Big changes afoot for Sasquatch

(a) current distribution of Sasquatch (b) Sasquatch distribution post-climate change

For those of you dallying around about how seriously to take the threat of climate change, here’s something for you.  If we don’t cease our emissions of greenhouse gases pronto, Bigfoot will invade Arizona and Utah.  I’m serious.

The essence of leaf litter ants

A while back, Mike Kaspari asked me if I might be able to produce an image that really captures the essence of the leaf litter ant fauna*.  A conceptual shot that would be useful for presentations and the like.  It wasn’t immediately clear how to do this, as the leaf litter is a dark, dark place.  Most of the inhabitants are blind.  Not many photons there for a photographer to work with, and lighting it up with a flash sort of kills the native ambiance.

In any case, while in Florida I sat down with a charismatic Strumigenys trap-jaw ant and tried a few things.  I came up with this:

Strumigenys rogeri, epitomizing the litter ants

Anyway.  What’s the deal with leaf litter ants?  Why the interest in these little things that most people will never see?

Leaf litter became a new frontier for myrmecologists in the 1980s.  New collecting technology had revealed an astounding unknown diversity of species living in the litter. What’s more, the sampling techniques were easy to standardize, so that collections from different regions and by different scientists could be compared in a quantifiable statistical framework.  The leaf litter fauna brought a lot of myrmecologists together.

I settled on a strategy of backlighting a decaying oak leaf for the image.  This technique emphasizes the darkness and complexity of the habitat but also silhouettes an ant foraging through it. I was lucky with this one- the ant was cooperative and it only took me a couple dozen exposures to get a usable photo.

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*What are leaf litter ants?  They are the (usually) minute ants that live in the decaying debris and rotting wood layered on the forest floor. They aren’t a defined taxonomic group but an assortment of ants from different parts of the ant evolutionary tree that have become small, cryptic, and nearly blind as they adapted to live in dank, tight spaces.

They are the (usually) minute ants that live in the decaying debris and rotting wood layered on the forest floor. They aren’t a defined taxonomic group but an assortment of ants from different parts of the ant evolutionary tree that have become small, cryptic, and nearly blind as they adapted to live in dank, tight spaces.

Slow Blogging Ahead

For reasons that aren’t clear to me, but are possibly related to the onset of summer bug season, traffic here at myrmecos blog has surged over the past few weeks.  We’re now getting more daily visitors than do my galleries at myrmecos.net.

I’d like nothing more than to entertain all the new readers with thoughtful essays and astounding photographs.  But that’s not going to happen.  Just the opposite, I’m afraid. The timing of this surge is terrible.

You see, we’ve just bought a house across town and are in the messy process of packing, paperwork, and moving.  The internet will be off for a few days.  And my hands will be full of furniture and cleaning products.

We’ve never owned a house before, so the move is exciting unto itself, but there’s more reason than that to be happy about it.  The new place has an enormous garage with a separate room in back that’s just about perfect for a studio. For the first time ever, I’ll actually have a dedicated place for doing photography instead of sprawling inconveniently across the kitchen.  So if we can get past the blog interruption we’ll all be better for it in the long run.

***update on the oddity***

Oh, and the mystery ant is an ergatoid male of Hypoponera opacior.  It hangs out in the nest robbing the cradle mating with female pupae.  An odd, incestuous little dude. 15 points to Josh King for getting the species. 15 to James Trager for explaining the sex, and five points to everyone who picked the genus correctly.  Don’t spend them all in one place.

Update on the oddity

I hadn’t anticipated that my keen readers would try to guess the *species* of the aforementioned oddity, but since the guessing has headed in that direction I’ll post this hint, which shows the much more commonly seen worker caste of our little mystery bug.

Stakes are now at, um, 15 points. Yeah.

An Avian Moonwalk

Well.  I’m off to host a photography workshop.  But in the meantime I can’t resist passing along this video. In honor of Michael Jackson, of course.

ht: nyt

An oddity

This odd little beast crawled out of a leaf litter sample from a mesic oak/pine forest in Florida. Ten points to the first person who picks what it is.

(Not sure what you’ll do with ten points.  But hey.  You’re all a creative lot.)

Attine genomes: for real this time

A few months ago we learned via an unintentionally leaked press release that a team of researchers lead by Nicole Gerardo and Cameron Currie had won a Roche Applied Sciences grant competition.  The team will be sequencing the complete genome of 14 players from the ant/fungus/microbe co-evolutionary system, including three attine ants from different genera.

The announcement is now official.

An Acromyrmex queen, with brood, in the fungus garden

Friday Beetle Blogging: The Eyed Elater

Alaus oculatus (Elateridae) – The Eyed Elater
Illinois

One of North America’s largest beetles, the eyed elater is more than an inch long.  Alaus oculatus is widespread in the deciduous forests of eastern North America where their larvae are predators of wood-boring beetles.  Other species of Alaus occur in the south and west.  This individual was attracted to a pheromone trap intended to bring in longhorn beetles as part of a University of Illinois study on beetle pheromones, a ready demonstration of how predators may exploit the chemical signaling of their prey.

This particular beetle has been around the block already, apparently. Many of the hairs have worn off and both antennae are missing segments. Still, a striking insect.

photo details: Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon EOS 50D
ISO 100, f/11, 1/160 sec (top) 1/125 sec (bottom), indirect strobe in a white box

The Phantom Ant of the Florida Dunes

Paratrechina phantasma
Archbold Biological Station, Florida

Here’s an ant I almost didn’t notice.  Paratrechina phantasma is one of the least known insects in North America, active at night and restricted to a particular type of sandy soil in Florida.  Workers are only a couple millimeters long and the color of sand.  In the field they appear as ghostly little shapes skirting across the ground, scarcely visible even to those looking for them.

Incidentally, Paratrechina phantasma was named and described by James Trager, a frequent commentator here at Myrmecos Blog. Perhaps, if we’re really nice to him, James will tell us something more about this little ant.

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

For the record…

…when I disappeared to Argentina recently, I was with my wife.

Here she is, collecting ants in the mountains near Tafí de Valle:

photo details: Canon 17-40mm f4.0 L lens on a Canon EOS 20D
ISO 400, 1/250 sec, f11.0, with circular polarizer & gradient filter
on-camera fill flash