Alex Wild on insects, science, and photography
If you follow myrmecology on the internet, you probably know about Benoit Guenard’s Global Ants database. Benoit has spent years combing disparate biological literature and natural history collections to compile a comprehensive map of where all the 300-some ant genera are known to live. This information is useful in its own right (want to know [...]
There are moments when I feel I am not a scientist at all, but a curator of the most beautiful art gallery ever assembled. From here.
This is creepy: Among the odder ant-attacking parasites are mermithid worms. These nematodes sit coiled inside their hosts’ abdomens, consuming stored reserves and disrupting normal development. Infected ants have smaller heads and a distended gaster, a distortion striking enough that taxonomists failing to recognize the signs of parasitism have occasionally described these forms as novel [...]
In the course of assembling an insect genetics lecture for the “Insects & People” class I needed, but could not find, a graph showing the number of insect genomes sequenced by year. So I made one myself: Data are adapted from Wikipedia. The 2007 spike is a spate of Drosophila genomes intended for comparison with [...]
Rob Dunn’s lab is looking for new postdocs to work in science outreach initiatives, including the School of Ants project: The camel crickets in our basement are jumping. Ants are busy foraging in our backyard. Both the birds and carpenter bees are furiously building nests in and around our house. Spring has ARRIVED. As the [...]
Consider the standard configuration of stereomicroscope and fiber optic light used to examine insect specimens: Arranged like this, the lights provide point sources of intense light. A shiny ant specimen lit as above looks like so: Undiffuse light from the fiber optic source leaves harsh glare and dark shadows, and the ant’s skin textures and [...]
There’s a study out in Proceedings of the Royal Society on how leafcutter ant colony size might be constrained by logistics. If you’d like a summary, you could hit up the regular old science news outlets like Cosmos or ABC (Australia). These are pretty good, insofar as science media goes. Or, you could hear directly [...]
The following is a guest post by Rob Dunn, with photos by his graduate school office mate Piotr Naskrecki, AKA Piotr the Great. This post is also cross-posted at the new and improved yourwildlife.org, the hub for the Dunn Lab and collaborators’ citizen science program. I have to be quiet so they don’t hear me. [...]
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 [...]
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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