Navel-gazing
awild | April 13, 2009Here's a heat map showing the intensity of Myrmecos blog visitors over the last 24 hours:
As a reminder, I'm blogging this month over at Photo Synthesis. Posts in the past week have included bits on ant diversity, phorid flies, google earth, and whirligig beetles.
awild | April 9, 2009Sorry to keep harping on Hoelldobler & Wilson's The Superorganism. But Wilson's section on ant evolution is so bad, so out of touch with the state of the field that I can't help but to rant.
Both Chapter 7 (The Rise of the Ants) and Chapter 8 (Ponerine Ants: The Great Radiation) are predicated on the argument that certain groups of poneromorph ants form a clade. In defense of this assumption, Wilson writes (page 322):
...Barry Bolton has recently split Ponerinae into seven subfamilies (Ponerinae, Amblyponinae, Ectatomminae, Heteroponerinae, Paraponerinae, Proceratiinae, and the fossil…
awild | April 6, 2009This weekend's various themes included hard drive failure, federal income taxes, and a wayward National Geographic film crew. We've put out most of the larger fires, but at the expense of blogging, I'm afraid.
On the bright side, we have some exciting news to announce in a day or two.
awild | March 3, 2009We're a little bit hectic behind the scenes here at Myrmecos Blog. I seem to have recovered from the flu, finally, and that means a week of work catch up on. That, and I'm leaving for Argentina in a few days. It's a conspiracy of deadlines, so you'll have to bear with us while we work through it.
awild | February 26, 2009
I've never understood the controversy over the Superorganism concept. It isn't as though organisms themselves are all that clear-cut, especially when considering oddities like social amoebas and lichens.
photo details: Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon EOS D60
ISO 400, 1/10 sec, f/2.8
awild | February 24, 2009If you're wondering why I've been posting more than usual the last couple days, it's because I'm home with the flu. When wrapped in blankets and doped up on Sudafed it's a lot easier to futz around on the internet than attempt any actual work.
It turns out that flu levels are at their highest point for the season. I know this through Google's Flu Trends, one of the company's cleverest applications. It seems someone noticed that activity levels of certain search terms correlate tightly with CDC's official flu statistics, but lead CDC's estimates by two weeks. Amazing.
awild | February 17, 2009
The Taliban Beetle, a specimen at the Naturhistorisches Museum Basel, Switzerland.
Meet the Taliban Beetle.
I took this picture in 2004 while visiting the collections at the Natural History Museum in Basel, Switzerland. For reasons I was unable to discern, a coleopterist working in the collection in the late 1990's had intended to name this new Afghani ground beetle after the country's ruling party at the time. Whether he came to regret this decision in the post 9/11 world, I do not know.
No formal description of the Taliban beetle was ever printed. So despite the official looking…
awild | February 6, 2009
I'm hoping the stimulus bill includes a research allocation towards figuring out why "Your Argument is Invalid" can be hilarious and inexplicably odd at the same time.
(h/t Bug Girl)
awild | February 3, 2009Since the device we commonly use to capture insects is called an aspirator, does that mean the insects we collect are aspirations?
Discuss.
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 | January 14, 2009From the Small Science Collective comes a little zine about ants:
The idea, I guess, is that printable pamphlets are ideal for scattering about in public places. Or as handouts during door-to-door myrmeco-evangelism.
awild | December 6, 2008
Macrophotography, as applied to Mingus the Cat.
photo details: Canon 35mm f2.0 lens with a 12mm extension tube, Canon EOS 20D
ISO 400, f/5, 1/100 sec, indirect strobe
awild | December 5, 2008
Metrius contractus
Oregon, USA
Many biologists are familiar with the Bombardier Beetles in the ground beetle tribe Brachinini, as their defensive tactic of aiming an explosive spray has been studied extensively. The Brachinini are even celebrated by creationists as animals that couldn't possibly evolve.
As it turns out, though, bombardiers have evolved at least twice. The second, less known radiation comprises the subfamily Paussinae, also in the Carabidae, and as we'd expect from an independent origin the spray dispersing mechanism is different, using a flange instead of a nozzle. …
awild | December 4, 2008Amblyopone australis
The correct pronunciation of this ant's name is Am-blee-ah-pon-ee, with the emphasis on the antepenultimate syllable and the final "e" audible. But I don't know anyone who says it that way.
Every English-speaking myrmecologist I know calls it "Am-blee-oh-pohn", with the final "e" silent. That's a shame, because the right way is also prettier. I mentioned this to May Berenbaum- whose office is across the hall from mine- and she pointed out that midwesterners inflict the same error on calzones, which New Yorkers say correctly as "cal-zon-ee."
awild | September 21, 2008
The BBQ Song. Once this gets in your head, good luck. It won't come out.
terrasig | September 11, 2008. . .and I thank you for your support.
I'm not a huge blog traffic addict and, in fact, I mostly keep a SiteMeter counter below because I get to see the geographical distribution of our readers. They have a great map feature where you can look at the locations of the last 100 or 500 hits and I love to see folks from Perth, Australia, Jawa Timur, Indonesia, or Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada.
At 1229 GMT on 10 Sept 2008, we received our 200,000th visitor - a reader from Truro, Nova Scotia - to whom I owe some Alexander Keith IPA (e-mail me to redeem your gift!).
After looking back at my original…
signout | September 1, 2008Every now and then, I get email from pre-med types who are having a lot of trouble deciding whether to go to medical school.
Dear Dr. Signout*,
I was supposed to start medical school last week, but [I've deferred for a year to figure things out.]
I guess the thing is, I like living so much, and medicine seems both incredibly in line and at odds with that--you give up everything you've ever been passionate about to live, to the extreme, one particular passion.
I know that what-ifs are horrible exercises of futility, and that denial and self-rationalization are crucial elements of happiness,…
awild | May 5, 2008
Busy, busy, busy. In the meantime, there's always the "Blog" of Unnecessary Quotation Marks.