Friday Beetle Blogging: Trox Hide Beetle

Scarab’s shrewd cousin, Elytra warty like hide. Must be Trogidae! Photo details: Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon EOS 20D ISO 100, f/16, 1/250 sec, indirect strobe in white box

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The trouble with phylogenetics

Here’s an issue that’s been on my mind as I’m shuffling trees around from several concurrent phylogenetic projects. The primary output from phylogenetics programs is tree diagrams depicting the relationships among organisms.  Very clean, very crisp, very precise diagrams.  Precision isn’t in itself a problem, but for the human foible of mistaking precision for accuracy. [...]

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Mystery Metazoan

Do any of you know what this little animal might be?  I honestly have no idea, and rather than look it up I thought I’d crowd-source it to you folks first. It was lurking on the underside of a leaf at the Archbold Biological Station in Florida along the shores of a sinkhole lake.  This [...]

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Bacteria let ants become herbivores

Why are there so many ants? This is a more perplexing question than it may seem.  At first glance ants are predators and scavengers.  Yet predators should be few in number, balanced on a narrow trophic peak and depending on high prey biomass to exist.  Why are terrestrial ecosystems dominated by these little hunters?

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