Alex Wild on insects, science, and photography
Google keeps suggesting I’m looking for “Hegemony”, but I’m not. This is Hegemona, a large darkling beetle we encountered in Belize: These insects are large- about an inch long- and appear nearly black in the field. Under soft lighting, structural colors in the elytra emerge spectacularly. I suspect the bright alternating stripes serve to warn [...]
You may have noticed a slight change today in the appearance of Myrmecos. In the interest of highlighting this blog’s visual character, I have widened the main column and compensated for the enlargement by dropping one of the two sidebars. Zing! The photographs are nearly 100 pixels wider than before. What do you think?
Smugmug, the host for my image gallery alexanderwild.com, has been down all morning. The problem is apparently serious and resolution may take a while. I apologize for the inconvenience. If there was a particular image you were looking for this morning and now you can’t get to it, email me. *update 12:15pm; we’re online again!
Ants are considered beneficial insects for their roles as predators, scavengers, and dispersers of plant seeds. But when the seeds belong to a pest plant, the ants’ role may change to that of accomplice in an unwanted biological invasion. Moni Berg-Binder, a student in the Suarez lab at the University of Illinois, is studying the [...]
and gives us a list of photography’s advantages over specimen collection: You don’t need permits to take images. You can take images of wildlife and people (you can’t “collect” those!). Storage of images takes a lot less room than storage of an insect collection. It takes less time to prepare an image than a specimen [...]
Great to see Alex back, and with such a beautiful shot. I had a little post ready, so I figured I would go ahead and put it up. Maybe it will give Alex a little bit more time to recuperate after what sounds like a tough journey back. One of the things I have discovered [...]
…We had reached the top village, we had sifted great quantities of Wasmannia-free leaf litter, and we had learned the local lore about the Kakamora dwarf people that lived in the forest and granted magical powers to those with the prowess to catch one. Meanwhile, the full week of wet shoes and socks was causing [...]
Cephalotes pusillus is ever-present in cerrado. In fact, I have never encountered another ant that is so abundant in a natural system, tropical or temperate. They are generalist nesters and can be found in almost every piece of standing dead-wood and many live trees. The workers are particularly robust, even for Cephalotes, and will often bulldoze their way to foods already [...]
…By the time we reached the the top of the mountain, Wasmannia had disappeared from the old growth forest and the native fauna appeared to us as it must have appeared to W. M. Mann the century before. Yet what the forest gave to us in specimen rewards, it took from us in bodily harm. [...]
High adventure is both the blessing and the curse for the intrepid collector of ants. The tropical rainforests of Melanesia are a veritable Shangri La for those in quest of ants never before scoped at 40x magnification, but to reach that promised land of riches… one must be prepared to sacrifice. It feels as if [...]
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.
