From the file of Inappropriate Anthropomorphization…
Posts on ‘February 8th, 2011’
Army Ant Week Spreads!
Troy Bartlett over at Nature Closeups inaugurates his own army ant series with a shot of Eciton hamatum from Panama. The more the merrier, I say.
Answer to the Monday Night Mystery
After plenty of head-scratching and squinting at what wasn’t a very clear image, the commentariat mostly converged on the idea that the mystery interloper in the army ant columns was a diapriid wasp. And they were right. Ten points go to Josh King, who got there first, and 5 more to Terry Nunn for taking [...]
Meanwhile, across the ocean…
Photographer/biologist Neil Losin sends us his video of African Driver Ants: Driver ants (Dorylus) belong to the same general part of the ant family tree as the South American species we’ve been discussing this week, although both lineages are so old that they last shared an ancestor before plate tectonics tore the two continents apart. [...]
Eciton hamatum, orange scourge of the social insects
Meet Eciton hamatum. This is a delightfully orange-colored army ant from Neotropical rain forests, big and charismatic, like the iconic E. burchellii. But- and here’s a secret trick of the wiley nature photographer- it is a much friendlier insect. If you’ve got an assignment to shoot army ants and your editor neglects to specify the [...]
A personal weblog by Illinois-based biologist and photographer Alex Wild.
