I, for one, welcome our new robot-ant overlords…

…whose arrival is apparently scored with new-age music and accompanied by your choice of beverage.  Be warned.

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Why no blogging?

This weekend’s various themes included hard drive failure, federal income taxes, and a wayward National Geographic film crew.  We’ve put out most of the larger fires, but at the expense of blogging, I’m afraid. On the bright side, we have some exciting news to announce in a day or two.

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Paisajes de Argentina, 2009

Bits and pieces of landscapes, northern Argentina, March 2009.

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Kalathomyrmex: New Genus, Old Species

In Zootaxa last week, Christiana Klingenberg and Beto Brandão introduced to the world an entirely new genus of fungus-growing ant, Kalathomyrmex.  Yet the single species, K. emeryi, is a widespread neotropical insect that has been known for over a century.  In fact, I photographed it twice during my recent trip to Argentina.  How does this [...]

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“Hey, I’m Dead”

This afternoon NPR is running an entertaining bit on Ed Wilson’s research on how ants identify their deceased nestmates. Plus, they seem to have made a LOLant out of one of my Odontomachus photos.

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Bug Eric takes up photography

and gives us a list of photography’s advantages over specimen collection: You don’t need permits to take images. You can take images of wildlife and people (you can’t “collect” those!). Storage of images takes a lot less room than storage of an insect collection. It takes less time to prepare an image than a specimen [...]

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