Alex Wild on insects, science, and photography
San Francisco’s KQED has crafted a lovely video featuring the research of Bay Area myrmecologists Brian Fisher and Neil Tsutsui: QUEST on KQED Public Media. If you’ve ever wanted a behind-the-scenes peak at the ant taxonomy megasite Antweb.org, give it a click. Oh, and, the still photographs look vaguely familiar.
photo details: Canon EOS 7D camera Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens ISO 100 f/13, 1/250 sec
For some reason I don’t normally shoot butterflies. But the swallowtails are so abundant this year they’re getting hard to ignore. Here’s a tiger: photo details: Canon EOS 7D camera Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens ISO 200 f/5.6, 1/320 sec Gradient filter to darken the sky Saturation and color balance tweaked in PS Vignetting added [...]
While it remains a mystery why anyone thought a peaceful green daisy-dwelling insect was a bed bug, the correct identification is Miridae, or plant bugs. The mirids are one of evolution’s spectacular radiations. The family contains more than 10,000 mostly herbivorous species and is found worldwide. As many of you picked, mirids are especially recognizable [...]
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From some of my recent photos. Click on each to enlarge. more below the fold:
Away in the windswept greenery of a distant alpine meadow, birds sing sweet lullabies to the azure sky. Dragonflies chase rays of sunlight. Rainbows settle across the sparkling waterfalls. And among the dewey stamens of the shasta mountain daisies, according to the Shutterstock corporation, rests a bed bug: Wait. What? Ok. So, not a bed [...]
Ants are accomplished architects, but most people would never know it. That’s because ant nests are often underground and impossible to observe directly, with the consequence that we don’t know as much about ant-built structures as we do about those of the more open-nesting bees and wasps. Enter Walter Tschinkel. Walt and his students have [...]
From the BBC’s remarkable “Life” series:
A personal weblog by Illinois-based biologist and photographer Alex Wild.
Myrmecos- derived from the ancient greek word for "ant"- hosts Alex's musings about these and other little creatures that share our planet.
Questions? Comments? Email alwild [at] myrmecos.net
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