Alex Wild on insects, science, and photography
The prairies of central North America are especially harsh environments. Half a continent removed from the buffering effect of oceans, temperatures in the plains soar in summer and crash in winter. Winds, and often fires, surge across the landscape. The prairie is not an easy place. Prairie is also an environment I don’t spend much [...]
If you’ve ever wondered why Crematogaster acrobat ants have such an odd shape, take a look at this: In Uganda’s Kibale Forest last summer, I smeared a bit of cookie cream along a rock as ant bait. A pleasingly yellow Crematogaster soon arrived to feed. All was well until a second species, in the big-headed ant genus Pheidole, attempted [...]
The media is carrying stories of a study in Science showing that Camponotus workers specialize into three behavioral classes, and that workers tend to move through these roles as they age. This result is interesting, but not terribly surprising as a similar pattern is known in the better-studied honey bees. The reason the paper appears in Science, rather than a more [...]
Earlier this month I gave a pair of talks at the University of Florida. The trip was fabulous! In addition to meeting a pile of exceptionally friendly people, I spent time with my myrmecologist friends Andrea Lucky and Lloyd Davis, hunting ants at Paynes Prairie State Park, Austin Cary Forest, and elsewhere around Gainesville. Below, [...]
(clip from Ants- Nature’s Secret Power) Leafcutters are the ant stars of many nature documentaries. Their most spectacular film appearances, including the nest excavation above, and the relocation of a full colony to a lab for the BBC’s upcoming Planet Ant, involve the destruction and removal of an established colony. Since leafcutters are such dominant players [...]
This is unusual: It’s an Aphaenogaster worker missing the metathorax and the propodeum. The mid-thorax is fused directly to the second abdominal segment, with the effect that the hind legs are just… gone. For comparison, have a look at a normal Aphaenogaster. Myrmecologist Douglas Booher pulled her from a litter sample in Georgia. You’d think a major [...]
Walt Tschinkel is a genius: In this paper, I describe a method based on the burial of a nest constructed of ice. The hollow space that remains after the ice melts is a facsimile of the ant nest as designed by the experimenter. Want to see, in the field, how a colony of ants reacts [...]
Benoit Guenárd and Rob Dunn have combed the technical literature to make a list of all the ant species known from China (pdf): China is one of the largest countries in the world and offers an incredible diversity of ecosystems and species. However the distribution of many insect species in China is still poorly known. Here, through [...]
Eli Sarnat and Evan Economo have a beautiful new paper out on the Ants of Fiji. It’s open-access, too: This study is not the first to cover the myrmecofauna of the Fijian islands. Worth reading, for contrast, is William M. Mann’s 1921 classic paper on the same topic: http://gap.entclub.org/taxonomists/Mann/1921.pdf In particular, notice that the 1921 [...]
On Monday we dropped by a favorite childhood insect collecting spot, a woodlot atop a hill in upstate New York. The habitat is a mix of mature oak and second growth maple forests surrounding an open field maintained by seasonal mowing. Over the years I’ve recorded around 35 species of ants, including some gems: Stigmatomma dracula [...]
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.
