Alex Wild on insects, science, and photography
Spring has arrived in full! The birds are singing, the tulips blooming, and the trees are greening. But, whatever. As an ant guy my favorite indication of the season is much more chitinous: massive urban ant warfare The Tetramorium pavement ants that live under every sidewalk in town have begun their spring expansion. When colonies meet, [...]
Those of us who enjoy the creative side of taxonomic nomenclature received an early Christmas present this week with the publication of a Zootaxa paper by Paco Hita Garcia & Brian Fisher. Their new revision of Malagasy Tetramorium kelleri and tortuosum species groups contains a slate of gems such as Tetramorium nazgul and Tetramorium jedi, above. From the [...]
When I first saw the trail of leggy brown myrmicines splayed along a tree trunk, I thought the ants must be Pheidole. After all, they moved like predatory Pheidole I know from South American forests. But their ranks contained none of the telltale big-headed soldiers, and when I viewed the shape of the mesosoma in my photos [...]
All this talk about copyright infringement is a real downer. It’s time to perk things up with pretty ants:
Francisco Hita Garcia and Brian Fisher have just published an open-access paper on the Tetramorium species groups of Madagascar. Tetramorium is a very large genus and this work, sizeable though it is, really only lays the groundwork for a coming monograph by delineating clusters of similar species and providing a key to the resulting groups. The [...]
Even the most epic moments of ant warfare can seem inconspicuous from the towering height of our human eyes. The fisherman above, for instance, didn’t even flinch at the hostilities at his feet, even after I pointed out the boiling mass of angry ants. “Someone must’ve spilled something there,” he grunted as he moved on. [...]
While walking through the park yesterday, I happened across a sidewalk boundary dispute between two colonies of Pavement Ants. As is their habit, these little brown ants opted to dispense with diplomacy in favor of all-out warfare. Incidentally, if I had to pick one thing that annoys me about the purely molecular systematists, it is [...]
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.
