Taxonomy Fail in the NY Times

Seriously, is there a name for the disorder whereby people think everything with wings is a honeybee?

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Breaking News: Attine Genomes Funded

Big ant news today!  Roche Applied Sciences is apparently funding the sequencing of a series of genomes- three ant and an array of fungal and microbial genomes- in an ambitious project to better understand the relationships among the players in the celebrated ant-fungus relationship.  The sequencing project is headed by Nicole Gerardo of Emory University [...]

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The internet has things in it

My profound apologies for the lack of blogitude here while I’m over at Photo Synthesis.  Fortunately, the internet has other things in it: Myrmician shares an action series of Australian Podomyrma taking apart a much larger Myrmecia. Brian Valentine finds some British Myrmica with a serious mite problem. Steve Shattuck’s Ants of Australia has been [...]

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Buffalo State College looking for science images

Posted to EvolDir: We are getting a new science building and one of the features will be beautiful floor to 3-story ceiling glass panels depicting various (somewhat abstract) images from science. I am looking for high resolution pictures of butterfly wing spots, close-ups of animal eyes, close-ups of feathers, or close-ups of color patterns on [...]

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Sunday Night Movie: Trapped in an Elevator

In the event you thought your weekend wasn’t much fun, consider Nicholas White, who spent 41 hours trapped in an elevator one weekend in 1999.  Here’s the time-lapse security video: The story is recounted by the New Yorker.

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The Forgotten Pogos

Ants of the genus Pogonomyrmex (“Pogos”) are known to myrmecologists as the classic harvester ants of North American deserts.  They are conspicuous insects, the most noticeable of the desert ants, and something of a model organism for studies of ecology.  Numerous scientific papers on pogos are published each year, and one species- Pogonomyrmex californicus- is [...]

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Taxonomy Fail

On the homepage of the Proceedings of the Royal Society?  Really? I expect this kind of screwup in, say, USA Today, but a major scientific society really ought to have someone on staff who can correctly identify a honeybee.

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If you are wondering why Myrmecos Blog has become so boring…

…it’s because I’m blogging over at Photo Synthesis this month.

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Sunday Night Movie: A Toast!

To all the anteaters!

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Sexless ants in National Geographic

An image I took a couple years ago at UT Austin is featured today in Nat Geo’s “Photo in the News“.  This laboratory nest was one of the colonies screened in Anna Himler’s study to determine that the species is parthenogenetic. One correction to the Nat Geo article.  Mycocepurus are not leafcutter ants themselves but [...]

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