The Best of Myrmecos 2009

Earlier I listed my pick of the best insect photos of the year taken by other photographers. Now it’s my turn. In 2009, I snapped 8000 exposures to produce 805 processed, saleable images of live insects. Below are my favorites.

A parasitic Pseudacteon fly targets a fire ant in Argentina

Ho, Ho, Ho!

The best insect photos of 2009

In 2009 the world’s macrophotographers- both amateur and professional- continued to capture breathtaking images of the arthropod microscape.  I’ve been bookmarking insect photos from around the web that catch my eye, and after spending some time this week reviewing the candidates I’ve selected nine favorites. Wow. These are the images from fellow photographers that most captured my imagination over the past year.

Together, by Jan Zajc

The trouble with MrBayes

Sorry for an uncharacteristically technical post.  But, I’ve produced an excellent example of a problem that’s been plaguing the widely-used phylogenetics program MrBayes and thought it might be of interest to the handful of systematists who read this blog.

I’ve been running analyses on the Azteca y’all sent after my desperate plea last month and noticed something odd. 

Sunday Night Movie: Powers of 10

A classic science film from the ’70s:

I love the internet

Feeling nostalgic this afternoon for my Peace Corps days, I did a Google Earth fly-by of my adoptive community, Colónia Once de Setiembre. Not only does Google show the site in high-resolution, the images are clear enough to see a patch of trees I planted with my neighbor in 1997. Judging from the shadows, our token attempt at reforestation must be at least 10 meters tall now.

The miracle of the internet also allows me to confirm that the economy of Once de Setiembre hasn’t changed much since I left.

New research: ants acquired microbial symbionts from honeydew-producing insects

Camponotus rosariensis tending scale insects in Argentina

Another piece of the Camponotus hyperdiversity puzzle was published this week in BMC Evolutionary Biology. The reasons behind the tremendous richness of Camponotine ants- a worldwide group of conspicuous insects containing more than a thousand species- are unknown, but recent explanations have focused on the nutritional relationship between the ants and their endosymbiotic Blochmannia bacteria. These gut-dwelling microbes may have allowed camponotines to capitalize on honeydew resources nutritionally unavailable to other ants, opening opportunities for evolutionary radiation.

In the latest paper, Jennifer Wernegreen isolated Blochmannia DNA sequences from a variety of ant species. Combining these with sequences previously known from other insects, the researchers reconstructed the evolutionary history of the symbionts. What did they find? From the abstract:

Phylogenetic analyses of 16S rDNA gave four important insights: (i) Blochmannia occurs in a broad range of Camponotini genera including Calomyrmex, Echinopla, and Opisthopsis, and did not occur in outgroups related to this tribe (e.g., Notostigma). This suggests that the mutualism originated in the ancestor of the tribe Camponotini. (ii) The known bacteriocyte-associated symbionts of ants, in Formica, Plagiolepis, and the Camponotini, arose independently. (iii) Blochmannia is nestled within a diverse clade of endosymbionts of sap-feeding hemipteran insects, such as mealybugs, aphids, and psyllids. In our analyses, a group of secondary symbionts of mealybugs are the closest relatives of Blochmannia. (iv) Blochmannia has cospeciated with its known hosts, although deep divergences at the genus level remain uncertain.

So ants picked up the bacteria from honeydew-producing insects that already carried them as symbionts.

Incidentally, interactions between microbes and social insects are becoming some of the hottest topics in entomology. This trend was apparent in the research talks at ESA this week, with many labs now exploring the relationship of ant societies and their bacteria. I expect to see plenty more studies in this vein in the coming years.

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Source: Wernegreen, J. J. et al (2009)  One nutritional symbiosis begat another: Phylogenetic evidence that the ant tribe Camponotini acquired Blochmannia by tending sap-feeding insects. BMC Evolutionary Biology 9:292. doi:10.1186/1471-2148-9-292

Back from ESA

We’ve returned from the 2009 Entomological Society of America meeting in Indianapolis. More on this later.

For now, here are slides from two presentations I gave yesterday:

Character Evolution in Heterospilus

Origin of Pheidole obscurithorax

Both talks report from ongoing research, so I should caution that neither of the studies has seen peer-review.

Metallic Green Bee, Agapostemon sp.

Agapostemon sp. – Halictidae
Fairport, NY, USA

Photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 20D.
ISO 100, f/13, 1/250 sec, twin flash diffused through tracing paper

Online Copyright Registration

A couple years back I posted a short bit on how to register photo copyright with the U.S. government. That turned out to be the last time I filled out a registration with pen and paper. For all subsequent submissions I’ve used the new ECO system at http://www.copyright.gov/eco.

Let me disabuse you of any preconception that the online method is easier. You’ll need to clear an hour or two out of your schedule to prepare a submission. The new process involves clicking though an interminable array of confusing steps, filling out an order of magnitude more information than was requested in the paper form, and jockeying awkwardly between upload and payment sites.

Fortunately, photo attorney Carolyn Wright has created a set of directions that are clearer than anything the copyright office provides. I won’t duplicate her efforts by explaining how it works, other than to offer the following pointer: compress your images into a series of .zip files before you begin. How many files you’ll need will depend on the speed of your internet connection, as ECO logs you out after an hour. As with the old system, you can register an unlimited number of images in a single batch and a single fee.

Despite the hassle, I find online registration worthwhile. For one, it’s ten bucks cheaper. And more importantly, the turnaround time is several months faster than paper submission. So if you need your reg numbers quickly, ECO is really your only option.

Anyway, this is been an absolutely thrilling post. So here’s an ant:

this photograph is registered copyright VAu 979-301

15 points to the first person who can identify it.