A really useful blog post (not mine)

Photos of L. humile and some other species by Alex Wild

Alex Wild over at Myrmecos has just posted a really useful post on how to identify the Argentine ant, Linepithema humile. I wish I'd had this post back when I was identifying all my samples. I cannot explain to you how long I agonized over whether I even had Linepithema, let alone which species they were. This is such a nice explanation that I may even be motivated to go back and look at some of those specimens again. Ack!

Brachymyrmex

Brachymyrmex is one of those genera that is really easy (for me, anyway) to identify to genus, but almost impossible to identify to species. The only species I was able to put a name on was Brachymyrmex cavernicola, a cute little bugger that looks more like a Paratrechina than a Brachymyrmex until you count the antennal segments. The last taxonomic revision was in 1923 (Santschi) so it is definitely due for another one. Luckily, it looks like Vinda Maharajh, a PhD student at the University of Florida, is working on one. I sent him a bunch of my samples last week and wish him luck. If you have any Brachymyrmex specimens lying around, you might consider sending them on over.

Physicists undertake stamp-collecting

John S. Wilkins (Evolving Thoughts) has a nice post about physicists and taxonomy and the role of classification systems in science:

"Ernst Rutherford, the "father" of nuclear physics, once airily declared "In science there is only physics. All the rest is stamp collecting". By this he meant that the theory of physics is the only significant thing in science. Such mundane activities as taxonomy in biology were just sampling contingent examples of physics.

So it is with some amusement that I note that in order to make sense of string theory, a group of physicists have been trying to do taxonomy over string theories. Why this is more than a "gotcha!" is that since the late nineteenth century, philosophers of science have ignored classification, although some of the more important advances in physics relied on it, such as Mendeleev's Table, which drove theoretical advances in both chemistry and physics (and led even more ironically to the understanding Rutherford had of radioactivity)...."

Read more at Evolving Thoughts

ANTZ The RPG

Unraveling the Evolutionary History of the Hyperdiverse Ant Genus Pheidole

Myrmecos has a very nice review of Corrie Moreau’s Pheidole evolution paper, as well as a hilarious informal summary of the results (see image above). Read the review here and the paper here.

Some interesting links

NC State University Insect Museum blog
lots of interesting stuff here. I like the idea of a blog that several people post to -- I keep trying to get my labmates to give me stuff to post about what they're doing but they're all too busy working and stuff :)

Geometry explains the benefits of division of labour in a leafcutter ant
new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B by Heikki Helanterä and Francis L.W. Ratnieks

The 5th edition of Linnaeus' Legacy
It's a blog carnival focusing on taxonomy and biodiversity. I'm not sure what a blog carnival is but it appears to be a roving roundup of interesting news and papers.

Darwin Live and in Concert

Ask Jane

Sometimes I hear about something and I think -- gee, I should really right a blog entry about this -- and I make a little note to myself or save the link for later and then when I sit down to write the entry I think -- boy, I don't have anything interesting to say about this and I don't want to do something lame like just have a link to it so why don't I deal with this later -- and then of course I either never get to it or I just have a lame link to it. Sometimes while I'm procrastinating someone else decides to write something interesting about it. That's what happened today when Myrmecos commented on Jane: the Journal/Author Name Estimator. So go read it.