dictator
Doug Taron hibernates his butterflies
Bug Girl gets a car crush
awild | August 19, 2009The best way to cook a certain kind of caterpillar and make it taste really nice may not be the very best thing to do with a grasshopper. One you might want to parboil, the other one you might want to stir fry. Iâll give you a good example. A friend of mine and I cooked a certain type of scarab beetle for the first time ever last summer, and we simultaneously boiled, sautéed in a skillet, and toasted them. We all liked the toasted ones best.
-Zach Lemann, the Bug Chef
Philly2Philly has more. Zach Lemann, by the way, is one of the people behind the amazing Insectarium in New Orleans.
awild | May 12, 2009
Eastern Treehole Mosquito
My commercial gallery now has flies!
Diptera photographs at alexanderwild.com
I feel sort of embarassed at how few fly images I have, considering the importance of the group. That's something I'll try to remedy as we get into this summer's photography season.
awild | May 1, 2009..over at Photo Synthesis:
How to attract an entomologist
Agrarian ants
Another way to humanize an insect photo
Ants in the New York Times
Photo technique: the white box
Humanizing the hordes: Anthropomorphism and science photography
awild | February 3, 2009
Mark your calendar. The 26th annual Insect Fear Film Festival will be held February 28th at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This year's theme is "Centipede Cinema".
The film festival is legendary. I've heard about the event for years, and its lineup of bug flicks, live displays, and art contests have received widespread media coverage. Now that I live in Champaign I'll be able to attend my first one.
The announcement:
The Insect Fear Film Festival - scaring the general public with
horrific films and horrific filmmaking since 1984
The…
awild | February 3, 2009
Cyborg beetles. Seriously. (h/t Cicindela)
The Other 95% hosts the Circus of the Spineless #35.
Coleopterist, photographer, and author Art Evans launches a new blog called What's Bugging You?
Archetype illustrates the counterintuitive segmentation of ant body parts.
Beetles in the Bush blogs about dung beetles that have kicked the fecal habit.
Some days I wish I could read Hebrew, because this might be the most awesome blog ever, judging from all the ant pix.
awild | December 31, 2008
A long-tongued horse fly takes a sip of nectar in Arizona's Chiricahua mountains.
100% crop of the same image.
photo details: Canon 65mm MP-E 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 20D
ISO 100, f/13, 1/250 sec, flash diffused through tracing paper
awild | December 28, 2008This morning I was picking through recent ant literature for a 2008 myrmecological retrospective post when I stumbled on this little gem.
Why do autumn leaves change to such striking colors? Kazuo Yamazaki thinks it's all about the ants:
Therefore, bright autumn leaves may have adaptive significance, attracting myrmecophilous specialist aphids and their attending ants and, thus, reducing herbivory and competition among aphids.
I hereby proclaim Kazuo Yamazaki the first recipient of an award in his own name, the Yamazaki "Going Way Out On A Limb" Award, for creative lateral thinking in…
awild | December 16, 2008This just in: Eli Sarnat's "Pacific Invasive Ants" website is up. It's got something for everyone: fact sheets, videos, keys, links.  Eli's got an eye for design, too, so the site is aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate.
http://www.lucidcentral.org/keys/v3/PIAkey/index.html
(postscript: yeah, yeah. Pacific Disturbance Specialist Ants. I know.)
awild | November 23, 2008I've posted enough Friday Beetles that I can no longer remember which species I've already done. Some species were almost posted twice out of sheer forgetfulness. Must be the academic scatter-brain.
So to keep them all straight I've made a list. This is mostly for my own good. In any case, here is the Friday Beetle Directory:
Adranes - Ant-Nest Beetle
Onthophagus gazella - Gazelle Scarab
Dineutes sublineatus - Whirligig Beetle
Lutrochus - Travertine Beetle
Scaphinotus petersi - Snail-eating Beetle
Laccophilus pictus - Predaceous Diving Beetle
Apteroloma caraboides - Snowfield Beetle…
awild | November 22, 2008
I sometimes wonder if a major reason why most people don't really get insects is the difference in pace between how we and how the insects move in the world.
Insects live faster than we do, their everyday motions an erratic, unintelligible blur to our sluggish perceptions. But slow them down so that we can see them on their own terms, and they seem almost as different creatures, more deliberate, more wise, and certainly much less buggy.
awild | November 21, 2008 My copy arrived from Amazon the day before yesterday. I've not given it anything more than a couple cursory thumb-throughs, but I'm immediately left with the impression of schizophrenia.
The bits on social organization, behavior, communication, and levels of selection- mostly Bert Hoelldobler's sections- seem an engaging and modern review, while the chapters dealing with ant history and evolution- Wilson's area- are... How do I say this diplomatically? Rubbish.
The past ten years have brought immeasurable advances in our knowledge of ant evolution, both in breadth and detail. …
awild | November 21, 2008
Priacma serrata - Bleach Beetle
California
Priacma serrata is an enigmatic insect from the conifer forests of western North America and is one of a handful of species belonging to the relictual beetle suborder Archostemata. It is often thought of as a "living fossil", bearing a strong resemblance to the earliest known beetles that pre-date even the dinosaurs.
Males are attracted to the scent of bleach, presumably because it resembles a female pheromone, and are sometimes collected off air-drying laundry. In spite of its unique evolutionary position, the biology of Priacma has not been…
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 18, 2008In the comments, Rob Clack asks:
Iâve just read about Martialis on Pandaâs Thumb and have a question. If I interpret it correctly, your cladogram shows Martialis to be the sister group of all living ants. Since it was blind and many living genera are not, that presumably implies that vision evolved independently within modern ants. I would therefore expect there to be some significant differences between modern ant eyes and those of other hymenoptera.
I assume Iâm missing something.
Rob is referring to this post, going straight to the problem that Martialis seemingly poses for our…