Photography Links
awild | September 26, 2008
Popillia japonica - Champaign, Illinois
The ever colorful Popillia japonica has been in North America for nearly a century. In spite of an unmistakable charisma, the charms of this unintentional visitor are largely lost among the ruins of chewed up rose bushes, grape vines, and raspberry plants left in its wake. This beetle is a serious pest, and I don't know many gardeners who have welcomed its spread across the continent.
For those with a camera, however, Japanese beetles are hard-to-resist eye candy. The insects' metallic surfaces render photography a bit tricky, though, as glare…
awild | September 24, 2008Can't devote much to blogging at the moment, but since we're feeling sorry for the dipterists this week here's a fly for you to look at:
Gall Midge, Cecidomyiidae - California
Maybe one of you fly folks could explain in the comments why Cecidomyiids are so cool. Aside from looking like little fairies, that is.
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon D60
ISO 100, f/13, 1/200 sec, flash diffused through tracing paper
awild | September 23, 2008
Battle of the Pavement Ants, definitely not Tetramorium caespitum
While walking through the park yesterday, I happened across a sidewalk boundary dispute between two colonies of Pavement Ants. As is their habit, these little brown ants opted to dispense with diplomacy in favor of all-out warfare.
Incidentally, if I had to pick one thing that annoys me about the purely molecular systematists, it is their tendency to avoid dealing with the taxonomic consequences of their work. A recent paper by Schlick-Steiner et al (2006) gave a detailed picture of the genetic structure within the…
awild | September 20, 2008
Dipterist Keith Bayless exposes a pernicious case of media bias:
Six new families of Diptera were described from newly discovered species in the last 6 years! None of these flies received the press coverage given to Martialis. There are a variety of explanations for this, including that
1) The fly descriptions were published in lower profile journals than PNAS
2) Many of the the new fly families evolved more recently than the first ant in the Martialis lineage
3) The level of public and scientific interest in ants inclines them to be better covered or
4) People who study ants are better at…
awild | September 18, 2008Speaking of bad science reporting...
Not the right ant.
Nope.
Camponotus? You've gotta be kidding.
It isn't Lasius, either.
Nor Ectatomma. (And isn't that Corrie Moreau's copyrighted photo?).
awild | September 14, 2008
Pheidole megacephala
Go see!
Incidentally, you might want to surf back here to Myrmecos Blog on Monday afternoon. There's been a very, very exciting discovery...
awild | September 14, 2008
Camponotus castaneus
Champaign, Illinois
I photographed this ant's nest yesterday afternoon. A couple hundred large, orange ants with piles of silken cocoons under a board in the park next to our house. I feel vaguely guilty about this now, as the soggy remains of Hurricane Ike are blowing through town this morning and everything is underwater. If I disturbed the structure of their nest too much, the ants might not have had time to repair their water-proofing. I suppose I should check in on them again once the weather improves.
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a…
awild | September 12, 2008A few links to make your weekend just that much more fun:
Photo.net has posted their Editors' 2008 picks for best macro.
Haje Jan Kamps explains how to make a macro lens from an old Pringles can.
Brian Valentine has an amazing series of a dance fly absolutely covered in mites.
If you've not yet seen it, stop by Piotr Naskrecki's portrait gallery.
And finally, the North Carolina Entomological Society is holding a photo competition. The NCSU insect blog explains how to submit your best bug photos. Deadline is October 20th.
awild | September 12, 2008
Prionocyphon Marsh Beetle (Scirtidae)
New York
Scirtidae is a small family of mostly small beetles found in wet, swampy habitats all over the world. Taxonomists find them to be difficult creatures, the larvae are archaic in appearance but the adults share some similarities with the elateriforms- click beetles, fireflies, and the like. Recent research based on ribosomal DNA sequences showed why their evolutionary relationships have been so hard to peg. Rather than fitting neatly inside one of the 4 beetle suborders, these insects are surprisingly old, diverging from the lineage that led…
awild | September 11, 2008My favorite upstart stock photography business, the Photoshelter Collection, has decided that their experiment was not successful enough to continue.  This is a shame. The quality of imagery at Photoshelter is competitive with the industry giants, yet they treated photographers more fairly than the traditional agencies and used a more democratic, more merit-based criteria to recruit their talent. According to CEO Allen Murabayashi, the problem was one of competion with the entrenched corporate heft of the traditional agencies, especially Getty:
The largest consumers of stock…
awild | September 9, 2008All the better to steal your brood with, my little red riding ant...
Polyergus
Champaign, Illinois
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon D60
ISO 100, f/13, 1/200 sec, flash diffused through tracing paper
awild | September 7, 2008In an earlier discussion on the merits of megapixels, commentator and snail guru Aydin notes:
Megapixel counts matter if you need to crop out large sections of an image & still need to retain enough pixels for a large enough print.
To illustrate Aydin's point, I've taken a full photo of an Australian Monomorium nest and cropped it away to show just the queen ant:
Viola! Instant magnification. I can get away with a tight crop because the original photo spans over 6 million pixels. Blog photos only need 100,000 pixels. Plenty of pixels to spare. Once I get my hands on the Canon 50D…
awild | September 2, 2008I'm on a roll! Myrmecos.net has a new series covering several species of trap-jaw ants:
Go see!
awild | August 30, 2008As you may have noticed, for a photography blog I don't write much about camera gear. Partly this is because I'm not the sort of person who chases the latest gadgets and gizmos, but partly because I think all the focus on equipment obscures the most important aspects of photography. Good photography comes from the artistry of the photographer. Megapixel count has hardly anything to do with it.
I bring this up because Canon has just announced the first bit of gear I've been excited about in years. The Canon 50D. Ignore the bits about the 15 megapixels (irrelevant for macro) and the 6.3…
awild | August 29, 2008
Microphotus angustus - Pink Glowworm
California Coast Range
Believe it or not, this squishy pink thing is an adult beetle.
Now and again, evolution produces a species that loses the complexities of the adult form. These animals simply retain a larval appearance into their adult life, later gaining only the ability to mate and have offspring independent of the other trappings of maturity. Perhaps the adult traits of large eyes, large brains, long legs, and big wings are so expensive that just skipping all that extra development allows an animal to get on that much more efficiently with the…
awild | August 28, 2008
A perpetually happy Venezuelan Leptogenys
We don't really know why some species of Leptogenys hunting ants sport a permanent grin. The oddly ecstatic mandible shape might, however, have something to do with handling the broadly curved exoskeleton of their preferred prey: isopods (the sow bugs and pill bugs).
Flickr user "venwu225" recently uploaded a fantastic series of the related species L. falcigera in action. Some of the shots show how the mandibles allow the ant to grip the isopod both above and below its wide skirt of armor. Cool stuff.
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro…
awild | August 22, 2008
Ochthebius sp. Minute Moss Beetles (Hydraenidae)
Pyramid Lake, Nevada
Tiny flea like specks
Move among the algal slime.
Oh! Hydraenidae!
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon D60
ISO 100, f/13, 1/200 sec, flash diffused through tracing paper
awild | August 21, 2008
On my recent visit to the coastal forests of Kwazulu-Natal I noticed basketball-like growths on many of the Acacia trees. In North America, any large gray ball you see hanging off a tree branch is liable to be a hornet's nest. In South America, it's probably a carton nest of fierce little Azteca ants. The equivalent in South Africa? I didn't know.
A little bit of poking around in the acacias revealed the culprit. It was Crematogaster tricolor, an orange ant about half a centimeter long:
They didn't appreciate the disturbance, apparently, because they came after me without…