Paraguay
awild | December 20, 2009Feeling nostalgic this afternoon for my Peace Corps days, I did a Google Earth fly-by of my adoptive community, Colónia Once de Setiembre. Not only does Google show the site in high-resolution, the images are clear enough to see a patch of trees I planted with my neighbor in 1997. Judging from the shadows, our token attempt at reforestation must be at least 10 meters tall now.
The miracle of the internet also allows me to confirm that the economy of Once de Setiembre hasn't changed much since I left.
awild | September 17, 2008Platythyrea pilosula - Image by April Nobile/Antweb
Yesterday, the above photograph was uploaded to Antweb's databases.  Platythyrea pilosula is the final species to be imaged for the Ants of Paraguay project, marking the end of a sporadic and meandering study that I started in 1995 as a hobby during my stint in the Peace Corps. After combining several years' worth of my field collections with the holdings at 19 entomological museums, I tallied 541 species for the country. This turns out to be too many species to keep track of in my head (I max out at about 300 or so), so I've found…
awild | April 3, 2008Back in 2002 when I used the Nikon Coolpix 995 for everything, I would occasionally play around with the camera's very basic video mode. The 995 made small, grainy movies without sound, and most of the videos I took are, well, pretty bad. But the camera had impressive macro abilities, which meant it could shoot ants close-in. Here's a movie of a Dinoponera from the Mbaracayú Forest Reserve in Paraguay:
awild | January 29, 2008My lovely wife Jo-anne has been in South America the last couple weeks doing field research on Argentine ants while I tend the home fires here in Tucson. I hope she finds it in her to forgive me for the post I am about to write.
Earlier today I got an email explaining why I'm not getting my much-awaited phone call:
I'd call but there aren't any phones at this locutorio and we're on our way out to look for social spiders."
Excuse me? Social spiders? More important than me, your needy hubby?
Ok, I grant that social spiders are pretty cool, if a bit creepy. I remember those things from when…
awild | January 20, 2008So you like insects, but can't be bothered to get up from your computer to go look for some? Google earth to the rescue!
South of Tucson, Arizona (31°38.097'N 111°03.797'W) I found this lovely aerial image. Visualized from an elevation of about a kilometer and a half, it shows a hill just west of I-19 covered in freshly-sprouted grass. Except, there's this strange pattern of evenly-spaced polka-dots:
What could account for the speckles? Alien crop-circles? Bizarre gardening accidents?
Why no, those are the nest discs of one of our most conspicuous insects in the Sonoran desert, the red…
awild | December 23, 2007
Paraguay may be the world's most important country. Never mind that it is economically isolated and geopolitically forgettable. Rather, I measure importance by less trivial metrics, and by that of course I mean ants.
Paraguayan ants have changed the world. Many of the world's worst pest species evolved on the broad plains of the Paraná river before hitchhiking with human commerce to points abroad. The infamous fire ants in the southern U.S. originated on the Paraná, as did the Argentine Ants that plague California and Europe, along with a rogue's gallery of other trampy and invasive…