Insect Links
awild | August 1, 2008
Strategus aloeus - Ox Beetles, female (left) and male
Arizona, USA
Impressive pronotal horns mark the male in these sexually dimorphic scarabs. Strategus aloeus is found in the southern United States from Florida to Arizona.
photo details, top photo: Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon 20D
f/9, 1/200sec, ISO 100, indirect strobe in a white box
bottom photo: Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon 20D
f/14, 1/200sec, ISO 200, indirect strobe in a white box
awild | July 31, 2008
Harpegnathos saltator - Jumping Ant
I thought I would have to travel all the way to India (the horror!) to photograph one of the world's most charming insects, the jumping ant Harpegnathos saltator. But I recently learned that myrmecologist Juergen Liebig, a professor at Arizona State University, maintains dozens of captive colonies in his lab in Phoenix. Juergen studies these ants' rather unusual behavior. Unlike most ants that show a clear division between reproductive queens and sterile workers, Harpegnathos workers can mate and produce fertile offspring, leading to soap opera-style…
awild | July 25, 2008
Cotinus mutabilis - Fig Beetle
Tucson, Arizona
A few weeks ago we started noticing these giant green scarabs flying about Tucson. They're about the same size and clumsiness in the air as carpenter bees, but brilliant green in color. My wife- a bit of a bug geek herself- was given a few for her birthday last year by one of her customers at the market where she works.
If you ever encounter a fig beetle larva, be prepared for something truly weird. They ignore the fact that they have legs and walk upside-down, lying on their backs, their little legs pointed up.
photo details, top photo:…
awild | July 21, 2008Oecophylla weaver ants are exceptionally cooperative subjects for photography, allowing for plenty of experimentation with lighting while the ants preen and pose. While developing the photographs from South Africa I discovered that strong backlighting allows a crystal-clear view of the tracheal system:
Oecophylla longinoda, St. Lucia, KZN, South Africa
The tracheae are visible as dark canals running through the body. These connect to the outside air in a series of circular spiracles and are essentially the lungs of the insect, channeling oxygen to the respiring cells and carrying away…
awild | July 19, 2008I've had a week to digest the International Congress of Entomology (ICE) meeting held earlier this month in Durban, South Africa. Thousands of diverse presentations happening in 15 parallel sessions cannot easily be summed up in a single blog post, so I'll stick to a few of my own impressions of the conference.
First, the bad. Durban was a terrible location.
Lovely beaches aside, the city was not safe. Several people were mugged outside their hotels, and there is nothing relaxing about having to watch your back when venturing off the conference grounds. The crime had a surpressive effect…
awild | July 18, 2008
Apatides fortis (Bostrichidae), the Horned Powder-Post Beetle
Tucson, Arizona
These robust wood-boring beetles have been common at my blacklight in early monsoon season. Good thing, too. We collected a few for the Beetle Tree of Life study, and they've been one of the easier beetles to produce DNA sequence for our project.
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon 20D
ISO 100, f/14, 1/250 sec
indirect strobe in a white box
awild | July 17, 2008
Leptogenys attenuata
In spite of the southern winter, the coastal forests of Kwazulu-Natal had plenty of ant activity to keep me occupied last week. In addition to the beautiful Polyrhachis I posted earlier, here are portraits of a few of the species I encountered.
Crematogaster tricolor
Platythyrea cooperi
Myrmicaria natalensis
Plectroctena mandibularis
Anochetus faurei
Oecophylla longinoda (African Tailor Ant)
Cataulacus brevisetosus
Dorylus helvolus
Pachycondyla (Bothroponera) mlanjiensis
Atopomyrmex mocquerysi
Pheidole megacephala (Big-Headed Ant)
Solenopsis geminata (…
awild | July 17, 2008Among the more charismatic ants I saw during my visit to South Africa was a silver Polyrhachis that seemed all too happy to pose for me. With such an unusually cooperative subject, I was able to experiment with several different arrangements of the flash heads on my MT-24EX twin flash. Compare these two shots, differing only in the placement of one of the two heads:
Polyrhachis schlueteri, St. Lucia, KZN, South Africa
The top photo is the clear winner. The MT-24EX has detachable heads, and what I did here was remove one of them and hand-hold it under the leaf, facing upward at the ant.…
awild | July 16, 2008Who was that waspy-looking male ant I posted last week?
Cephalotes rohweri, the Arizona Turtle Ant. Workers like like this:
awild | July 14, 2008While I was away the Photoshelter blog posted a recent interview I did with Allen Murabayashi, the company's CEO. You can read it here, and I've also pasted it below the fold.
I don't market my photos through an agency- my own sites work pretty well- but if I did, Photoshelter is one of the first companies I'd consider. They've navigated the emerging internet market more successfully than the traditional photo agency giants like Getty and Corbis, but unlike the microstocks they also pay their photographers decently.
Alex Wild is a biologist at the University of Arizona with a doctorate in…
awild | July 8, 2008
After a stroll through a Palo Verde woodland in the Tucson mountains I returned to my car to find this male ant sitting on the roof. I didn't immediately recognize it, and several hours later, after I figured it out, I wished I'd stuck around to looks for queens. What is it? I'll provide the answer next week.
Update: the answer!
awild | July 4, 2008
Chrysina (=Plusiotis) gloriosa - The Glorious Beetle
Huachuca Mountains, Arizona
Few of Arizona's beetles are as spectacular as the jewel scarabs in the genus Chrysina. They are most readily collected by blacklight (as in Kojun's handful o' beetles) in juniper forests in the weeks following the arrival of the monsoon.
photo details: Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon 20D
Indirect strobe fired into white box
awild | June 28, 2008
A close-in crop of the body:
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon 20D
ISO 100, f/13, 1/250sec exposure
awild | June 27, 2008
Yesterday's unexpectedly intense monsoon storms brought several inches of rain and flash floods to Tucson. Many of our desert ants cue their mating flights with the onset of the summer rains, and this morning the Forelius were flying, congregating in dense swarms that twirled and twisted above the desert floor.
Males emerge from the nest, ready to go:
photo details: (flight photos) Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon 20D
ISO 100, f/2.8, 1/800sec exposure
(close-ups) Canon MP-E 65mm macro lens on a Canon 20D
ISO 100, f/13, 1/250sec exposure, twin flash diffused through tracing…
awild | June 23, 2008Via GTDA comes this mesmerizing time lapse video demonstrating the efficiency of ant recruitment:
awild | June 22, 2008 A century ago, William Morton Wheeler inked this iconic illustration of the striking polymorphism displayed among members of an ant colony. You may have seen it; Andrew Bourke and Nigel Franks used it as the cover for their 1995 text Social Evolution in Ants.
I always assumed Wheeler's figure depicted some exotic tropical marauder ant, a voracious jungle species with massive soldiers for slicing up hapless prey. I don't read captions carefully enough, I guess, because I learned recently that this charismatic creature is actually a local harvester ant, Pheidole tepicana. Not only that, but…
awild | June 5, 2008
Derobrachus hovorei - Palo Verde Borer
Cerambycidae
Tucson, Arizona
Every June, hundreds of thousands of giant beetles emerge from beneath the Tucsonian soil. The enormous size of these beetles- up to several inches long- makes them among the most memorable of Tucson's insects. They cruise about clumsily in the evenings, flying at eye level as they disperse and look for mates.
Palo Verde beetles spend most of their lives as subterranean grubs feeding on the roots of Palo Verde trees. Adults emerge in early summer, usually ahead of the monsoon, and by August they are gone.
It is still a…
awild | June 1, 2008
Taxonomists are busy, busy people. Their efforts in the year 2006 have just been released by Arizona State University's Institute for Species Exploration. Within insects, here's the breakdown by order:
The Institute has also compiled a whimsical "Top Ten" list of their favorite new species.
source: International Institute for Species Exploration. 2008. The Status of Observed Species Report 2008. online at http://species.asu.edu/pdf/sos.pdf
awild | May 31, 2008
30 years ago, biologists thought they'd solved one of Darwin's thorniest problems, the evolution of sterile social insects:
No doubt many instincts of very difficult explanation could be opposed to the theory of natural selection,âcases, in which we cannot see how an instinct could possibly have originated...I will not here enter on these several cases, but will confine myself to one special difficulty, which at first appeared to me insuperable, and actually fatal to my whole theory. I allude to the neuters or sterile females in insect-communities: for these neuters often differ widely in…