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:
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.
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:
Papilio glaucus, the Tiger Swallowtail
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 by the cuneus, a portion of the fore wing that folds slightly downward and is separated from the rest of the wing by a subtle suture. I’ve indicated the cuneus on a tarnished plant bug here:
A Lygus sp. tarnished plant bug, showing the cuneus
For their efforts, the indefatigable JasonC wins 6 points for nailing the family ID with some supporting information. Entomologist Julie Stalhut picks up 4 points for being the first to provide the technical term, and Weird Bug Lady (who makes amazing plush insects) gets 4 more for noting the wing venation.
And I’m giving two points to Rob M because this was awesome.
This brings us to the end of month, and to the announcement of the July winner: JasonC. Jason, please email me for your loot.
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 bug. But what is it?
Ten Myrmecos Points (TM) to the first commenter who can name the family of the mystery critter. Per our new rules, you must also give identifying characters that support your entry.
The cumulative points winner for the month of July will win their choice of 1) an 8×10-sized print from my photo galleries, or 2) a guest post here on Myrmecos.
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.
Nest casts of Odontomachus brunneus
Enter Walter Tschinkel. Walt and his students have perfected the art of pouring casting materials into ant nests, waiting for the slurry to harden, and digging up the resulting structures. The various chambers and passageways are transformed into sculpture, and what was invisible is cast openly in three dimensions. It’s a great trick, and the Tschinkel lab has churned out a string of papers on ant nest engineering.
The latest paper, a survey of nest shapes in the trap-jaw ant Odontomachus brunneus, was led by Lina Cerquera and came out last month in the Journal of Insect Science.
Odontomachus brunneus
Odontomachus is a predatory ant with small colonies, so one might not expect their nests to be overly complex. And it turns out that’s the case. These trap-jaw ants construct a single vertical shaft with chambers dug out to the side, and the overall volume of the nest is proportional to the number of ants in the colony. From the paper (emphasis mine):
No matter what their size, the nests of O. brunneus can be recognized by their characteristic appearance; that is, the size-free shape does not change much with nest size… [This] means that workers need only follow simple, local iterative rules to produce a nest of similar shape but any size.
This finding is in line with previous work on insect architecture, where complex structures emerge through the aggregate action of many individuals following a small set of behavioral rules. Nothing surprising, but isn’t it a luxury just to have the means to see underground?
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
|
