Alex Wild on insects, science, and photography
(via Google Trends) I’m not generally one to extol the virtues of enormous corporations, but one thing the tech giant Google does right is to share freely much of their bank of search data. Google Trends picks up tick season like clockwork, and searches for “ticks” peak reliably every May when North Americans find the [...]
Science is reporting: After 2 years of flogging the need to transform Canada’s National Research Council (NRC) into a toolbox for industry, the Conservative government announced today that the 97-year-old agency is “open for business” under its new philosophy. ‘If Canada is going to continue to compete internationally, we must do it through new ideas, [...]
I’m curious. Given the imminent demise of Google Reader, how many of you actually use it to follow blogs?
This is an inventive and, I think, necessary strategy for natural history collections as they lay off curators and cut back on research: We are doing something a little daring, but certainly exciting here at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. We have decided to specialize on flies. …we found a first partner in [...]
I’m told Americans traditionally use this day to select one of these: *update: I voted! My timing at the polling place this morning was such that the prescheduled 10:00am tornado drill sirens went off all around town just as I fed my ballot into the machine. Gave me a bit of a start. I thought [...]
Happy Father’s Day! Hard-working fathers do exist in the insect world. Male water bugs (Belostomatidae) carry their mate’s eggs glued to their backs to ensure they hatch safely.
Remember the German World of Ants store that traffics in dangerous invasive pest species and illegally collected ants? Now they’re offering yet another risky animal, the little fire ant Wasmannia auropunctata: Wasmannia auropunctata is perhaps the most dangerous pest ant in the Pacific region, where it wipes clean native arthropod faunas and is a big factor in [...]
If you’re in the twin cities region of Minnesota and would like to hear about braconid wasp taxonomy & evolution, I’ll be giving the following presentation tomorrow afternoon: “Traveling Across the Taxonomic Impediment: Tales from Tropical Wasps.” 490 Hodson Hall 28 February 2012 3:00 Refreshments 3:15 Seminar Dept. of Entomology University of Minnesota The University [...]
In the news this morning, a story about people who make a tidy living hunting weaver ant brood: Tradition dictates that a Javanese man must possess five things to be a real man: a house, a woman, a horse, a dagger and a caged bird. The obsession with birds has spread to other ethnic groups, [...]
A personal blog 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? Email alwild [at] myrmecos.net; or follow @Myrmecos on Twitter.
