I could do without the patronizing narration, but National Geographic’s footage of Pseudomyrmex acacia-ants is worth your time:
A brief blog break…
…for the month of May. Don’t worry- it’s for good myrmecological cause.
I may stop in to give a brief dispatch now and again, but I can’t guarantee it.
In the meantime, behave yourselves.
Multiple Choice
Blogging has been slow this week as, among other things, I’m readying the final exam for Insects & People. Here is an excerpt from a practice exam administered earlier this evening:
In the absence of posting, I figured I’d at least offer some multiple-choice questions.
Not enough ants
It occurs to me that I don’t post nearly enough ants.
Click “continue reading” and scroll down. That should take care of it.
New ant genera from Madagascar and Africa
Please welcome the shiny new ant genera Tanipone and Vicinopone to the world’s ant fauna!
Tanipone aversa holotype worker (Madagascar)
Vicinopone conciliatrix (Ghana)
The new genera emerge from a detailed taxonomic study of the Malagasy and Afrotropical genus Simopone, published this week by Barry Bolton and Brian Fisher in an open-access monograph in Zootaxa.
source: Bolton B., Fisher B.L. 2012. Taxonomy of the cerapachyine ant genera Simopone Forel, Vicinopone gen. n. and Tanipone gen. n. (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Zootaxa 3283: 1–101.
Meanwhile, over at Compound Eye…
A few recent posts on my SciAm blog:
When an artist copies a photograph, who gets the credit?
6 sources of free images for science blogging
Experimenting with off-camera light
Sunday Night Movie: Andrew Bird’s Imitosis
Because robot bugs, that’s why.
(h/t Polly Nator, who pointed me to the video for a song I already loved)
Camponotus impressus, a cork-headed ant
One of Josh King’s lab ants at the University of Central Florida. The blunt head serves as a living door to this species’ twig nests.
photo details:
Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 7D
ISO 200 f/13 1/250 sec
diffuse twin flash
Course Announcement: Ants of the Southwest
You may be familiar with the California Academy of Science’s extremely popular Ant Course, which offers intensive taxonomic training in a once-a-year workshop held at an exotic locale. Ant Course is fantastic, with all its taxonomicky taxonomy and systematicky systematics. What if your anty interests, however, tend more to ecology and behavior?
A new course is being offered this summer just for you:
Ants of the Southwest
21-31 August, 2012
The American Southwest is a hotspot for North American ant diversity, with over 350 species of ants known from Arizona, and a variety of ecologically interesting taxa – including leafcutters, harvester ants, army ants, and honeypot ants. In this 10-night course, participants will gain knowledge of the outstanding diversity, ecology, and behavior of southwestern ants. This course is designed with curriculum that complements rather than competes with the California Academy of Sciences Ant Course, which is also held at the SWRS once every three years and focuses heavily on the taxonomy and systematics of ants. Although this course also covers basic taxonomy and systematics, its major focus will be on the ecology and behavior of ants.The course will include lectures, field trips, field experiments, and labs. Participants will obtain hands-on experience in experimental techniques with both field and captive ant colonies. The course will also cover current topics in ant behavior and ecology research. Students will leave the course with a small collection they create, and may have the opportunity to set up a captive laboratory colony.
Benoit Guenard figures out the easiest places to record new ant genera
If you follow myrmecology on the internet, you probably know about Benoit Guenard’s Global Ants database. Benoit has spent years combing disparate biological literature and natural history collections to compile a comprehensive map of where all the 300-some ant genera are known to live. This information is useful in its own right (want to know which ants live in that tropical vacation destination?) but the database is more powerful that that. It can be used to make predictions about where in the world we are most and least likely to make new genus & species records.
Top: the number of ant genera recorded from various political divisions (darker=more). Bottom: model predictions of undercollected regions (yellow & blue are different models; black is where both models agree). Modified from Figures 1 & 3 in Guenard et al 2012.
In a clever paper out this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Benoit and his colleagues Michael Weiser and Rob Dunn apply a pair of mathematical models to the database to locate spots on the map with far fewer known ant genera than their location might predict. Because ant researchers have tended to work more in particular countries and less in others, what this project has effectively done is pinpoint the under-studied corners of the globe. Places where even common ants have gone uncollected.
Off to Cambodia it is, then.
source: Guenard, B. et al 2012. Global models of ant diversity suggest regions where new discoveries are most likely are under disproportionate deforestation threat. PNAS published online before print doi:10.1073/pnas.1113867109.
A personal weblog by Illinois-based biologist and photographer Alex Wild.
