I could do without the patronizing narration, but National Geographic’s footage of Pseudomyrmex acacia-ants is worth your time:
Posts Tagged ‘ecology’
In New Zealand, Argentine Ants Collapse
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 [...]
Native trees help an invasive ant push north
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 [...]
Course Announcement: Tropical Behavioural Ecology and Evolution in Panama
Rachelle Adams, who studies Megalomyrmex ants, sends word of a new tropical eco/evo class in Panama for graduate students: Click for details The Smithsonian’s Tropical Research Institute in Panama has been ground zero in tropical biology for decades, and this course looks to put you right in the middle of it. The application deadline is [...]
Pollinators in action
This shot may look like it came from an exotic location, but in fact I snapped it not three hours ago in our prairie garden. The sideoats grama is flowering, and its tiny blossoms are positively buzzing with miniature halictid bees, each barely half a centimenter long. photo details: Canon EOS 7D camera with a [...]
Eastern North America is the Asian Lady Beetle's Bridge to the World
If I had to pick the most annoying insect in Illinois it’d be Harmonia axyridis. This lady beetle was introduced to our continent as a control agent for aphids but became a pest in its own right. It consumes not just aphids but all manner of other insects, including beneficials like native lady beetles. Swarms [...]
The eggs that weren't
I did not expect everyone to nearly instantaneously solve yesterday’s termite ball mystery. I’m either going to have to post more difficult challenges (from now on, nothing will be in focus!) or attract a slower class of reader. As you surmised, those little orange balls are an egg-mimicking fungus. It is related to free-living soil fungi, [...]
Ant Ecology now available
Surfing around the bookstores this morning I see that the much-anticipated Ant Ecology book is out. At $129.00 it’s not something the casual reader is liable to pick up. Nonetheless, Ant Ecology is a beautiful volume reviewing the state of the field, and scientists who work on ants should probably own a copy. Or at [...]
The other ant-fungi
If I were to mention an ant-fungus mutualism- that is, an ecological partnership between an ant and a fungus that benefits both- most biologically literate people might think of the famed leafcutter ants and the edible mycelia they cultivate. But that is just one example. Several other fungi have entered into productive relationships with ants, [...]
An Ant Lion in Action
An ant lion captures prey not by passively sitting at the bottom of its sand trap, but by aggressively flinging debris at its target, enveloping it in a sand storm.
A personal weblog by Illinois-based biologist and photographer Alex Wild.
