Alex Wild on insects, science, and photography
A slide from my lecture tomorrow morning on social insects: Years ago I held the opinion that social insects were too alien, their concerns too remote from our own, to enlighten us about the nature of our human societies. I’ve since come around to a more nuanced perspective. It is certainly still true that ants’ [...]
And now, a parable from my recent Australia trip. One morning, in the forests of Cape Tribulation, I happened across a lovely stag beetle. I took it back to the cabin where I’d set up an insect mini-studio. My photography session did not go smoothly, however. The set was persistently interrupted by pesky Tapinoma melanocephalum [...]
The following announcement was sent in by Paleomyrmecologist Vincent Perrichot: Fossil Ants (Antweb) Regular users of Antweb may have noticed that a project named Fossil ants was added some months ago (www.antweb.org/fossil.jsp); a few technical issues prevented the imaged species to show up correctly, however, resulting in only a few visible species fully illustrated. These [...]
With all the recent attention devoted to Pheidole‘s apparently latent ability to produce supermajor workers at the drop of a hormone, now is an opportune time to mention Pheidole fimbriata. Pheidole fimbriata is, according to Corrie Moreau’s research, the single sister species to the remaining 1000+ in the genus. That is, the first thing to happen when Pheidole first [...]
Andrew Quitmeyer has made a charming instructional video on how to paint ants: Painting insects may sound arcane, but applying unique color combinations to individuals is a standard technique for researchers who need to keep track of the activities of each ant within the colony. It’s like name tags.
Ant enthusiasts know Pheidole as a common genus where each nest has two distinct worker types: small minors and big majors. But a few odd species add one more: enormous supermajors. You can see all three in the photo above of the Arizona species Pheidole tepicana. This afternoon, developmental biologists at McGill University and University [...]
The science media is buzzing (ha, ha) with tales of a new honey bee parasite, Apocephalus borealis, and its potential involvement in Colony Collapse. For example: Parasitic flies that turn honeybees into night-flying zombies could provide another clue to cracking the mystery of colony collapse disorder. Since 2007, thousands of hives in the US have been [...]
Argentine Ants have spent the past century following commerce around the world, aggressively subsuming the territories of native ants. However, a study by Meghan Cooling et al out today in Biology Letters reports a dent in the Argentine ant empire: Argentine ants had disappeared from 40 per cent of our sampling sites. In many other [...]
One measure of a predator’s ecological significance is the abundance of strategies prey adopt to avoid being eaten. And how ecologically significant are ants? They are enough of a problem to web-building spiders that the arachnids impregnate their webs with ant-deterring 2-pyrrolidinone: …ants are rarely reported foraging on the webs of orb-weaving spiders, despite the [...]
Pest insects can be unpredictable, arriving in unexpected places yet failing to show up in regions where they ought to thrive. The famously defensive Africanized honey bees, for example, took more than a decade to move into Florida after establishing in nearby Texas. Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) are a subtropical species from flood plains in the [...]
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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