Alex Wild on insects, science, and photography
Paraguay is the second poorest country in South America. You’d never know it from visiting some neighborhoods in the capital city of Asunción, though. Shiny new SUVs cruise the streets between the golf course and the yacht club. Boutique malls sell the latest in European fashion. Not a bad country for enjoying the good life. [...]
There’s a bunch of crap circulating about a new PLoS ONE study linking Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) to a pair of bee pathogens. It’s got me worked up to full rant mode. As far as I can tell the PLoS study is solid, at least in demonstrating a correlation between CCD and the pathogens, and [...]
Watch beetle guru Anthony Cognato trying to deal with Fox News ignoramus Tucker Carlson: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7f52y4Nq4E] It isn’t news that Fox News isn’t, um, news. Nor is it news that Fox can’t grasp the benefits of public investment in knowledge creation- perhaps because actual knowledge is anathema to their business model. But I digress. I’m going [...]
In reading various web reactions to news that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act contained nearly 1 million dollars for ant research at Arizona State University and the University of Arizona, it seems there’s a lot of confusion about how something like ant behavior winds up getting a stimulus check. Here’s an explanation.
The Republican Party speaks: GOP senators on Tuesday highlighted “pure waste” in the billions of stimulus funds spent this year, including money for fossil research in Argentina, puppet shows and to protect cruise ships from terrorist attacks… What does the Republican Party consider wasteful? Science, apparently:
Every year my part-time photography business does a little better than the year before. A few new clients, a few new venues, a few more visitors to my web sites. It’s not a meteoric rise by any measure, but considering the current economic situation I am counting my blessings. Naturally, of course, when business is [...]
I can’t help but feel gleeful at this morning’s news. Back in January I had landed, I thought, a postdoctoral position at the Illinois Natural History Survey. It was a dream job. I’ve been itching for years to figure out what’s really going on with the evolutionary history of Camponotus, a hugely important ant genus [...]
While you’re at it, why not just have a good old-fashioned book-burning?
…and the woman behind me was holding a tearful and very disappointed three year old girl. “She thought we were going ‘boating’,” she explained.
Fruit flies are a family, Tephritidae, containing about 5,000 species of often strikingly colored insects. As the name implies, these flies are frugivores. Many, such as the mediterranean fruit fly, are agricultural pests. Drosophila melanogaster, the insect that has been so important in genetic research, is not a true fruit fly. Drosophila is a member [...]
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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