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Archive for March, 2010

WebMD Taxonomy Fail

Posted in Ants, fun, Taxonomy, tagged Ants, webmd on March 17, 2010 | 12 Comments »

Not a fire ant. But I’ll give ten Myrmecos (™) points to the first person who can identify what species it really is.

Muscleman Tree Ant

Posted in Ants, Australia, Nature, tagged Ants, Photography on March 16, 2010 | 5 Comments »

Podomyrma sp. Cape York Peninsula, Queensland, Australia Photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS D60 ISO 100, f13, 1/200 sec, flash diffused through tracing paper

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Answer to the Monday Night Mystery

Posted in Insect Links, Nature, tagged Insects, strepsiptera on March 16, 2010 | 6 Comments »

The magical mystery lump from last night? As many astute readers noted, they are insects in the enigmatic order Strepsiptera. They live as parasites in the bodies of other insects. Considering the host species (Isodontia mexicana, a sphecid wasp), the streps are probably in the genus Paraxenos. Here are a couple more shots:

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Cordyceps in glass

Posted in Ants, tagged art, glass, Parasites on March 16, 2010 | 11 Comments »

You may remember Wesley Fleming, the glass artist I blogged about last year. It seems he’s accomplished a remarkable new piece: a leafcutter ant infected with a parasitic Cordyceps fungus. As far as I know this is the first Cordyceps ever created from glass. If you’d like to see it in person, this and some [...]

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Monday Night Mystery

Posted in illinois, Nature, tagged biology, entomology, Insects, Photography on March 15, 2010 | 14 Comments »

Ok, so we all know this is a wasp. But what’s with the lumps near the tip of the abdomen? Ten points for identifying the lump, and five points for anyone ambitious enough to put a name on the wasp, too.

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Sunday Night Movie: Trophallaxis

Posted in Ants, Nature, tagged Ants, camponotus, canon 7d, franz schubert, hd video, Insects on March 14, 2010 | 11 Comments »

To create this video, I fed honey water to a captive colony of Camponotus pennsylvanicus carpenter ants and recorded them passing the liquid among nestmates. The sharing behavior is called trophallaxis, and it means more to ants than mere nutrition. They use the behavior to spread chemical messages around the nest and to create a [...]

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The world’s ant taxonomists, brought to you by the Global Ant Project

Posted in Ants, Science, Taxonomy, tagged Ants, myrmecology on March 13, 2010 | 8 Comments »

Over 12,000 ant species have been described since the inception of modern taxonomy 252 years ago. From Formica rufa Linneaus 1758 to Paraparatrechina gnoma LaPolla & Cheng 2010, where did all those names come from? Now it’s easier than ever to find out. The Global Ant Project is assembling a biography for each of the [...]

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