awild | June 18, 20091. Temnothorax curvispinosus
2. Polyergus sp. nr. breviceps
3. Aphaenogaster tenneesseensis (queen)
4. Aphaenogaster fulva/rudis complex
5. Camponotus pennsylvanicus
6. Pyramica reflexa
awild | June 17, 2009
A velvet mite forages over a rotting log in Urbana, Illinois.
I don't photograph all that many mites, but if these miniature arachnids are your thing you should visit Macromite's amazing mite blog.
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 50D
ISO 100, 1/250 sec, f13, flash diffused through tracing paper
awild | June 16, 2009As in the previous quiz, these ants are all found in Illinois:
#1
#2
#3
#4
#5
#6
Answers will be posted on Thursday.
awild | June 15, 2009A recent study by Gabriela Pirk in Insectes Sociaux provides me with an excuse to share this photo:
Minor workers of the seed harvester Pheidole spininodis (left) and the predatory Pheidole bergi lock jaws in combat. Jujuy, Argentina.
Pirk et al examined the diet of both Pheidole species in the Monte desert of Northern Argentina. Why would someone spend time doing this?  Ants are important dispersers of seeds, and these Pheidole are two of the most abundant seed-eating ants of the region. What they do with the seeds, which ones they choose to take, and how far they take them has…
awild | June 13, 2009
Formica exsectoides carries off a seed of a non-native plant, leafy spurge
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 interaction between native Formica ants and an invasive euphorb, leafy spurge. Leafy spurge seeds have an edible elaiosome that ants find attractive enough to carry back to their nests,…
awild | June 12, 2009
A Podabrus soldier beetle hides away in the leafy folds of an understory plant in an eastern deciduous forest. Soldier beetles (family Cantharidae) are predators of other arthropods.
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 50D
ISO 100, 1/250 sec, f13, flash diffused through tracing paper
awild | June 11, 2009
Image by Flickr user traviswilcoxen
Tomorrow morning I leave for a week at the Archbold Biological Station in the scrublands of central Florida. Archbold is a magical place filled with charmingly unique plants and animals. I spent a summer there in 1995; this will be my first visit since then. With any luck I'll return with a pile of new photographs. On the list to shoot: the Florida harvester ant, Platythyrea punctata, and a couple scrub endemics like the graceful Dorymyrmex elegans.
I've pre-scheduled a few posts while I'm away so the blog won't go quiet, but I may be slow…
awild | June 11, 2009
I see that the TimeTree of Life project is now public. This collaborative project draws on the research of dozens of biologists to estimate the timing of past evolutionary divergences. The work is available as a book, but the online version has an interactive section that allows the user to name two organisms and get back the date the two last shared an ancestor.
For instance,
Ants vs. Bees: 163.5 million years ago
A word of caution, though. While the output is extremely precise (i.e., it gives exact dates with decimal places), precision is not necessarily accuracy. The given dates…
awild | June 10, 2009For a change of pace around here. Â These were photographed last weekend in Brownfield Woods in Urbana, Illinois.
A micropezid fly guards a prime patch of bird poop
A scuttle fly (Phoridae) on a mushroom
Chrysopilus sp. (Rhagionidae)
Long-legged fly (Dolichopodidae)
If any of you Diptera-inclined folk can give me more specific identifications I'd really appreciate it.
awild | June 9, 2009You might recall how much I dislike DNA barcoding.
So you can imagine my frustration when, in spite of my best efforts to mount an empirical demonstration of what a waste of time it is, the technique turns out to be extraordinarily useful. I've been processing sequence data all day from the barcoding gene (COI) for a set of 7 Pheidole species distributed from Costa Rica to Argentina. The results are in hand, and here are the pairwise genetic distances:
See that blank spot in the middle? That shouldn't be there. If barcoding didn't work, that is.
For this sample of ants, then, any two…
awild | June 9, 2009Josh King writes in with the following:
Subject: Arthropod specimens available for analysis from large experiments in long-leaf pine forests.
We have material from 8100 pitfalls available for anyone (including enterprising students or post-docs) interested in studying the effect of disturbance or fire ant invasion on ground-dwelling arthropods in a variety of habitats.Â
We simply do not have the time to sort this material any time in the near future and we would prefer it not languish on a shelf for decades. The majority of this experimental work was conducted in and near the Apalachicola…
awild | June 9, 2009at the Washington Post:
This is the multi-generational public exhibition mentality at work: Every show should have something that makes each member of the family say wow. Ants fight, ants work, ants make things. Ants are just like us: "Text messaging is out, but they have other ways to communicate . . . " Which would be pheromones, or chemical signals, something Aristotle never could have detected when he distinguished merely social animals from the social animal par excellence, man, who can speak.
Details on the exhibit here.
awild | June 9, 2009
Aphaenogaster workers tasting the elaiosome of a bloodroot seed. Illinois.
Some plants have come to rely so heavily on ants to spread their seeds about that they offer the insects a tasty treat in exchange for the dispersal service. Seeds of these species bear a lipid-filled structure called an elaiosome, whose sole function appears to be the attraction of ants. A recent study suggests that plant lineages dependent on ants in this way speciate more rapidly than related ant-free lineages.
photo details (both photos): Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 50D
ISO 100, 1/160 sec…
awild | June 7, 2009I sometimes get requests for stylistic pictures of dead ants. From pest control industry folks, usually. And I always have to beg off. Somehow, with my global image library of hundreds of different ant species, I've had nothing but live insects. Dead bugs never held much aesthetic appeal, I guess.
Well, Pest Control People. Just for you I've sold out. Here, at last, is your ex-ant.
(Incidentally, this ant wasn't even dead. It was knocked out with CO2 and walked off 5 minutes later.)
awild | June 7, 2009I saw this short video at a conference last year and was entranced. The clip shows how the ancestral arachnid body plan changed as it evolved through various descendant lineages.
awild | June 6, 2009
Pyramica (or is it Strumigenys?) rostrata, Illinois
I've been thinking today about the Wikipedia edits to the Pyramica page, and my curiosity about the controversy prodded me to attempt a quick phylogenetic analysis. Before I get to the analysis, though, here is some background.
The Ants. Forests in warmer regions around the world hold a great number of tiny, sluggish ants covered with bizarre hairs of unknown function. These oddly ornate little insects are predators of other arthropods. Mites, springtails, and the like. Because of their size, their preference for below-ground…
awild | June 5, 2009
Looking like a trilobite, or perhaps a mutant millipede, a heavily armored beetle larva crawls through the leaf litter in an Illinois forest.  This predaceous insect belongs to the family Lycidae Lampyridae, the net-winged beetles fireflies.
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 50D
ISO 100, 1/250 sec, f13, flash diffused through tracing paper
awild | June 4, 2009In 2002 I took a shiny new Nikon Coolpix 995 on a research trip to Argentina and Paraguay. I'd not done much photography to that point, but it was tremendous fun. I spent nearly as much time shooting the region's charismatic ant fauna as I did working on my dissertation project. The resulting images formed the heart of a new web site, www.myrmecos.net, that went live a couple months after my return. The original myrmecos site can still be viewed at the Internet Archive.
Of course, as my equipment and aesthetic standards improved the old images I had been so proud of began to seem...…