Specimen Request: Army/leafcutter/bullet ant queens for morphometrics

Myrmecologist extraordinaire Mike Kaspari sends out the following call to arms: I am working on a project with Jamie Gillooly examing how various life history traits scale in ant colonies.  Specifically, we are testing the hypothesis that when total colony mass is used (instead of the mass of an individual in the colony) social insects [...]

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Sunday Night Movie: Chocolate Moose

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North America’s charming citronella ants

Students of the North American myrmecofauna will undoubtedly recognize this ant.  Pudgy, pleasingly orange in color, and smelling sweetly of citrus, the Citronella ant is an endearing creature.   This Nearctic endemic is among our most common ants, living in underground empires farming root aphids and mealybugs for sustenance. Yet few people ever encounter these shy [...]

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Who is the intended audience for The Superorganism?

Who is supposed to read The Superorganism? I can’t really tell.  While I’m enjoying Holldobler & Wilson’s latest tome, I am perplexed at the book’s target audience.  The text switches between broadly anthropomorphic prose clearly aimed for a general audience and obtuse jargon digestible only by the experienced biologist. I get the feeling that the [...]

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Friday Beetle Blogging: Long-necked Ground Beetle

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

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Wasp Photo Featured in Nature News

Here’s a sharper version:

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Cool.

Even Google does Darwin Day.

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Guest Blogger: Charles Darwin

In honor of the old man’s 200th, Myrmecos Blog is proud to feature Charles Darwin writing prophetically about the problems posed by social insects for his theory of natural selection.   The passage below is from the first edition of On the Origin of Species, and in it Darwin anticipates the same answers- kin and group [...]

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SLR vs microscope for imaging museum specimens

A few years ago I needed to image some ants for a short taxonomic paper.  Lacking a decent specimen imaging system (like Entovision), I decided to snap the photos at home using my standard macro gear: a dSLR with the Canon MP-E lens.  The images turned out fine and were published in Zootaxa with the [...]

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Stephen Colbert Spills the Beans…

…on what we in Entomology here at Urbana-Champaign are up to.

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