specimen request
awild | September 23, 2009James Trager writes in this week with a request and a photo:
I have been interested in Polyergus (âAmazon antsâ, see here) since childhood, when I first had the good fortune to observe them on summer afternoons in northern New Mexico. After decades of intermittent field observations and microscopic examination of specimens of these ants from various parts of the USA and Eurasia, and various interactions with other researchers on this group, I came to the conclusion that a taxonomic revision of the group is necessary.
Some background: Linda Goodloe, in her 1986 City University of NY…
awild | February 23, 2009
Stenamma sp., California.
This request comes from Michael Branstetter:
I am working on a broad-scale phylogeny of the ant genus Stenamma and am in search of fresh specimens from the Old World. Stenamma is a cryptic genus that is most often collected in forest leaf litter. The genus is primarily Holarctic in distribution, but also has representatives in the New World tropics. Producing a phylogeny of the genus will help me in my quest to better understand the genus as a whole and to revise the Mesoamerican species. In the Old World there are species records from Europe, northern…
awild | February 16, 2009
Myrmecologist extraordinaire Mike Kaspari sends out the following call to arms:
I am working on a project with Jamie Gillooly examing how various life history traits scale in ant colonies. Specifically, we are testing the hypothesis that when total colony mass is used (instead of the mass of an individual in the colony) social insects scale much like their unitary counterparts.
From the subject heading, you can see where I am going with this. Allometries need to be tested across the entire natural range of variability, and a regression of total worker mass against queen mass (of monogyne…