The Ant Room

Species Diversity and Distribution Patterns of the Ants of Amazonian Ecuador

2010-10-04T13:12:00.000-04:00

So, if you've ever wondered what it is I have been doing for the past 10 years, a big chunk of it was just published in PLoS ONE. You can read the whole article here.

Species Diversity and Distribution Patterns of the Ants of Amazonian Ecuador
Kari T. Ryder Wilkie, Amy L. Mertl, James F. A. Traniello
Department of Biology, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America

Abstract
Ants are among the most diverse, abundant and ecologically significant organisms on earth. Although their species richness appears to be greatest in the New World tropics, global patterns of ant diversity and distribution are not well understood. We comprehensively surveyed ant diversity in a lowland primary rainforest in Western Amazonia, Ecuador using canopy fogging, pitfall traps, baits, hand collecting, mini-Winkler devices and subterranean probes to sample ants. A total of 489 ant species comprising 64 genera in nine subfamilies were identified from samples collected in only 0.16 square kilometers. The most species-rich genera were Camponotus,Pheidole, Pseudomyrmex, Pachycondyla, Brachymyrmex, and Crematogaster. Camponotus andPseudomyrmex were most diverse in the canopy, while Pheidole was most diverse on the ground. The three most abundant ground-dwelling ant genera were Pheidole, Solenopsis and Pyramica.Crematogaster carinata was the most abundant ant species in the canopy; Wasmannia auropunctata was most abundant on the ground, and the army ant Labidus coecus was the most abundant subterranean species. Ant species composition among strata was significantly different: 80% of species were found in only one stratum, 17% in two strata, and 3% in all three strata. Elevation and the number of logs and twigs available as nest sites were significant predictors of ground-dwelling ant species richness. Canopy species richness was not correlated with any ecological variable measured. Subterranean species richness was negatively correlated with depth in the soil. When ant species were categorized using a functional group matrix based on diet, nest-site preference and foraging ecology, the greatest diversity was found in Omnivorous Canopy Nesters. Our study indicates ant species richness is exceptionally high at Tiputini. We project 647–736 ant species in this global hotspot of biodiversity. Considering the relatively small area surveyed, this region of western Amazonia appears to support the most diverse ant fauna yet recorded.

Citation: Ryder Wilkie KT, Mertl AL, Traniello JFA (2010) Species Diversity and Distribution Patterns of the Ants of Amazonian Ecuador. PLoS ONE 5(10): e13146. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013146

CNN report on Yasuni

2010-06-03T20:29:00.000-04:00

CNN aired a report on Yasuni Biosphere Reserve in Ecuador, where I did my doctoral research. It includes an interview with my favorite director of Tiputini Biodiversity Station, Kelly Swing. You can also take a look at some context for the story that was put up on YouTube – find it with the keywords “Yasuni forever.”

Tiputini Termites

2010-02-10T18:44:00.002-05:00

Along with all those billions of ants I collected from Tiputini Biodiversity Station, I also collected some termites. Why? To see if there was a correlation between ant diversity and termite diversity. Ants and termites have a variety of significant relationships with each other from predatory to mutualistic, and I wanted to see if one could influence the other. What do you think?

Below is a list of the termite species collected during ant collections from Tiputini. Termite identifications were made by Reginaldo Constantino.

Genus	species
Anoplotermes	sp. 1
Anoplotermes	sp. 2
Anoplotermes	sp. 3
Anoplotermes	sp. 4
Armitermes	minutus
Atlantitermes	sp.
Coptotermes	cf. testaceus
Cornicapritermes	sp.
Cornitermes	sp. A
Crepititermes	verruculosus
Cylindrotermes	cf. nordenskioeldi
Cylindrotermes	flangiatus
Cylindrotermes	parvignathus
Cylindrotermes	sp. (workers)
Heterotermes	tenuis
Nasutitermes	callimorphus
Nasutitermes	ephratae
Nasutitermes	guayanae
Nasutitermes	intermedius
Nasutitermes	llinquipatensis
Nasutitermes	longirostratus
Nasutitermes	sp. 2
Nasutitermes	surinamensis
Neocapritermes	pumilis
Neocapritermes	sp. (worker)
Rotunditermes	bragantinus
Ruptitermes	sp.
Triangularitermes	triangulariceps
Velocitermes	sp.

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species: A Graphic Adaptation

2009-12-07T17:29:00.001-05:00

Charles Darwin's on the Origin of Species: A Graphic Adaptation
by Michael Keller, illustrated by Nicolle Rager Fuller

I admit that I have not seen this book in person yet but it is illustrated by my cousin, Nicolle Rager Fuller, and therefore must be awesome. Also, it has gotten a lot of good reviews (from Panda's Thumb, ScienceNews, and Graphic Novel Reporter, for instance). It's on my Christmas list. Maybe it should be on yours, too!

Impact of Flooding on the Species Richness, Density and Composition of Amazonian Litter-Nesting Ants

2009-12-07T17:14:00.000-05:00

Better late than never:

Impact of Flooding on the Species Richness, Density and Composition of Amazonian Litter-Nesting Ants

Authors: Mertl, Amy L.; Ryder Wilkie, Kari T.; Traniello, James F. A.
Source: Biotropica, Volume 41, Number 5, September 2009 , pp. 633-641(9)

Litter-nesting ants are diverse and abundant in tropical forests, but the factors structuring their communities are poorly known. Here we present results of the first study to examine the impact of natural variation in flooding on a highly diverse (21 genera, 77 species) litter-nesting ant community in a primary Amazonian forest. Fifty-six 3 × 3 m plots experiencing strong variation in flooding and twenty-eight 3 × 3 m terra firme plots were exhaustively searched for litter-nesting ants to determine patterns of density, species richness and species composition. In each plot, flooding, litter depth, twig availability, canopy cover, plant density, percent soil nitrogen, carbon, and phosphorus were measured. Degree of flooding, measured as flood frequency and flood interval, had the strongest impact on ant density in flooded forest. Flooding caused a linear decrease in ant abundance, potentially due to a reduction of suitable nesting sites. However, its influence on species richness varied: low-disturbance habitat had species richness equal to terra firme forest after adjusting for differences in density. The composition of ant genera and species varied among flood categories; some groups known to contain specialist predators were particularly intolerant to flooding. Hypoponera STD10 appeared to be well-adapted to highly flooded habitat. Although flooding did not appear to increase species richness or abundance at the habitat scale, low-flooding habitat contained a mixture of species found in the significantly distinct ant communities of terra firme and highly flooded habitat.

printable version

GigaPan ant

2009-07-09T00:33:00.002-04:00

I'm not totally clear on what GigaPan is, but check out this awesome panorama photo of Eutetramorium mocquerysi from Madagascar.

a few links to tide you over...

2009-06-16T17:05:00.002-04:00

Not exactly Rocket Science has a very interesting post entitled How research saved the Large Blue Butterfly. Hint: first they had to save some ants.

Bug Girl's Blog comments on Pseudonyms and anonymity with a really nice quote from Charles Darwin: "I am dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects..." Very nice.

From ScienceDaily comes news that Linnaeus invented the index card. Who knew?

Myrmecos has a wonderful post about the difference between Smithistruma and Pyramica.

The New York Times has an interview with Bert Holldobler.

And, just for kicks, I gotta give props to the Fort Wayne Mad Ants, an NBA development team. Go check out their website! Love the theme, from the tagline "join the invasion" to the kids club "ants army" to the cheerleaders "Madame Ants." Not to mention the awesome mascot "The Mad Ant" (see above). Rock on!

Insects In Flagrante

2009-06-03T12:57:00.002-04:00

More insect sex here.

And, while we're on the subject of animal sex, Isabella Roselini's Green Porno is now in its second season! If you haven't experienced this, you must do so now. Go. Now. Watch the whale one.

Colony as Art

2009-06-01T19:04:00.004-04:00

There is a new ant exhibit at the Smithsonian, which features, among other things, Walter Tschinkel's lovely casts of ant colonies. Which reminded me of a recent post on BoingBoing featuring Hilary Berseth's beehive art. The article, explaining how he gets his bees to build their honeycomb structure in just a certain way, is fascinating. And check out the Smithsonian website for a nice photo gallery of where ants live.

Multiple Choice question

2009-05-22T15:37:00.003-04:00

Which of the following headlines are real (real as in they are the titles of serious news stories)

Ants have magnets in their antennae
Ants Demand 23.9-Hour Workday
Brain-Controlling Flies to Triumph Over Alien Ants?
Magneto-ants pump iron
Ant Farm Teaches Children About Toil, Death
FOR KIDS: Night of the living ants
Children bitten by ants, mother arrested
Zombie ants walk the earth in East Texas
Study Shows Ants Can Smell Their Fallen Comrades
Latest pest-control attempt: Turn fire ants into zombies

Answer: all of them except for #2 and #5

So, you want to be a citizen scientist?

2009-05-14T10:00:00.004-04:00

Photo: Christmas Bird Count (Pool) Flickr group

I am slowly trying to get myself back into the blogging swing of things. Here is a CNN article from a couple of weeks ago that caught my eye. I love the idea of citizen scientists:

(CNN) -- As a hobby, Suzie Jirachareonkul, a teacher and mother of two, spends many of her nights searching for endangered toads on the country roads near her home outside Cape Town, South Africa.

She often finds them flattened on the street.

"They're so beautiful and it's just really hard to live with, especially when you're living on the road right here," the 33-year-old said of the toad deaths. "So we started doing something about it. We started saving them off the road in the middle of the rain."

When a scientist caught onto her efforts, Jirachareonkul and a friend assembled about 20 volunteers -- a group she calls the "Toad NUTS" -- to collect data on the endangered Western Leopard Toad.

The information they collect is being used in scientific research.

Read more here

Some other interesting sites about citizen science:

NatureNews article: Personal technology: Phoning in data -- Far from being just an accessory, mobile phones are starting to be used to collect data in an increasing number of disciplines. Roberta Kwok looks into their potential.
http://citizensci.com/ A weblog about citizen science projects
blog post from Science Progress: Harnessing Citizen Scientists -- Let’s Create a Very Public Office of Technology Assessment
CNN story: Ninety years of birdwatchers' notes going online
Science Cheerleader blog post: Citizen Scientists: They’re All the Rage
Fill out this Online Citizen Science Survey
And, yes, an iPhone app is coming....

Look! A Paper!

2009-05-08T11:36:00.008-04:00

Diversity of ground-dwelling ants in primary and secondary forests in Amazonian Ecuador

Kari T. Ryder Wilkie, Amy L. Mertl & James F.A. Traniello

Abstract: An inventory of the ground-dwelling ant faunas of primary and secondary forests at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station in Amazonian Ecuador revealed a total of 101 ant species in 32 genera. Eighty species were collected from the primary forest, while 65 species were collected from the secondary forest. Species overlap between the two sites was low (42.6%) and the composition was significantly different (p<0.0001). Actual species richness was estimated to be 126 species for primary forest and 110 for secondary forest. The most species-rich genus in both habitats was Pheidole (21 species), which was also the most widespread genus, occurring in 38 of 40 collection sites. In the primary forest, in addition to Pheidole (18 species), the most species-rich genera were Crematogaster (8 species), and Pachycondyla (7 species), whereas Pheidole (17 species), Camponotus (5 species), and Pachycondyla (5 species) were the most species-rich genera in the secondary forest. These results are consistent with past studies showing that the number of ant species in secondary forest increases with time from disturbance and may approach that of primary forest within several decades, but that species composition may take significantly longer to resemble that of the original ant assemblage. The prevalence of different ant functional groups in the two habitats is discussed and the results compared to similar studies in Australia and North America.

Ryder Wilkie KT, Mertl AL, Traniello JFA. 2009. Diversity of ground-dwelling ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) in primary and secondary forests in Amazonian Ecuador. Myrmecological News 12: 139-147 published Online Earlier 20 April 2009

UPDATE: printable version

Rod Page talks taxonomy

2009-02-21T13:22:00.004-05:00

If I lived in London, this is what I would be doing on March 17th:

Rod Page, Professor of Taxonomy at Glasgow University will be giving two talks in London about taxonomy on March 17th. These will be at the Natural History Museum and later at the British Library. Details as follows:
"Going digital: what's in it for taxonomy and taxonomists?"
Flett Theatre, NHM from 11-12.30, refreshments from 10.30.
"What's in a name: Taxonomy in Crisis"
British Library, 18-20.30.

Via Vince Smith's blog

Kaspari & Davidson receive NSF funds to work on BCI

2009-02-19T19:43:00.002-05:00

Good stuff from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute:

NSF granted funds to do research on BCNM to STRI research associate Michael Kaspari from the University of Oklahoma ($324K) and Adam Kay Davidson, St. Thomas University ($316K) for the project “Toward stoichiometric theory of ant ecology--from colony performance to community composition," on Barro Colorado Nature Monument. This project explores a basic goal of evolutionary ecology: to understand how organisms respond to environmental challenges and to scale that information up to predict the behavior of communities and ecosystems.

The big goal is to detail the natural history of 50-75 common ant species, link their reproductive biology to the colony's niche, and access the degree to which those niches are phenol typically plastic.

Also of interest is the fact that this was announced through their Twitter feed. Rock on Smithsonian!

Videos on EOL

2009-02-17T16:48:00.003-05:00

Looks like the Encyclopedia of Life is now indexing videos as well as images from Flickr. Just upload your videos to the EOL group in Flickr and tag it with with a species name. The videos will should then be featured in EOL species pages. The Honeybee (Apis mellifera) page has an example. From EOL:

Since the group began less than 6 months ago contributors have submitted over 13,000 photos and now over 200 videos which are shown in EOL species pages. Follow the instructions on our group homepage and learn how to submit and tag your photos and videos. We encourage everyone to check out the EOL Flickr group and start submitting photos and videos today!

So.... let's get some ant videos up there!

SPADE update

2009-02-13T09:14:00.002-05:00

"Dear Collegues/Friends and SPADE Users,

Thank you for your use/interest/request of SPADE program in the past. (SPADE: Species Prediction And Diversity Estimation). I also thank many users for very helpful comments and feedbacks, which have led substantial improvement in SPADE. Now SPADE has been recently updated/modified and added two new parts: multiple-community similarity/diversity measures and genetic applications. In the genetic application part, we have featured Jost's differentiation measure

D proposed in Jost (2008, Molecular Ecology,17, 4015-4026).

The latest version of SPADE (2009/Feb 13 Version) and the revised User Guide now can be freely downloaded online from http://chao.stat.nthu.edu.tw/softwareCE.html by just clicking SPADE there. The installation procedures have been greatly simplified. Please also note that the data input format for frequency or abundance data in one community case has been properly modified in order to be consistent with data format for multiple communities. Your comments, thoughts and suggestions are always welcome."

.

Best regards, Anne Chao

Tsing Hua Distinguished Chair Professor

Institute of Statistics

National Tsing Hua University

Hsin-Chu, TAIWAN

http://chao.stat.nthu.edu.tw

Slogging through the setbacks

2009-02-13T02:09:00.002-05:00

I have been out of commission for awhile with severe bronchitis and something called hyper-reactive airway syndrome, whatever that means. I spent 2 days in the hospital and am currently working from home because doing things like going outside in the cold distresses my lungs. At what point did I become an old person? I am back to working on my big paper and will hopefully have more to say on that matter soon. Cheers!

Ant links to check out

2009-01-13T09:17:00.000-05:00

Linnaeus' Legacy 15: Sorting it all out

"The latest edition of Linnaeus' Legacy is up at Greg Laden's Blog. This month's keywords: Not, a third of it is in Latin, now you get it for free, dahlias, something about the way, littlest sauropodomorph, martini, can of worms, Jocko, finches on mescaline, wench, tricks, oriole, parrots, bucket full of gasoline, extinction"

Species compensation maintains abundance and raid rates of African swarm-raiding army ants in rainforest fragments

"Our study demonstrates that habitat fragmentation may have a differential effect on two ecologically highly similar keystone species. Moreover, it shows that species compensation might help in maintaining an important ecosystem function (i.e. raiding by swarm-raiding army ants) in fragmented tropical rainforests."

How cheating ants give themselves away

"According to research findings published in the journal Current Biology on Jan. 8, hydrocarbons on the outside cuticle of fertile ants form 'a particular chemical signature blend.' A cocktail that an ant apparently can't deny, cover up, or lie about and which brands a cheater much like the red "A" on the bosom of Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Scarlet Letter.'"

Evolution of the Neotropical ant genus Linepithema by Alex Wild

Origin of Species read along

Look! Pretty pictures!

2009-01-05T15:27:00.009-05:00

You know how you get sometimes when you have been working on a revision of a revision of a revision and you are just so tired of the stupid thing you can barely even look at it let alone work on it? Well, that is where I am right now. So... here are some pretty pics of a leafcutter ant mating swarm in Arizona from (who else?) myrmecos.

Ants Digging the Web

2009-01-05T01:30:00.000-05:00

While looking for info on Ants, Nature's Secret Power, I stumbled across this post comparing ants laying trails to social voting sites like Digg and Reddit. Ants do everything first!

Myrmecos reviews the year in ants

2008-12-30T10:19:00.006-05:00

image: Alex Wild

via myrmecos:

The Demise of the Standard Ant. That is the title of a review by Juergen Heinze, but the idea that our basic conception of how ant colonies work is overly simplistic receives plenty of additional support from the research community. For instance, Smith et al document the complexity of caste determination in Pogonomyrmex badius, while Schwander & Keller find likewise in P. rugosus. Meanwhile, Dobata et al show some supposed queens of Pristomyrmex punctata are actually parasites, and Hughes et al find parasitic patrilines among the attines.
The Eureka Ant. A potential sister lineage to all living ants is discovered when Christian Rabeling and Manfred Verhaagh find Martialis heureka wandering about in Amazonian leaf litter near Manaus, Brazil. We gain a subfamily, Martialinae, and a great deal new to ponder about ant evolution.
Ant Genomes. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute announces the funding of not one, but three ant genomes. While we won’t see the assembled data for a good while yet, the genomes are certain to become a gold mine for many different areas of myrmecology. The announcement comes on the heels of Tsutsui et al’sstudy on the evolution of genome size in ants.
Elephants and giraffes are a pivotal part of Africa’s famed ant-acacia mutualisms. Palmer et al experimentally removed large mammals from the system to find that the ant-acacia relationship broke down.
Attine fungus-growing ants have a big year, with Schultz & Brady producing a detailed phylogeny of the attini, Bacci et al publishing a phylogeny of the leafcutting genus Atta, Mueller et al showing that some of the microbes in the system are not as co-evolved as had been thought, and Hughes et al documenting an abrupt shift in anti-microbial gland size in the leaf-cutting attine genera.
Parasitic nematodes turn their ant hosts into bird-attracting berries so that they can spread to new ants via tasty bird poop. This, according to work by Yanoviak et al.
Lasius neglectus’ transition to invasiveness receives thorough documentation in a. The team concludes that pre-existing traits may have combined with human activity to assist an escape from parasites. A new pest is born.
The ant evolutionary tree receives a boost as systematists produce species-level histories of the genera Pheidole, Atta, Lasius, Odontomachus, and Linepithema.
Suicidal Forelius workers provide a stark example of altruism when they regularly close themselves out of the nest in the process of sealing it from attackers. As recorded by Tofilski et al.
Treehoppers in trouble call ants. According to Morales et al, when hoppers get in trouble with lady beetles they issue audio signals. These attract ants that chase off the carnivorous coccinellids.
GP-9 demystified. The enigmatic gp-9 was the first gene to be associated with social behavior in ants, marking the difference between single and multiple queen colonies of the fire ant Solenopsis invicta. A study by Wang et al showed that the gp-9 locus might not directly cause the difference itself; instead, it primarily affects gene expression at a small number of other loci, many associated with chemical communication. If you’re wondering what the future holds for myrmecology, pay attention. These sorts of genomic studies will become much more common as researchers begin to dissect the links between genetics and social behavior.

Leafcutter ant colony + 10 tons of cement = awesome documentary

2008-12-30T00:03:00.003-05:00

This video is from a documentary titled Ants! Natures Secret Power. I saw it on BoingBoing recently, but it appears to have been around for years. Based on Bert Hölldobler’s research, it shows the excavation of a full sized leafcutter ant colony filled with 10 tons of cement ala Walter Tschinkel. Yup. I haven't seen the full documentary but the YouTube clip is amazing. What I really want to know is what happened to this ten ton cement colony afterwards?

If you happen to be in Oklahoma on March 24th, it appears that there will be a showing at the University of Oklahoma. The word on the street is that it is well worth watching.

More mystery ants

2008-12-23T07:25:00.001-05:00

Once again, these photos were taken by Kelly Swing at Tiputini Biodiversity Station.

Mystery ant!

2008-12-21T23:11:00.003-05:00

So, anybody know what this ant is? This photo was taken by Kelly Swing at Tiputini Biodiversity Station in Ecuador. More mystery ants are coming....

A few interesting links

2008-12-08T19:14:00.010-05:00

Roberto Keller has started a blog Archetype: Ant reconstruction one homology at a time.
CollectionsWeb: Building a Community of Natural History Collections
Red Ants Pants: Workpants for women. Why not?
Cool ant T-shirt on Threadless. And another one.
Some disturbing art involving ants from Courtney Kim
Otto the octopus wreaks havoc -- so bored he juggles hermit crabs
Chill out: cooling promotes aggressive behavior in ant

What's up with me

2008-12-08T19:04:00.003-05:00

If anyone out there is dying to know what I have been up to:

Working on a revision of a paper comparing species diversity of ants in primary and secondary forest in Amazonian Ecuador. Finally sent it in last week and hope to see it published soon.
Watching my friend, labmate, and collaborator Amy Mertl finish her thesis a month and a half after getting married. Crazy woman.
Starting in on The Big Paper. Details to follow.

Ant #4 (Tim and Kari): ceramic planter

2008-12-08T18:05:00.004-05:00

So, if anyone out there recalls my fabulous idea of creating an ant a day, they will also recall that I have been an abject failure at doing so. I shall now move into a mode involving showing ants I created in the past, that are just sitting around the apartment, rather than ants that I created for this project. Next I shall no doubt move into a mode involving showing ants other people have made that are just sitting around my apartment. Sigh. This is a ceramic planter I made for a ceramics class several years ago. It is actually a collaborative piece between my husband and I, who created a rolling ant stamp that I used in the design.

Dance Your PhD! (Possibly the coolest thing ever)

2008-10-08T15:54:00.003-04:00

Image: Bradley Wind

Dear God: Please please please let me have the motivation (and balls) to enter this contest. Amen.

The 2009 AAAS Science Dance Contest

HOW TO ENTER:

The contest is open to anyone who has (or is pursuing) a Ph.D. in any scientific field, such as physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, anthropology, or in science-related fields such as mathematics, engineering, linguistics, bioethics, the history of science, etc. regardless of whether you've remained in academia.

1. Make a video of your own Ph.D. dance.

2. Post the video on YouTube. In the video's information box, include your Ph.D. title and any relevant information (scientific or artistic) that you'd like to share.

3. Not later than 23:00 EST 16 November 2008, email your name; current affiliation and status; the title of your Ph.D., university where it is earned, and completion date; and the Internet link to your Ph.D. dance video to: gonzo@aaas.org

Once this information is posted on the Contestants video page, you are officially entered in the contest.

* * Submission deadline: 16 November 2008 * *

HOW TO WIN:

On 17 November 2008, an independent panel of judges will select a total of 4 winners from the following categories:

Graduate Student: Best among those currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program

Post-Doc: Best among those who have a Ph.D. but not tenure at a university

Professor: Best among those with Ph.D. and tenure at a university

Popular Choice: The video with the highest YouTube viewcount by the deadline

If a dance video wins in both the Popular Choice and another category, the video with the next highest viewcount wins the Popular Choice award. The dance can be solo or a group effort, but the author of the Ph.D. must appear in a central role. This is a dance contest, not a video contest, so the judges will focus on the quality of the dance rather than any fancy editing you do with iMovie. The winning dances will be those that most creatively convey the scientific essence of their respective Ph.D. theses.

THE PRIZE:

On the day you are chosen as a winner, you must submit a single peer-reviewed research article on which you are a co-author. (Graduate students who have not yet co-authored an article must choose one co-authored by their Ph.D. advisor.)

Each of you will be paired with a professional choreographer. (A team of 4 choreographers in Chicago are ready and waiting.) Over the next couple of weeks (via email and telephone) you must help your choreographer understand your article, its aims, the hypotheses it tests, and its big-picture context. With that knowledge, the choreographers will collaborate to create a 4-part dance based on the science behind the 4 winning research articles.

You will be honored guests at the 2009 AAAS Annual Meeting in Chicago in February. Accommodation for 2 nights will be provided, and travel grants are available to help cover your expenses.

During the AAAS meeting, on 13 February 2009, you will have front row seats to the world debut of "THIS IS SCIENCE"--the professional dance interpretation of your scientific research.

Ants in the New Yorker

2008-09-29T18:02:00.004-04:00

Who says you have to go to the far off jungles to study ant diversity? Check out this New Yorker article on the work of former graduate student Marko Pecarevic entitled Ant Diversity and Abundance Increase with Increasing Plant Complexity and Amount of Garbage Bins in New York City Street Medians.

Via bridgeandtunnelclub

How to Identify Queens

2008-09-28T16:17:00.002-04:00

Alex over at Myrmecos has a fabulous post on how to identify queens. It is the clearest, most useful explanation I have ever seen, with some wonderful images to illustrate. I really wish I had had this when I was first starting out. Go check it out and thank Alex for all the hard work he clearly put into this. Thanks Alex!

Check List: journal of species lists and distributions

2008-09-19T11:29:00.003-04:00

Just had this journal pointed out to me today. From their website:

CHECK LIST is a quarterly journal devoted to publishing species occurrence lists, geographic distribution maps, and notes on the geographic distribution of any taxon. These reports have traditionally been neglected and considered "too basic" or "not scientifically relevant" for publication in other venues. CHECK LIST seeks to remedy this. Efforts to preserve the remaining ranges of species are fundamental for the conservation of biodiversity and the first step to accomplish this is to keep records of the distribution of the species. CHECK LIST was created to fill this gap by publishing papers on these important inventories.

It looks like it is a Brazilian-based effort by CRIA (Centro de Referência em Informação Ambiental), a "non-profit and non-governmental Brazilian organization that aims to contribute to the conservation of global biodiversity by dissemination of high quality scientific information." Since 2005 they have published 11 issues (in English) online. Papers are peer-reviewed, turn-around is quick, and there are no publication costs. Sounds good to me. Check them out here.

Scratchpads: biodiversity online

2008-09-18T17:40:00.005-04:00

Scratchpads: Biodiversity Online is an online biodiversity site (duh) that looks very promising. From their website:

Scratchpads are an easy to use, social networking application that enable communities of researchers to manage, share and publish taxonomic data online. Sites are hosted at the Natural History Museum London, and offered free to any scientist that completes an online registration form. Key features of the Scratchpads include tools to manage:

Classifications Phylogenies

Bibliographies Documents

Image galleries Custom data

Specimen records Maps

Users control who has access to content, which is published on the site under Creative Commons (by-nc-sa) license.

Data added to a Scratchpad are automatically classified and grouped around a taxonomy that is supplied by the users. This is optionally supplemented with information from high quality web accessible databases, to automatic construct content rich web pages about any documented taxon. Currently these sources include Genbank, GBIF, Biodiversity Heritage Library, Yahoo! Images, flickr and Google Scholar.

Want to learn more? I do!

Roberts, D., Rycroft, S.D., González, M., and Smith, V.S. (2007) Scratchpads: what are they? European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy News (newsletter article).

Smith, VS.* (2008) Cybertaxonomy: applying computers & the Web to the study of biodiversity. Invited. Part of the Voyages of Discovery lecture series. Natural History Museum, London, U.K. April 22, 2008.

Smith, VS.*, Rycroft, S.D. & Roberts, D. (2008) Scratchpads: Getting biodiversity online, redefining publication. Invited. NHM trustees presentation. Natural History Museum, London, U.K. March 4, 2008.

Smith, VS.*, Rycroft, S.D., & Roberts, D. (2008) Scratchpads: Getting biodiversity online, redefining publication. EDIT general meeting, Carvoeiro, Portugal. Jan. 24, 2008.

ZooKeys: new online journal edited by Terry Erwin

2008-08-19T09:09:00.000-04:00

From their website:

"ZooKeys is a peer-reviewed, open-access, rapidly produced journal launched to support free exchange of ideas and information in systematic zoology.

All papers published in ZooKeys can be freely copied, downloaded, printed and distributed at no charge for the reader. Authors may retain all other rights on their works. Authors are thus encouraged to post the pdf files of published papers on their homepages or elsewhere to expedite distribution.

Papers are published both online and in the traditional printed format, in full compliance with the current requirements of ICZN."

The abstract from the editorial opening paper:

"Publishing taxonomic and systematics studies in the digital era faces major challenges and requires new approaches, many of which are currently stimulating spirited discussions amongst taxonomists and systematists. New amendments to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature are expected to regulate electronic publishing of new taxa and create a standard form for their registration (ZooBank). Responding to a perceived need, this editorial announces establishment of ZooKeys – a new online and print journal in zoological taxonomy and systematics, which aims to quickly respond and adapt to the newest developments in taxonomic publishing. Open Access is accepted as mandatory for ZooKeys. Th e rationale for and concept of ZooKeys is discussed in detail."

Check it out here.

The 2009 Edward O. Wilson Biodiversity Technology Pioneer Awards

2008-08-18T09:00:00.000-04:00

Photo from terpenstra

From The Dispersal of Darwin blog:

I am happy to announce this information from George Keremedjiev and Bozeman's American Computer Museum. In 2006, biologist Edward O. Wilson visited, gave a lecture, and signed books in Bozeman, as part of accepting the 2006 George R. Stibitz Computer and Communications Award for his proposal to create an electronic encyclopedia of all life (EOL, and see this TED talk).

Now, Bozeman and Montana State University will host in 2009 the first ceremony for recipients of the Edward O. Wilson Biodiversity Technology Pioneer Awards, which, according to the website, "will will be presented by Dr. Wilson in person to honorees who have pioneered, invented, developed or used modern technology to help advance the biodiversity of life on planet Earth."

A free public forum in the afternoon and a tickets-required awards dinner in the evening are scheduled for Thursday, April 9, 2009.

Four honorees have been announced so far:

Dr. Jane Lubchenco Wayne and Gladys Valley Professor of Marine Biology, Distinguished Professor of Zoology, Oregon State University
Dr. Steve Running Professor & Director, Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group (NTSG), College of Forestry & Conservation, University of Montana, Missoula, MT
Dr. Michael Soulé Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz
Dr. David Ward Professor of Microbial Ecology, Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences, Montana State UniversityBozeman, MT

Updates about the awards, the events, and its honorees will be updated on this website.
[Photo credit: E.O. Wilson signing books in Bozeman, Montana, 2006]

The Kurt Kuene Antpage

2008-08-08T09:30:00.000-04:00

By the way, when I was hunting around on the internet for random Fluon facts, I stumbled across this guy. That is like the coolest ant farm ever! He has detailed drawings, descriptions, and photos of the development of this thing from year to year. It is amazing. Check it out here.

Where do you get your Fluon from?

2008-08-07T15:27:00.003-04:00

One of my favorite ant-related products is Fluon. Liquid Teflon. The thing that keeps all of our ants from running amok (well, most of them anyway). Apparently the company that we usually get our Fluon from has gone out of business and our dealer sent us a replacement that was not so good. Where do you get your Fluon from?

Some interesting facts about Fluon (taken from a very old post on The Ant Farm's message board):

Its slipperiness declines over several months in warm, humid conditions, such as during summer in many places, or in tropical climates. In dry conditions, it may last over a year.
Some arboreal ants can climb over it.
Unused Fluon should be agitated, either shaken gently with a circular motion, or merely turned upside down two or three times, about once every ten days or two weeks. Otherwise, the polymer will settle out of suspension and become useless.
If you are a smoker, be sure NEVER to inhale combusted Fluon, such as might rub off on a cigarette. This can result in severe flu-like symptoms, known as "polymer fever". Wash it off your skin very thoroughly after use.

For all you thrifty ant keepers out there -- here is a 2007 article on how diluted Fluon works just as well as undiluted Fluon:

Chen, J., Wei, X. Coated containers with reduced concentrations of fluon to prevent ant escape. Journal of Entomological Science. 42(1):119-121 (January 2007).

And for the historically minded -- check out this 1956 article mentioning Fluon (perhaps for the first time?) as a tool in the control of insect movement:

Merton, T. 1956. On a barrier against insect pests. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Vol. 234, No. 1197 (Feb. 7, 1956), pp. 218-220

Wear your nerdiness proudly!

2008-07-23T17:04:00.002-04:00

Buy them here.

Study looks at leafcutter ants to provide new insight into the origins of Amazonian diversity

2008-07-23T09:17:00.005-04:00

Figure: Timeline of diversification in Amazonian Atta species

Via EurekAlert:

"The results of a new study suggest that past climate changes and sea level fluctuations may have promoted the formation of new species in the Amazon region of South America.
Today, the Amazon basin is home to the richest diversity of life on earth, yet the reasons why this came to be are not well understood. A team of American and Brazilian researchers studied three species of leafcutter ants from Central and South America to determine how geography and climate affect the formation of new species. Their results will be published July 23 in the journal PLoS ONE.

"One way in which our study is unique is that we looked at an insect. Previous studies have focused mostly on birds, mammals and other vertebrates, whereas insects actually represent the majority of the animal diversity in the Amazon," said Dr. Scott Solomon, the lead author on the study.

Climate changes during the last ice age affected where Amazonian species, such as leafcutter ants, were able to live, restricting some to isolated "refugia" that could cause them to evolve into new species.

"During the last ice age the Amazon region was cooler and drier than it is today, although it was probably still mostly covered by forests," said Solomon.

By comparing the climatic conditions where the species live today with models of what the climate was like in the past using a computational method called maximum entropy, the researchers estimated exactly where each species was capable of living during the last ice age, approximately 21,000 years ago. The researchers then tested their estimates using DNA sequence information from each species and found that the patterns matched up, suggesting that the ancient climate changes left a genetic signature on the ants that is still detectable today.

Prior to the last ice age, rising sea levels may have also played a role in separating populations. Parts of South America that are today covered in rainforest may have been underwater between 10-15 million years ago, according to the researchers. This would have caused higher elevation regions nearby, like the slopes of the Andes mountains, to become like islands, in which species were able to evolve independently from species on other "islands."

According to the study, the genetic evidence was consistent with both scenarios, suggesting that both ice age climate changes as well as flooding of the Amazon basin could be responsible for generating diversity in leafcutter ants.

The authors rejected the idea, previously suggested by other scientists, that rivers play a role in generating diversity in the Amazon basin by separating populations that live on either side. According to the study, even the Amazon river—which at places is nearly 2 miles wide—has not kept winged leafcutter ant queens and males from flying across it.

"It is interesting that Amazonian rivers acts as barriers to some birds, but these ants are apparently able to cross them," said Solomon.

According to the authors, the idea that refugia were responsible for generating species diversity in the Amazon has been heavily criticized. However, the new findings suggest that the refugia theory may need to be reevaluated.

"Even though we found support for the refugia hypothesis, our results suggest that climate changes had a different effect on each species, even though they are very closely related. This goes against the way people have thought about refugia in the past, and it highlights how difficult it is to generalize when it comes to making predictions about how climate change affects species," said Solomon."

Citation: Solomon SE, Bacci M Jr, Martins J Jr, Vinha GG, Mueller UG (2008) Paleodistributions and Comparative Molecular Phylogeography of Leafcutter Ants (Atta spp.) Provide New Insight into the Origins of Amazonian Diversity. PLoS ONE 3(7): e2738. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002738

E. O. Wilson working on a novel

2008-07-15T23:45:00.003-04:00

Apparently, he would write a novel.

In a recent article in the New York Times, E. O. Wilson is said to be working on his first novel:

"Over lunch he describes his novel in progress, currently titled “Anthill.” Its contents have occasioned certain differences of emphasis between himself and his publisher, even though it was his editor at Norton, Robert Weil, who suggested he write it. Dr. Wilson would like ants to play a large role in the novel, given all the useful lessons that can be drawn from their behavior. The publisher sees a larger role for people and a smaller, at most ant-sized, role for ants. The novel is rotating through draft after draft as this tension is worked out."

I can't wait to read it.

Primary vs. Secondary forest

2008-07-07T16:00:00.005-04:00

Photo: Tiputini Biodiversity Station -- tower view

It occurs to me that I am not doing a good job of living up to my blog mission statement. More specifically, I have not been "keeping track (for my own benefit) of my daily progress in the identification of the ant fauna of Tiputini Biodiversity Station in Ecuador, the analysis of that data, and the pursuit of my PhD." To remedy that situation, I shall tell you what I am doing right now.

Right now I am working on a paper comparing ant diversity in primary vs. secondary forest. This is from a small pilot study Amy Mertl and I did in 2002. It was our first visit to Tiputini, our first field season, and our first attempt at identifying ants. We were not very good. We would sit together in the lab, one of us with a key and the other at the microscope. We had never heard of pinning so we just looked at them in alcohol. We had never heard of Bolton, so we used the key in The Ants. One of us would read through the key couplet by couplet and the other one would say things like, "I guess the first one" or "what the hell does that mean?" or "is there a third option?" or "why don't you take a look." And no one was around to tell us if we got anything right (or wrong). It's a miracle we got anything right at all. Of course, the beauty of keeping your ants in alcohol is that you can go back and re-identify them. :)

Interested in how biodiversity is affected when primary forest is cut down and then allowed to regrow? There is an interesting article in a recent issue of Science on rainforest biodiversity in recovering forests. Check it out here.

Ant #3 (Tim): wood burned ant trail

2008-06-30T14:59:00.005-04:00

This lovely trail of ants was created using a wood burning pen on a very small piece of wood (about 1 cm wide).

My Tiputini Mantis Database: The Numbers

2008-06-25T08:00:00.000-04:00

9: # of subfamilies.

64: # of valid genera records.

17: # of genera represented by a single species.

110: # of species represented by a single specimen.

65: # of species represented by two specimens.

10: # of species represented by over 100 specimens.

8483: # of specimen records.

50: # of species records for the genus Pheidole, the most species-rich genus in my collection.

65: # of Pheidole species Amy Mertl has collected at Tiputini.

154: # of Pheidole species on John Longino's Ants of Costa Rica website.

14: # of people (besides myself) who have helped me to identify species.

70: # of specimen records for specimens that are definitely not ants.

8: # of years I have been in graduate school.

6: # of years that have passed since I collected my first specimen at Tiputini.

27: # of copies of various versions of my database that I have.

5: # of places I keep backup versions of current database.

29: # of specimen records that contain the phrase "lost specimen" in the specimen notes.

861: # of specimen records for reproductives.

108: # of specimens that I was unable to identify to anything more than "Formicidae"

542: # of species records -- this includes fake ones like Formicidae (Formicidae) where I know it's an ant but have no idea what kind it is or Attini (Attini) where I know it is an Attine, but have no idea what kind. It also includes the classic Hymenoptera (Hymenoptera), otherwise known as "it has six legs and wings."

503: # of species records -- this does not include the above fake species but does include morphospecies and new species, and is not necessarily the number of species that I have collected, as it includes certain morphospecies which may overlap each other.

???: # of species I have collected.

Ant #2 (Kari): Bitstrip Ant

2008-06-20T09:00:00.001-04:00

This ant was created on Bitstrips, which is a pretty cool site that lets you design characters and create comics very easily. It was mashed together using silhouettes of baseball bats, lemons, bottles, a heart, and two golf tees. I forgot the antennae, though.

An ant a day (ish)

2008-06-19T08:00:00.000-04:00

I've been a big fan of the skull-a-day blog where the author created a new piece of art (with a skull theme) every day for a year. I thought, I can do that! And (obviously) I would want to use ants as a theme. I made a deal with my husband that we would take turns making something every other day and I would post the results in this blog. Turns out we are both pretty lazy and have come up with nothing close to an ant a day. More like an ant every couple of weeks. I will still post the results here, though. We also make no claims as to the quality of the art -- it's just for fun.

Day 1 (Tim): bent wire ant

International Code of Area Nomenclature (ICAN)

2008-06-18T06:06:00.002-04:00

John S. Wilkins over at Evolving Thoughts pointed me in the direction of a new code which has just been published in the Journal of Biogeography that aims to standardize the naming of areas of endemism and other biogeographical areas. This new code would be similar in scope to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), which governs how we name new taxa. The smallest area would be named a district, followed by province, dominion, region, and realm. From the abstract:

"Biogeography needs a standard, coherent nomenclature. Currently, in biogeography,
the same name is used for different areas of biological endemism, and one area of endemism is known by more than one name, which leads to conflict and confusion. The name ‘Mediterranean’, for example, may mean different things to different people – all or part of the sea, or the land in and around it. This results in ambiguity concerning the meaning of names and, more importantly, may lead to conflicts between inferences based on different aspects of a given name. We propose the International Code of Area Nomenclature (ICAN), a naming system that can be used to classify newly coined or existing names based on a standard. When fully implemented, the ICAN will improve communication among biogeographers, systematists, ecologists and conservation biologists."

Apparently someone has already published a paper which utilizes this new system. López et al. (2008) includes the following statement from the abstract:

"The following zoogeographic provinces are proposed for Argentine freshwater fish fauna following the International Code of Area Nomenclature: Andean Cuyan, Patagonian, Aymaran, Great Rivers and Pampean. The former two are placed within the Andean Subregion of the Austral Region, and the latter three within the Neotropical Subregion of the Holotropical Region. These provinces, based on results coinciding with PAE and cluster analysis, represent the first classification of Argentine provinces based on objective methods."

There are a lot of reasons why I'm doing what I'm doing and one of them is that I like organizing systems. They make me happy. I like putting things into categories and (theoretically) bringing order to chaos. At its best it feels like the "after" photo from one of those articles about organizing your closet. Look how clean and organized it is now! Every sock has its own little cubbyhole, sorted by color and length. Summer outfits on the left, Winter on the right. Shoes all lined up and ready to compare to your purses so you can color coordinate your outfits! Considering a new dress? Now you can easily and efficiently scan all the dresses you already own, and be able to make a good decision about whether that new dress is really all that different from all your old dresses! Isn't it wonderful? Won't life be so much better now? Just think of all the time and money you will save!

So you can see why this new system seems pretty neato to me. I have certainly run into problems in the past trying to figure out what exactly people are talking about when it comes to geography. Or what term I should be using for my area of study. Western Amazonian lowland rainforest? Yasuní region? Upper Napo region? Amazon Basin? Lowland Ecuadorian rainforest? Yasuni National Park? Tiputini Biodiversity Station? The Neotropics? It is not always clear to me.

On the other hand, it is also not clear to me how exactly I would utilize this new code in reality. Perhaps there is a list somewhere of currently accepted terms, but if so, I can't find it. So does that mean that everyone is starting from scratch? I don't even know what a realm is. And I would think that all of these areas would be attached to particular taxa. For instance the areas of endemism for freshwater fish are probably not going to be the same as the areas of endemism for ants or birds. At least at the province level. But they would certainly overlap. At the top of the hierarchy, though, they might be the same. How does that work? You can cite previous work, so I could (for instance) cite Bolton and divide ants into the classic groups of Nearctic, Palearctic, Neotropical, Afrotropical, etc.), but would those be kingdoms? Realms? Districts? Would the Neotropical region for ants be different from the Neotropical region for freshwater fish? How would my newly defined areas fit into the existing system? Or is there no system yet? I'm not clear. Perhaps some concrete examples would help me understand it. Of course, I've only spent about an hour browsing the internet to figure this stuff out, so all the answers could already be out there. But I really need to get back to work!

And now for something fun -- Elements!

2008-06-17T08:05:00.000-04:00

The return of the ant room maven

2008-06-17T08:00:00.000-04:00

As some of you may have noticed, I have been absent on this blog for quite awhile now. The reasons are various and sundry but mostly involve the fact that I discovered some major problems with my master database and I think I have been going through the 5 stages of grieving:

Denial -- I'm sure this isn't that bad. Maybe just a couple of records gone awry. I'll just check my email first.... My desk is so disorganized. I'm going to clean out my desk so I can have a good environment to work in. Yeah, I really should figure out what is wrong with my database. But I think I'm coming down with a cold. Probably better if I take the day off and rest so I don't get really sick. It's important to take care of yourself! I will definitely deal with that whole database issue tomorrow.

Anger -- #@!!%!!!!!!!

Bargaining -- Perhaps I have some older version of the database that isn't messed up. Hmmm... not on my computer... maybe on one of these twelve million random disks that are sitting in my desk. No... maybe on my old laptop that died four years ago. Okay, that doesn't work. Perhaps I should spend several days making my old computer try to work. That seems reasonable. And so on.

Depression -- Everything is bad... (groan).... I'm going to have to re-identify every... single... specimen... (moan).... I'm just going to curl up in a little ball for awhile....

Acceptance -- Okay. I really just can't trust my database anymore. The only way to be sure of the data is to do a pin-by-pin inventory of every single specimen in my collection and match them up to its record in the database. If I don't see it in front of me (and I didn't send it off to another researcher) then it doesn't exist.

So that is what I have been doing. Which is a process both boring and stressful, the worst possible combination. The good news is, I am now officially done. HURRAY!

A really useful blog post (not mine)

2008-04-14T18:17:00.003-04:00

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

2008-04-01T09:30:00.000-04:00

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

2008-03-29T09:38:00.003-04:00

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)...."

ANTZ The RPG

2008-03-27T11:40:00.000-04:00

Unraveling the Evolutionary History of the Hyperdiverse Ant Genus Pheidole

2008-03-17T12:33:00.004-04:00

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

2008-03-08T09:27:00.004-05:00

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

2008-03-08T09:17:00.004-05:00

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.

The Gigantiops Destructor Store gets a mention

2008-03-07T20:45:00.003-05:00

Looks like my cafepress store got a mention on antbase. That's cool. Makes me feel bad for not updating it in so long, though. Just remember, it's called The Gigantiops Destructor Store, not The Gigantiops Destructor Shop (cause that doesn't rhyme!).

Biodiversity Heritage Library

2008-03-04T13:06:00.002-05:00

Biodiversity Heritage Library has launched. Looks like it will be a good resource for taxonomists.

"Ten major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions have joined to form the Biodiversity Heritage Library Project. The group is developing a strategy and operational plan to digitize the published literature of biodiversity held in their respective collections. This literature will be available through a global "biodiversity commons."
Participating institutions:

* American Museum of Natural History (New York, NY)
* The Field Museum (Chicago, IL)
* Harvard University Botany Libraries (Cambridge, MA)
* Harvard University, Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (Cambridge, MA)
* Marine Biological Laboratory / Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Woods Hole, MA)
* Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis, MO)
* Natural History Museum (London, UK)
* The New York Botanical Garden (New York, NY)
* Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (Richmond, UK)
* Smithsonian Institution Libraries (Washington, DC)

Plazi.org

2008-02-28T15:07:00.002-05:00

Plazi.org is a new web based service that has been developed for the access and storage of taxonomic info. Myrmecos is a fan. I just gave it the quickest of look-overs, but it does look very cool. Go check it out.

Site Redesign

2008-02-28T12:51:00.002-05:00

I have recently spent way too much time redesigning my research website. Comments would be appreciated.

Awesome new scientific name: Beelzebufo

2008-02-20T09:40:00.002-05:00

So I'm sure you have heard about this new giant frog fossil found in Madagascar. It's big news. What I didn't know, and just found out last night, is that it is called Beelzebufo, which I think is an absolutely fabulous name. I really do appreciate a clever scientific name. I also appreciate all the crazy headlines this frog has inspired. I'm starting to feel bad for the poor thing:

Giant Frog Jumps Continents, May Have Eaten Baby Dinosaurs

The Whopper Hopper

Devil toad! Giant Beelzebufo bones unearthed

Found: The frog from hell

Ancient frog was as big as a bowling ball

ALL HAIL BEELZEBUFO

'Devil' frog ate dinos for breakfast

Froggie went a-killing

Prehistoric 'devil frog' was an amphibian with attitude

Devil Toad had armor, teeth

Beelzebufo - devil toad and scourge of prehistoric times

The meanest frog ever...

Meet the dinosaur toad as big as a bowling ball

A hoary, 10-pound, out-of-place frog

Happy Valentine's Day!

2008-02-14T12:54:00.003-05:00

See more great scientist valentine's at Ironic Sans

Climate change and the fate of the Amazon

2008-02-13T11:43:00.003-05:00

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B has a theme issue on ‘Climate change and the fate of the Amazon.’ And it looks like it's all available online. Check it out here.

Happy belated Darwin Day

2008-02-13T11:30:00.001-05:00

Yesterday was Darwin's 199th birthday. Here is a quote that I particularly like:

Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.
- Charles R. Darwin

Linnaeus' Legacy #4: Darwin Month Extravaganza!

2008-02-09T12:48:00.000-05:00

The Other 95% has a nice roundup of interesting blog entries in the taxonomic/Darwinian/Linnaean genres:

"the economy of nature"

species are "alloted places" in nature

"everyone's war against everyone"

These were concepts familiar to Darwin by the time he wrote On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. They influenced his thinking are solidified within his writings. Yet, these are not Darwin's own words, nor his own ideas. Other's works weighed heavily on Charles Darwin from Thomas Malthus and Gilbert White to Charles Lyell and William Paley. The words, or ideas, are none of their own as well. These words and concepts belong to Carolus Linnaeus, the namesake of this carnival and founder of taxonomy.

Linnaeus had a very ecological view on organisms and their place in nature. He was particular interested in reproduction and had a vivid imagery associated with writings when describing bisexual plants. "Nine men in the bride's chamber, with one woman" describes the 9 stamens surrounding a singular pistil on a flower. Erasmus Darwin, Charles' grandather, was similarly vivid and poetic. Darwin apparently read translations of Oeconomia Naturae and Politia Naturae in the 1840s, though I am not sure if he read the Systema, but he certainly would have been aware of it and followed Linnaeus' taxonomic guidelines. This month brings you posts in the traditions of Linnaeus and Darwin.
Deep Sea News reports on the discovery of an entirely new order of fish.
"Tube-eye is a strange fish indeed. It possesses a pair of telescopic eyes that lie anteriorly when not feeding. During feeding, the head is oriented up and back and the mouth is moved forward. The mouth cavity is balloonable and can greatly expand its size (38X). This creates negative pressure and provides suction for capturing prey."
In true linnaean fashion, the Systema Brachyurom is out!! An amazing reference for identifying every brachyuran, or true crab, IN. THE. WORLD. Can't plug this one enough! I've already downloaded it (its open access!!!) and flipped through it. It is well put together with clear photos to aid in identification. Check it out for free courtesy of the Raffles Museum in Singapore.

10,000 Birds has an interview with David Ringer, creator of Birdstack. Find about more about the bird listing website that has the "potential to become the web standard for listing". Mike also encourages bloggers who discuss natural history and ecology to register their blogs on the Nature Blogs Network.

What are the mysteries of the platypus? Oh let me count the ways... A 3lb Monkey Brain describes how the fossil record elucidates this mystery, it might not be the one your thinking of. Browse his blog for my systematic fun!

The Catalogue of Organisms reports on breaking news that will Shock and Awe™ the genetics world. Should Drosophila melangaster be maintained despite obvious paraphyly?? Or should it become the wine-cellar fly of Linnaeus? Or will the ~~evil~~ geneticists win because of their laziness to accept the rules of nomenclature?

A character analysis of moray eels is discussed over Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice and Sunset. Every Monday, Rick discusses a species on moray eel on his series That's a Moray Monday. Its turning out to be a online field guide! He hints at a cool new species of Moray for the next Monday's edition so stay tuned to the blogdial.

John Lynch tells us that a new beetle is named after Roy Orbison and giant elephant shrew was recently described. Laelaps also talks about the Grey-Faced Sengi in more detail. Pondering Pikaia picks up on this amazing discovery too. While at Living the Scientific Life, a new subspecies of bird was discovered in Nepal and a giganormous rodent found in ~~New York City~~ modern day Uruguay.

Greg Laden discusses the ascent of cat breeds (with a hilarious LOLcats to boot). In thinking about the number of species of flies (not cats), The Questionable Authority has a quiz about "How many different species should these three populations be grouped in, and why?" Tune in on Monday to find out the answer!

Finally, last year Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology helped to blow the whistle on inappropriate activity in the field of palaeontology. Mike Taylor has the latest from Aetogate. Darren updates us on this issue and the press it has received. Christopher at the Catalogue asks what would the ICZN do about the issue? Adventures in Ethics and Science discusses the ethical ramifications of this and then explains why the "is this really that important?" attitude is detrimental, then wonders which field of science has the most integrity problems. Additional coverage is provided by The Ethical Palaeontologist, Cryptomundo, Dinochick Blogs, Laelaps, Gene Expression, The Open Source Palaeontologist, Slashdot, One Big Lab, A Blog Around the Clock, All My Faults Are Stress-Related, Dinochick again, Palaeoblog, A Three-Pound Monkey Brain, Stephen Sorrell, The Reptipage. As you can see, this is a very important issue and each blog offers their unique perspective on this and the support for ethics in taxonomy and palaeontology is overwhelming.

Arboreal ant diversity in a central African forest

2008-02-08T08:54:00.000-05:00

the African Journal of Ecology has a new paper out on arboreal ant diversity by Yanoviak, Fisher, and Alonso. Here is the abstract:

"Like many developing tropical areas, central Africa is subject to substantial anthropogenic disturbance associated with the large-scale harvesting of natural resources. We surveyed the ants of the forest canopy at an oil extraction site near Gamba, Gabon. Ants were collected by hand and with tuna baits from nine tree crowns in late secondary forest. Thirty-six ant species were collected in all. Michaelis-Menten and incidence-based richness coverage estimates indicate that this represents 65% of the arboreal ant species richness at the site. Crematogaster spp. generally were behaviourally aggressive and monopolized baits in most trees. Taxonomic similarity (classical Sørensen index) averaged 0.25 (range = 0.00-0.50) between trees and was not a function of the distances separating them. No edge effects were detected, but there was a tendency for trees within the same forest patch to show higher similarity in ant composition than trees in separate patches. Overall arboreal ant species richness and composition in the disturbed forests around Gamba were similar to those found in primary forests of the region." Link

ants playing roller derby

2008-02-07T13:05:00.001-05:00

So I received a get well card from my labmates. Not just any card, but a card with ants playing roller derby! So fabulous. I love the names and how an attempt has been made to have each ant be morphologically correct at least in terms of petiole number and relative size. And of course, Gigantiops destructor is a ref, because how else would you utilize those giant eyes? Brilliant! Make sure to click on the picture to see it up close so you can read all the words!

Roundup of ant research and some interesting miscellania

2008-02-04T22:45:00.000-05:00

Who's scooping whom and why this matters?

An interesting story about "a group of people [who] have made it a habit to scoop their colleagues by publishing other people's information (shown by colleagues in private) and naming species faster by using their in-house Journal" from A Blog Around the Clock

Ants And Avalanches: Insects On Coffee Plants Follow Widespread Natural Tendency

"Ever since a forward-thinking trio of physicists identified the phenomenon known as self-organized criticality --- a mechanism by which complexity arises in nature --- scientists have been applying its concepts to everything from economics to avalanches. Now, researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Toledo have shown that clusters of ant nests on a coffee farm in Mexico also adhere to the model. Their work, which has implications for controlling coffee pests, appears in the Jan. 24 issue of the journal Nature." from Science Daily

New Species: Lordomyrma vanua

"Last week’s Zootaxa contained a excellent short paper by Andrea Lucky and Eli Sarnat describing a pair of new Lordomyrma species, including the beautiful L. vanua pictured above. As is true of most insects, Lordomyrma vanua remains a largely unknown quantity. It has been collected just twice, both times from the island of Vanua, in Fiji, for which it is named." Via Myrmecos

Specificity and transmission mosaic of ant nest-wall fungi

"We characterized ascomycete fungal associates culturedfor nest architecture by the ant subgenera Dendrolasius andChthonolasius. The ants probably manage their fungal mutualistsby protecting them against fungal competitors. The ant subgeneradisplay different ant-to-fungus specificity patterns, one-to-twoand many-to-one, and we infer vertical transmission, in thelatter case overlaid by horizontal transmission. Possible evolutionarytrajectories include a reversal from fungiculture by other Lasiussubgenera and inheritance of fungi through life cycle interactionsof the ant subgenera. The mosaic indicates how specificity patternscan be shaped by an interplay between host life-cycles and transmissionadaptations." Via PNAS

Isabella Rossellini's bug porn

"Green Porno is a series of very short films conceived, written, co-directed by and featuring Isabella Rossellini about the sex life of bugs, insects and various creatures. The films are a comical but insightful study of the curious ways certain bugs “make love”. “Green” echoes the ecological movement of today and our interest in nature, and “Porno” alludes to the racy ways bugs, insects and other creatures have sex, if human, these acts would not be allowed to be screened or air on television, considered instead as most filthy and obscene." from Twitch

2007 Periodic Table of Elements Printmaking Project

"Ninety-six printmakers of all experience levels, have joined together to produce 118 prints in any medium; woodcut, linocut, monotype, etching, lithograph, silkscreen, or any combination. The end result is a periodic table of elements intended to promote both science and the arts."

What I Killed Today

I found this to be a surprisingly moving record of animals euthanized by one vet tech. Via BoingBoing

unintentional hiatus

2008-02-04T22:21:00.000-05:00

Here are some new things I have learned about myself in the past couple of weeks:

I do not have

Tuberculosis
Whooping Cough
Legionnaire's Disease
confidence in my healthcare providers
a healthy immune system

I do have

pneumonia in both lungs
chronic sinusitis
possible asthma
small veins
a lot of catching up to do

My apologies for the unintentional hiatus.

Mmmmmm... ant berry

2008-01-17T14:17:00.000-05:00

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A parasitic worm can make its ant victims swell into what looks like a delicious, juicy berry to birds, which apparently eat the ants and help the worm spread and reproduce, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.

The nematode, a type of roundworm, changes not only the appearance of the ant but also its behavior, with the ants holding out their bloated, glowing abdomens to entice the birds, the researchers report in The American Naturalist.

Robert Dudley of the University of California Berkeley and Steve Yanoviak of the University of Arkansas said the parasite and the way it works are new to science.

The black ants, found in the forests of Panama, are foul-tasting and not usually eaten by birds, they said.

Yanoviak acknowledged the team never saw birds eating one of the swollen ants but strongly suspected that they did.

"I definitely saw birds come in and seemingly stop and take a second look at those ants before flying off, probably because the ants were moving," he said in a statement.

"So I really suspect that these little bananaquits or tyrannids (flycatchers) are coming in and taking the ants, thinking they are fruit."

The researchers said that if the birds ate the ants, they could spread the worm's eggs in their droppings. These eggs would then be gathered by other ants who then feed and unwittingly infect their young.
"It's just crazy that something as dumb as a nematode can manipulate its host's exterior morphology and behavior in ways sufficient to convince a clever bird to facilitate transmission of the nematode," Dudley said in the statement.
"It's phenomenal that these nematodes actually turn the ants bright red, and that they look so much like the fruits in the forest canopy," added Yanoviak.

Yanoviak and George Poinar, now at Oregon State University in Corvallis, have written another study describing the nematode in the February 2008 issue of the journal Systematic Parasitology. They named it Myrmeconema neotropicum.

(Reporting by Maggie Fox; Editing by John O'Callaghan) Link

Creative Commons and Photography

2008-01-10T17:05:00.000-05:00

Like Alex Wild over at Myrmecos, I have occasionally been asked why I don't use a Creative Commons license on my ant photos. I looked into it briefly and it seemed like a good idea, but I never really got around to investigating it in more detail. After reading his most recent post, I may just decide not to:

"People occasionally ask why I don’t assign my photos a Creative Commons license. Dan Heller explains. And adds a horror story here.

The short of it is, while Creative Commons was established with the best of intentions it is easily abused in the photographic setting. Users unknowingly open themselves up to large legal risks, and I find photo licensing by traditional means to be both more secure and more professional."

Sounds like we're on the verge of a good old fashioned bio-smack down!

2008-01-10T15:12:00.000-05:00

Benny Bleiman over at Zooillogix has a humorous take on the recent hubbub over the origins of altruism. For a less humorous (but more informative) take on the E.O. Wilson vs. Richard Dawkins face-off check out Ontogeny.

"Why do some creatures forgo their own reproduction to help their relatives survive and reproduce? While we all might like to believe that naked mole rats really do care and are thus willing to sacrifice their creepy little lives for the good of the colony, the true answer probably has more to do with gene frequency across generations and evolution.

A scene from the 2003 ant remake of "Saving Private Ryan". Needless to say, it did not fair well at the box office.

Since the late 1950's, the idea of 'kin selection' has been the most widely accepted explanation for such bizarre behavior in species. The basic premise of kin selection (before you all attack my summary, please note that I work in tech sales, not a genetics lab) is this: Natural selection tends to...

...weed out genes that put individuals at a reproductive disadvantage. When the gene, however, causes the individual to have a lessened chance of reproducing, but also increases the chance of the individual's relatives in reproducing, that gene may actually increase in frequency over time. Why? Because the individual's relatives also carry that gene. In these cases, the benefits that the gene causes to the relatives outweighs the losses that it causes for the individual and thus the gene continues to be passed along through generations.

What was her true motivation? The heavenly Father? Or a dominant gene?

The idea behind kin selection was originally proposed by JBS Haldane in 1955 and, though sometimes controversial, has been more or less widely accepted by the scientific community for the last 30-40 years. The idea even helped make Richard Dawkins a star, as a central idea in his 1976 bombshell The Selfish Gene.

Now, however, the whole idea of kin selection is being called into question by one of the most influential biologists of our time, E.O. Wilson of Harvard. Wilson has a new hypothesis that he is releasing in his upcoming book, Suck It! Just kidding the book is called The Superorganism.

"You're stupid," he seems to be saying.

According to Wilson, such behavior is not a result of kin selection, but of the fact that personal sacrifice by individuals increases the chances of overall colonies in surviving, and thus has been selected for over time.

Hmmm...sounds like we're on the verge of a good old fashioned bio-smack down!"

Asian Myrmecology

2008-01-10T15:03:00.000-05:00

Ajay Narendra of Ant Visions lets us know that all articles in the first issue of Asian Myrmecology are available for free download. Check it out.

groovy new ant images

2008-01-08T10:26:00.000-05:00

Ant Visions has some cool new images of Tetraponera and Pachycondyla; I especially like this portrait of Tetraponera rufonigra. Looks like a headshot for character work in Hollywood.And myrmecos has posted some fabulous new photos of ants and plants including the Neotropical Acacia - Pseudomyrmex and Cecropia - Azteca systems and the Australian Myrmecodia - Philidris partnership. I love this photo of two Azteca alfari ants in a private moment. I feel like I should come up with a really cute caption, but instead, I'll just let it speak for itself.

Linnaeus' Legacy # 3

2008-01-07T23:57:00.000-05:00

Greg Laden's blog is currently hosting Linnaeus' Legacy, a monthly carnival celebrating the diversity of life on this planet, and the methods we use to understand it. Below I have highlighted a few of my favorite entries:

The Specialness Of Species at Podblack Blog.
Creativity in biological nomenclature was something I learned about in the mid-90s, when I heard of a news report on a beetle named after Darth Vader. A genuine article, a newly-discovered beetle; indeed the product of research and study... so-called for his shiny head with a slit across the front, like the Sith Lord's helmet - Agathidium vaderi.

Lighting the Phylogenetic Tree by Tangled Up in Blue Guy

Bioluminescence lights the way for a whole host of living beings to either find their way in the dark, attract prey or just to provide pretty pictures (considering the design hypothesis to have some scientific value).

Reference Review: The Trials of Anamorphic Taxa is a review of Skovgaard, K., S. Rosendahl, K. O'Donnell & H. I. Nirenberg. 2003. Fusarium commune is a new species identified by morphological and molecular phylogenetic data. Mycologia 95(4): 630-636, a peer-reviewed paper, covered by Christopher Taylor or a Catalogue of Organisms.

Fusarium is a genus of filamentous soil fungi ... that is best known as a cause of a selection of nasty diseases of crop plants. It is an anamorphic genus - that is, it includes taxa that reproduce asexually. Fungal taxonomy maintains a complicated system of classifying asexual anamorphs separately from sexual teleomorphs...

New Views of Mammals: The Giraffe
A recent paper on the diversity of giraffes has received considerable attention in the blogosphere, including these posts:

Now We Are Six by Coturnix at A Blog Around the Clock

Is there any kid who does not love giraffes? They are just so amazing: tall, leggy, fast and graceful, with prehensile tongues and a need to go through complex calistehnics in order to drink. The favourites at zoos, in natural history museums and on TV nature shows....Giraffes were also important players in the history of evolutionary thought and I bet you have all seen, and heard the criticisms of, the iconic comparison between Lamarck's and Darwin's notions of evolution using a comic strip featuring giraffes and how they got their long necks.... But, one thing that you think when you think of giraffes is the giraffe, i.e., one thing, one species. There have been inklings recently that this thinking may change, finally culminating in a very interesting paper published yesterday...

There Are More Giraffe Species Than You Think

How many species of giraffes are there? Well, it may surprise you to learn this, but some people have actually thought about this throughout the decades, and they decided that there is only one species, Giraffa camelopardalis. However, a paper published today in BMC Biology convincingly demonstrates that giraffes are actually comprised of at least six, and possibly as many as eleven separate species instead of just one, as originally thought.

Diversity linked to ecosystem function by Peter Etnoyer at Deep-Sea News.

A recent study linking deep-sea biodiversity to ecosystem processes recognized that 1) the deep-sea supports the largest biomass of living things on the planet and 2) the deep-sea represents the most important ecosystem for carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous cycling. The chosen indicator species for the study was the nematode worm.

The Great Chain of Being...

... may be an invalid idea, but the Great Chain of the Internet is real. Linking Linnaeus is a post at The Disperal of Darwin blog, with nearly two dozen organized links to Linnaeus related resources...

On December 12, Edward O. Wilson spoke on "The Great Linnean Enterprise" at the Linnean Society. I think it is, however, a retelling of another lecture he gave in 2004 for the American Philosophical Society as part of a symposium, "Science, Art, and Knowledge: Practicing Natural History from the Enlightenment to the Twenty-first Century" (papers given at this symposium are available online as pdfs, including Wilson's "The Linnaean Enterprise: Past, Present, and Future." Deb of A Celebration of Mundanity gives her thoughts on the 2007 lecture here, and the Linnean Society has a schedule of upcoming 2008 programs... [Go to the post to find a zillion links to all of these resources]

The Digital Cuttlefish continues the theme of connections into entirely unexpected territory with Of Trees, and Life, and Fun

Clicking in through a post at The Loom, I was led to a wonderfully inspirational site, the Interactive Tree Of Life! For some people, a site like this puts them immediately in mind of Darwin. Others, Linnaeus. Others, Gould. Others, others. ... Not me. ... Me, I see a site like this and immediately think of Ogden Nash. Naturally.

What are the Bare Necessities? is a post at the Catalogue of Organisms (the blog of Christopher Taylor, Linnaeus' Legacy's founder).

This is a blog on Peer Reviewed Research, in particular, Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research: Valdecasas, A. G., D. Williams & Q. D. Wheeler. 2007. 'Integrative taxonomy' then and now: a response to Dayrat (2005). Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 93 (1): 211-216.

The question ... ultimately, is the current Taxonomy Crisis - essentially, the fact that there are just too many undescribed species and not enough work being done to identify them.

Species naming rights by Jim Lemire of the blog 'from Archaea to Zeazanthol.'

I'm not a taxonomist. I have never been involved in the discovery, description, or naming of a new species. Or even in the renaming of a species once considered something else. So, I really don't know the logistics of providing a name to a species. I know that species are named for what they look like, where they are found, who discovered them, or in honor of someone else. I don't know the official rules of the game or even if there are official rules, but I never once would have thought that someone could buy the rights to a species name.... Well, that's what seems to be happening according to a story out of Scripps. Apparently, Scripps has a collection of new species that need to be named and has decided to use this as a fund-raising tool.

Extras
The following is a list of additional links to a range of blog posts related to the topics at hand.

Extreme Dinosaur: Nigersaurus, the Mesozoic Cow!

PODCAST: BBC's Great Lives on Alfred Russel Wallace

Surreal caecilians part I: tentacles and protrusible eyes

Surreal caecilians part II: pass mum's skin, hold the mayo

Seasonal snails

The Ant Analogy

Public Service Announcement: Formica nitidiventris = F. pallidefulva

2008-01-04T18:23:00.000-05:00

I have to admit that although I've become pretty handy at identifying Amazonian ants, I have no idea what the ants outside my office are. Formica? What? So Myrmecos's public service announcement will probably be more useful to others. So here it is -- Via Myrmecos:

In the comments, James Trager brings to our attention his recent synonymy of the venerable Formica nitidiventris with Formica pallidefulva. This is one of the most common ants, and in my opinion one of the prettiest, in eastern North America. Many of us from the east learned of this ubiquitous species incorrectly as F. nitidiventris, so the synonymy may take some getting used to. In any case, the name nitidiventris is sunk, so you’ll only make yourself look obsolete if you persist in using it.

The Trager et al (2007) revision of the Formica pallidefulva group is excellent, by the way. Thorough and well-illustrated. I had no troubles sorting out the ants in my collection, which turned out to contain all five of the group’s species.

source: Trager, J. C., J. A. MacGown and M. D. Trager. 2007. Revision of the Nearctic endemic Formica pallidefulva group, pp 610-636. In Snelling, R. R., B. L. Fisher, and P. S. Ward (eds) Advances in ant systematics (Hymenoptera: Formicidae): homage to E. O. Wilson – 50 years of contributions. Memoirs of the American Entomological Institute, 80.

Butterflies Dupe Ants, Trigger "Smell" Race

2008-01-03T22:38:00.000-05:00

I had a bunch of hits on my antroom newsfeeder about a very interesting new paper in this week's Science, but I liked the blog entry from Zooillogix the best, so here it is:

A new scientific paper has shown a strange, deceptive adaptation in the Maculinea butterflies of North Western Europe--an adaptation that has caused a genetic race between the butterflies and many different species of ants. The butterflies' caterpillar larvae emit a powerful smell that tricks the ants into believing that they are in fact ant larvae. The ants then...

...carry the larvae back to their secret lairs, and feed them. Just like the famed cuckoo birds, the larvae trick the ants so effectively that the ants give up on taking care of their own brood to focus exclusively on the caterpillars.

In response to this invasion, however, ants from colonies that have been "parasited" by the butterflies have evolved to have a different odor than the butterflies, and thus are able to recognize the caterpillars as frauds.
In their research David Nash, Jacobus Boomsma and others from the Centre for Social Evolution (CSE) at the University of Copenhagen show that colonies of ants which developed a resistance (a different smell) and then interbred with colonies who had not been exposed to the parasites lost their resistance as the genes were diluted. Of course, they then fell victim to the Maculinea butterflies again.

Center for Ecology and Conservation Biology 2007 newsletter

2008-01-03T13:54:00.000-05:00

The CECB newsletter for 2007 has a nice mention in it of my Naturwissenschaften paper, as well as a lot of other work being done at Tiputini. New facilities, too. Check it out.

Giraffes And Frogs Provide More Evidence Of New Species Hidden In Plain Sight

2008-01-02T23:18:00.000-05:00

So here are even more reasons for me to feel like I am not doing a good enough job identifying all of the ant diversity at Tiputini. Two recent studies have shown that identical looking organisms can in fact be several distinct species:

"ScienceDaily (Jan. 2, 2008) — Two new articles provide further evidence that we have hugely underestimated the number of species with which we share our planet. Today sophisticated genetic techniques mean that superficially identical animals previously classed as members of a single species, including the frogs and giraffes in these studies, could in fact come from several distinct 'cryptic' species.

In the Upper Amazon, Kathryn Elmer and Stephen Lougheed working at Queen's University, Kingston, Canada teamed up with José Dávila from Instituto de Investigación en Recursos Cinegéticos, Cuidad Real, Spain to investigate the terrestrial leaflitter frog (Eleutherodactylus ockendeni) at 13 locations across Ecuador.

Looking at the frogs' mitochondrial and nuclear DNA, the researchers found three distinct species, which look very much alike. These species have distinct geographic distributions, but these don't correspond to modern landscape barriers. Coupled with phylogenetic analyses, this suggests they diverged before the Ecuadorean Andes arose, in the Miocene period over 5.3 million years ago.

"Our research coupled with other studies suggests that species richness in the upper Amazon is drastically underestimated by current inventories based on morphospecies," say the authors.

And in Africa, an interdisciplinary team from the University of California, Los Angeles, Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo, and the Mpala Research Centre in Kenya has found that there may be more to the giraffe than meets the eye, too.

Their analysis of nuclear and mitochondrial DNA shows at least six genealogically distinct lineages of giraffe in Africa, with little evidence of interbreeding between them. Further divisions within these groups mean that in total the researchers have spotted 11 genetically distinct populations.

"Such extreme genetic subdivision within a large vertebrate with high dispersal capabilities is unprecedented and exceeds that of any other large African mammal," says graduate student David Brown, first author of the study. The researchers estimate that the giraffe populations they surveyed have been genetically distinct for between 0.13 and 1.62 million years. The findings have serious implications for giraffe conservation because some among these subgroups have as few as 100 members, making them highly endangered -- if not yet officially recognised -- species."

Journal articles:

Cryptic diversity and deep divergence in an upper Amazonian frog, Eleutherodactylus ockendeni. Kathryn R Elmer, Jose A Davila and Stephen C Lougheed. BMC Evolutionary Biology (in press)
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/7/247/abstract

Extensive Population Genetic Structure in the Giraffe. David M Brown, Rick A Brenneman, Klaus-Peter Koepfli, John P Pollinger, Borja Mila, Nicholas J Georgiadis, Edward E Louis Jr, Gregory F Grether, David K Jacobs and Robert K Wayne. BMC Biology (in press) http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcevolbiol/

Adapted from materials provided by BioMed Central.

2007: The Year in Ants

2008-01-01T01:28:00.000-05:00

Myrmecos recaps the best of the ant world this past year. And, hey, I'm even on there! Which kind of makes me feel bad for not getting more done. But that's what 2008 is for, right?

"This week the blogosphere is busy recapping 2007 with lists of top stories in politics, news, and celebrity haircuts. In all the hoopla surrounding year’s end, somehow everyone seems to have forgotten the ants, even though the, um, fast-paced world of Myrmecology has made plenty of discoveries this year. In no particular order, here is my list of the most significant advances in Ant Science from 2007.

Argentine ants and Fire ants- two of the world’s worst invasive species- keep each other in check in their common native range. The perennial mystery of invasive ants is why they are so dominant in their introduced ranges but so benign in their native ranges. LeBrun et al went to the heart of the invasives’ native range, the Paraná river flood plain, and selectively removed nests of either Fire ants or Argentine ants from areas where both naturally occur. In response, the dominance of the other species increased, showing how competition may limit populations of these ants in their native habitat. (Source: LeBrun et al. 2007. An experimental study of competition between fire ants and Argentine ants in their native range.)

Carpenter ants use gut bacteria to move lower on the food chain. Another perennial ecological mystery about ants has been why there are so many of them. Most terrestrial ecosystems have vast numbers of ants, outweighing the sum total of the much larger vertebrates. The key seems to be that ants can move themselves down the food chain, plugging into the highly-productive primary plant biomass. Feldhaar et al revealed the mechanism behind how Carpenter ants achieve this jump: the gut bacterium Blochmannia is able to make key amino acids available to the ants from otherwise lower-nutrient foods. (Source: Feldhaar et al 2007. Nutritional Upgrading for Omnivorous Carpenter Ants by the Endosymbiont Blochmannia.)

Adult ant traits are partly the result of the care they receive as larvae. In a clever series of cross-fostering experiments between different Temnothorax species, Tim Linksvayer showed that adult size was determined in part by the species charged with raising the larvae. Larger species raised larger ants, even when given larvae of a normally smaller species. Thus, adult worker size in ants is under genetic control, but not in as direct a manner as one might think. Linksvayer’s study is an elegant demonstration of how traits are determined by the interaction of nature and nurture. (Source: Linksvayer, T. A. 2007. Ant Species Differences Determined by Epistasis between Brood and Worker Genomes.)

The long awaited E. O. Wilson Festschrift was published. This volume commemorates the 50th anniversary of Wilson’s Ph.D. thesis (a taxonomic revision of the North American Lasius) with over two dozen contributions from the world’s ant taxonomists. Among the festschrift’s many treats, we now have keys to Australian Camponotus, North American Army Ants, New World Gnamptogenys and Wasmannia, along with revisions of Meranoplus, Mayriella, Perissomyrmex, and others. We also gained a new ant genus, Dolopomyrmex.

Formica wood ants guard against disease using antibacterial properties of plant resins. Chapuisat et al. experimentally demonstrated a positive effect of plant resins on the survival of both adults and brood. (Source: Chapuisat, M. et al. 2007. Wood ants use resin to protect themselves against pathogens.)

Traditional notions of Army Ant evolution were partly overturned by a molecular phylogeny of the old world driver ants. Kronauer et al showed that subterrannean foraging, assumed to be the ancestral condition for Dorylus army ants, re-evolved at least once from leaf-litter foraging species. The team also found that key morphological characters were generally more associated with ecological niche than with phylogeny. (Source: Kronauer et al 2007. A molecular phylogeny of Dorylus army ants provides evidence for multiple evolutionary transitions in foraging niche.)
Ant invasions can be of more complex origin than they first appear. Mikheyev and Mueller showed that the little fire ant Wasmannia auropunctata, a pest worldwide, appears to have originated from at least two different source populations. (Source: Mikheyev and Mueller 2007. Genetic relationships between native and introduced populations of the little fire ant Wasmannia auropunctata.) Similarly Barry Bolton, in a recent revision of Technomyrmex, determined that the White-Footed Ant that is invasive in various regions turns out to be a complex of several related species instead of the singular T. albipes. (Source: Bolton 2007. Taxonomy of the dolichoderine ant genus Technomyrmex Mayr (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) based on the worker cast.)

Ants have memory. At least, the behavior of individual ants is shaped by previous experience. A study by Ravary et al on Cerapachys demonstrated that ants with early successful foraging experience tend to remain as foragers as they age, while those that early on meet with failure turn to other tasks like brood care. (Source: Ravary et al 2007. Individual Experience Alone Can Generate Lasting Division of Labor in Ants.) A different study, conducted by Dreier et al. on two different Pachycondyla species, showed that queens can store information about ants with which they had previously interacted (Source: Dreier et al. 2007. Long-term memory of individual identity in ant queens.)

Early in the year, the number of described ant species surpassed 12,000. (Source: Antbase.org.) A partial list of these new species can be found here: New taxa of Formicidae described in 2007.

Outside the realm of technical publications 2007 also saw other advances, especially online. Kiko Gómez & Xavier Espadaler created a fantastic database of Spanish Ants at hormigas.org, Antweb.org continued to add new faunas such as Costa Rica and New Zealand, Ajay Narendra launched a live ant image gallery for the Indian and Australian faunas, Kari Ryder-Wilkie continued to add images to the Ants of Tiputini, Jochen Bihn added more pages to the Ants of Cachoeira, Nugi from the Ant Farm Boards created an image gallery of Indonesian insects, and Benoit Guenard launched ant image galleries from Australia and North Carolina. The Ant Course was held in Arizona this year, attracting over two dozen students, and instructors Brian Fisher and Stefan Cover published an excellent guide to the Ant Genera of North America. American Public Television’s NOVA program produced an ant-related show, and National Geographic continued to publish Mark Moffett’s photographic series on ants.

Here’s hoping that 2008 holds yet more Myrmecological treats!"

A quick round-up of what I've been missing

2007-12-30T17:48:00.000-05:00

So while I was gone there were a bunch of interesting posts from the blogosphere. A quick round-up:

Ward, P.S. 2007. Phylogeny, classification, and species-level taxonomy of ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Zootaxa 1668: 549-563. (Via Myrmecos )

The ants of Paraguay (Via Myrmecos)

Aleksiev AS, Longdon B, Christmas MJ, Sendova-Franks AB, Franks NR. Individual and collective choice: parallel prospecting and mining in ants. Naturwissenschaften. 2007 Dec 18 [Epub ahead of print]

Meet the Beetles--And Their Crazy Family Tree ScienceNOW and A Comprehensive Phylogeny of Beetles Reveals the Evolutionary Origins of a Superradiation (Science)

Waiting on Weevils If you’ve got weevils to identify, patience is a virtue. At current rates of taxonomic description it’ll only take 650 more years to name all the weevil species. (Via Myrmecos)

Beetles and Assassin bugs (Via Bug Girl's Blog)

The Long and Thorny Road to Publication in Quality Journals Thomas C. Erren

JoVE -- This is the official blog of JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments. Looks like fun

New pictures at Ant Visions

Post holiday catch-up

2007-12-30T12:38:00.000-05:00

I am finally back to blogging after an extended illness and ten days in Hawaii for Christmas (sadly, these two events overlapped significantly). Here are the things I miss about Hawaii --

chocolate popsicles -- don't even get me started
teri chicken plate lunch
my cat Aengus -- 15 years old and still more fun at a party than me
the weather -- where even the rain seems pleasant
the mountains, the plants, the birds, the beaches
the fact that I look just like everybody else
how everybody is in a good mood all the time

Things I do not miss about Hawaii:

my allergies to just about everything in Hawaii (including my fab cat Aengus)
the traffic -- worse than Boston, I am sure
the fact that Hawaii is a rock in the middle of the ocean -- people are always asking me why I would want to leave paradise. The truth is you can only take paradise for so long before it starts to bother you that you've basically done and seen everything. You can drive around the entire island in a couple of hours and you'll just end up back where you started. Everything is expensive and a lot of things never make it to Hawaii at all (think movies, plays, concerts, products in stores, ideas for chrissakes). It's like the little town you grew up in where everything is safe and familiar but all you want to do is get to the big city and pursue your dreams. Except you can't take a Greyhound out of town or hitch a ride with some likely stranger -- you have to buy an expensive plane ticket. Yup. Nice place to visit. Hard to live in. At least for me.

So the holidays were nice if short and a bit stressful. I was able to visit my grandmother on Maui, who just had a stroke, which was a good thing (the visit, not the stroke). Spent some time with my Mom and caught up with a couple of old friends. Spent exactly ten minutes at the beach (Waikiki Beach, which hardly even counts - plus I was wearing sneakers, which makes it count even less). Witnessed the Christmas miracle of Taz (my mother in law's dog, who has been quite ill, and who was so sick that we all thought he was going to die that night -- shaking uncontrollably, unable to get up, not responding -- who got up the next day, bouncy and happy, demanding to be taken for a walk and given treats! Yay!). Hooked up with the wonderful Honolulu Derby Girls and went to two practices with them -- also met Sassy Chassis (Rat City Rollergirls) and Bea Attitude (Texas Rollergirls) who were also in town. Hooray for derby! Completely and totally ignored my email and anything even resembling work, despite the fact that Shawn Dash sent me an email saying he was DONE WITH THE HYPOPONERA!!! More on that later.

Bolton's Technomyrmex Revision

2007-12-09T14:59:00.000-05:00

Bolton's Technomyrmex revision is now available from The American Entomological Institute.

Taxonomy of the dolichoderine ant genus Technomyrmex Mayr (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) based on the worker cast. Barry Bolton. 2007. 150 pp. Contributions of the American Entomological Institute Volume 35, No. 1. $30.00

Thanks to the anonymous commenter who pointed it out.

Shrinky-Dink microfluidics

2007-12-07T16:53:00.000-05:00

I grew up in Hawaii, where apparently Shrinky-Dinks never quite made it as the icon of childhood craftiness that it seems to be for others of my peers, but I recently heard about them in the journal Chemical Technology. Check it out:

Shrinky-Dink microfluidics
A children's toy has been turned into a microfluidic research tool in the hands of US engineers.
Michelle Khine's team from the University of California, Merced, printed microfluidic mould patterns onto Shrinky-Dinks and used them to make patterns of channels for mixing fluids and moving cells about. The technique allows the whole process - from device design conception to working device - to be completed with very simple tools within minutes.
Shrinky-Dinks are thermoplastic sheets of polystyrene which have been pre-heated and stretched. When they are reheated they shrink to their original size, also shrinking anything drawn on them. The drawn features become narrower and more raised as the ink lines are compressed.
Using only a laserjet printer and a toaster oven, the team printed a device layout on a Shrinky-Dink sheet and shrunk it down to make a mould. The ink lines printed on their Shrinky-Dinks were raised by over 500% to form a series of small walls with slightly rounded edges, ideal for making channels for use with microfluidic valves. The polydimethylsiloxane plastic used to make the devices could then be simply poured onto the mould, cured, and peeled off.
'Many researchers are excited about this, because it dramatically lowers the barrier to entry into the microfluidics field,' said Khine. 'There are no tooling costs - all you need is a printer and a toaster oven.'
'I am not a patient person,' explained Khine, 'and being a new faculty member at a brand new university, I did not have the cleanroom facilities I am accustomed to. As I was brainstorming solutions, I remembered my favourite childhood toy and decided to try it in my kitchen one night, and it worked amazingly well!' The Shrinky-Dink moulds can be used more than ten times, and different heights of channel can be made by running the Shrinky-Dink sheets through the printer more than once.
'We are using the microfluidic chips for chemotaxis experiments and cell culture experiments,' she added, 'and we definitely have a couple more projects based on this in the oven.'
Clare Boothby
Link to journal article
Shrinky-Dink microfluidics: rapid generation of deep and rounded patterns
Anthony Grimes, David N. Breslauer, Maureen Long, Jonathan Pegan, Luke P. Lee and Michelle Khine, Lab Chip, 2008

At this lab, everyone is required to maintain a science blog

2007-12-05T17:05:00.000-05:00

I think this is a fabulous idea. Via The World's Fair:

Posted on: December 4, 2007 1:44 PM, by David Ng
Last week (or thereabouts), I had a chat with Rosie Redfield, an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia. She had come over to visit because I noticed that every member of her lab (predominantly postdocs) had their own blog, and I was curious to see what was up with that.

Anyway, it turns out that Rosie makes it a requirement for her lab members to maintain a blog. This was primarily to act as an appendum lab book, and a place to reflect on the experiments carried out recently.

Chatting with her, she was quite excited by the prospect of such a thing becoming common practice. She noted a number of side benefits to the process:

1. It allows her, as a supervisor, to remotely keep track on what's going on. Think of it as preface material before the lab meeting, or the one on ones.

2. She's convinced that with the public facade to the posting, folks in her lab tend to conceptualize more fully what the experiments and data could signify. In doing so, there's a great opportunity for blogging to help clarify the experiments necessary to move the research projects forward.

3. Scientists are not necessarily noted for their writing skills. Which is too bad, because that ability tends to come in very handy in the fine art of preparing grants. Here, you have a platform where you can work the "practice makes perfect" angle.

4. Depending on the tact of the blogger, you may inadvertently end up with a significant amount of draft material for that thesis or paper you going to have to write later.

Then, of course, Rosie got into the whole issue of open access. In that, her efforts to promote science blogging in her lab, could possibly be thought of as a powerful exercise in scientific communication. Imagine a scenario where facets of the standard "lab book" are offered for public viewing.

This means that things like negative data, serendipity findings (things that don't normally get published) have a chance to be publicly aired, which only adds to the body of scientific knowledge. And what about unpublished data? How open is that? For instance, Rosie herself has no qualms in presenting her grant proposals, even before competition deadlines.

Mind you, her lab happens to focus on a research area that is not too competitive, so the relative merits of what her lab's blogging is obviously subjected to this important nuance.

Still, it's interesting to imagine a scenario where what Rosie's lab does is common practice. i.e. what if NIH, NSERC, NSF, CIHR made it explicit in their funding structure.

A review of the genus Mystrium

2007-12-04T15:27:00.000-05:00

Jochen Bihn from Trophallaxis has just published a review of the genus Mystrium in the Indo-Australian region:

JOCHEN H. BIHN & MANFRED VERHAAGH, 2007: A review of the genus Mystrium (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) in the Indo-Australian region. Zootaxa 1642: 1-12.

Abstract:
Indo-Australian species of the amblyoponine ant genus Mystrium Roger are reviewed. Three species are recognized in the region, and two of them, which were found in Indonesia (Papua and West Papua Province), are described as new species: Mystrium maren sp. nov. and Mystrium leonie sp. nov. Worker diagnoses and illustrations of the three species and a tabular key are given.

Full article can be downloaded here.

Image: Mystrium maren

Bug Girl's Blog

2007-11-30T18:38:00.000-05:00

I found a new blog the other day that I thought I would share. It is called "Bug Girl's Blog: Entomology. Gardening. Ranting. Nerdery." How can you go wrong with a title like that? Check it out here.

From her blog I found a couple of other science/nerd blogs that also look like they might be worth keeping an eye on:
The Science Creative Quarterly
Science Mole
Weird Science
Young Female Scientist

Just thought I would share.

New ant blog

2007-11-30T18:26:00.000-05:00

You know how you always see these fantastic photos of ants (live ants, not pinned ones like mine) on people's blogs, on their websites, or in their presentations? Well, most of them are taken by Alex Wild. Today I found out (via Ontogeny) that he has started a new blog focused on ants and photography. Check it out at Myrmecos.

Ant Saves Man's Life

2007-11-30T18:04:00.000-05:00

I meant to post this story when it first came out but I got distracted. You're always hearing about dogs that save their owner's life or cats that wake their families up in time to escape the fire, but you never hear about the lowly ant stepping up to save somebody's life. Now you have...
Via MiamiHerald.com:

BY JONNELLE MARTE
jmarte@MiamiHerald.com
No one saw 18-year-old Adrian Gregorio's car veer off the Don Shula Expressway early Sunday and plunge into a canal, Florida Highway Patrol officials said.
He still managed to pull himself out and swim to shore.
Then, he waited alone for help for at least 10 hours in the morning chill before a family found him lying on the grassy embankment next to the water, blood gushing from his head, they said.
They called police, and Gregorio was air-lifted to Ryder Trauma Center. His condition was unavailable Sunday.
Gregorio's 2006 Nissan 350Z sank into a canal just north of Florida's Turnpike and was barely visible to drivers, FHP Lt. Pat Santangelo said.
''If those people hadn't stopped in that particular spot, he may never have been found,'' Santangelo said.
The teen was apparently driving northbound on the Don Shula at about 1:30 a.m. when he swerved off the road, Santangelo said.
THANKS TO AN ANT
Gregorio, who had been reported missing overnight, was found purely by chance -- and thanks to an ant.
At around 11:40 a.m. Sunday, Reynaldo Acosta and his family were driving by the same canal when his 4-year-old son Sebastian complained that an ant was biting him.
Acosta, 42, pulled over to the side of the road near Southwest 117th Avenue so his girlfriend could swat the ant out of the boy's car seat, he said.
When Oskarina Martinez stepped out of the car, she saw Gregorio lying on the grass by the canal. Unable to move, he raised his arm to get their attention, she said.
''Thank God that we stopped there because of that ant,'' Martinez said in Spanish. ``He must have felt so desperate. The truth is that no one could see him.''
Acosta approached the faint teen, who told him he drove his car into the canal hours earlier. Acosta's older son called 911. Acosta also called Gregorio's mother to let her know her son was OK.
When Miami-Dade Fire Rescue arrived, Gregorio was in and out of consciousness.
''So in a way, the boy owes his life to the ant, partly also to my son, but more importantly to God,'' Acosta said.

Ghost Bug Explained

2007-11-29T13:01:00.000-05:00

Brilliant!

A Tale of Four Stories: Soil Ecology, Theory, Evolution and the Publication System

2007-11-28T11:31:00.000-05:00

Abstract

Background

Soil ecology has produced a huge corpus of results on relations between soil organisms, ecosystem processes controlled by these organisms and links between belowground and aboveground processes. However, some soil scientists think that soil ecology is short of modelling and evolutionary approaches and has developed too independently from general ecology. We have tested quantitatively these hypotheses through a bibliographic study (about 23000 articles) comparing soil ecology journals, generalist ecology journals, evolutionary ecology journals and theoretical ecology journals.

Findings

We have shown that soil ecology is not well represented in generalist ecology journals and that soil ecologists poorly use modelling and evolutionary approaches. Moreover, the articles published by a typical soil ecology journal (Soil Biology and Biochemistry) are cited by and cite low percentages of articles published in generalist ecology journals, evolutionary ecology journals and theoretical ecology journals.

Conclusion

This confirms our hypotheses and suggests that soil ecology would benefit from an effort towards modelling and evolutionary approaches. This effort should promote the building of a general conceptual framework for soil ecology and bridges between soil ecology and general ecology. We give some historical reasons for the parsimonious use of modelling and evolutionary approaches by soil ecologists. We finally suggest that a publication system that classifies journals according to their Impact Factors and their level of generality is probably inadequate to integrate “particularity” (empirical observations) and “generality” (general theories), which is the goal of all natural sciences. Such a system might also be particularly detrimental to the development of a science such as ecology that is intrinsically multidisciplinary.
Barot S, Blouin M, Fontaine S, Jouquet P, Lata J, et al. (2007) A Tale of Four Stories: Soil Ecology, Theory, Evolution and the Publication System. PLoS ONE 2(11): e1248. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001248

Identifying Pheidole

2007-11-26T15:43:00.001-05:00

Have a bunch of Pheidole that need identifying and don't know what to do? Here are a couple of resources:

Pheidole Working Group (John Longino)
Pheidole of Costa Rica (John Longino)
Pheidole of Tiputini (Amy Mertl)
Pheidole of Africa (Brian Taylor)
Pheidole of Egypt (Brian Taylor)
Pheidole of Iran (Brian Taylor)
MCZ Type Database of Pheidole
Pheidole of Mississippi and Alabama
Pheidole of Japan
Pheidole of Borneo

Many of these keys are works in progress, so if you use them and find some problems with them, most folks are happy to get feedback about their keys.

A seclusion of embiopterans

2007-11-24T14:00:00.000-05:00

Nothing to do with ants, but I enjoyed this blog entry about embiopterans. Via A Catalogue of Organisms:

A work colleague and I got into a conversation a while ago about collective nouns, and of course that eventually got onto the question of making up appropriate terms for groups of animals that currently lack collective nouns. One suggestion that I came up with that I still rather like the sound of was a "seclusion of embiopterans". From now on, I urge you to use the term when discussing embiopterans.

If through some bizarre oversight you haven't regularly found yourself discussing embiopterans, then you really should be. Also known as webspinners or embiids, embiopterans are one of the definite contenders for the total of world's coolest insects. I have personally come across a specimen in the wild just once that I found clinging to a piece of bark I pulled off its tree - unfortunately, I have to admit, no-one around me quite got what I was getting so excited about.

Webspinners are small insects that live in silken galleries they build in secluded areas such as under bark or rocks (the picture above from the homepage of Janice Edgerly-Rooks shows a female webspinner peeping out of its home). There is something of an esoteric contention about what exactly the correct name for the webspinner order should be - Embioptera, Embiidina or Embiodea all can be found. I'm going to stick with Embioptera for no good reason. The name means "lively wings" and is wildly inappropriate - webspinners are not noticeably lively, and more often than not lack wings (females are invariably wingless, males can sometimes be). It has been suggested that the name refers to the flicking movement of the male wings. The wings of male webspinners have large blood sinuses developed from the veins that are pumped full of haemolymph to make the wings rigid when they fly. When the haemolymph is drained from the sinuses, the wings become limp and floppy, able to move in whatever direction is required to let the male crawl through a female's silk nest, even bending forward over the head if the male goes into reverse.

Webspinners are often referred to as semi-social and females may share inter-connected galleries. Females also show a high level of parental care. However, females will not show any care for the young of others, and social interactions between females should probably be regarded as opportunistic rather than required (Grimaldi & Engel, 2005). The female and juvenile webspinners emerge from their silken palaces at night to feed on vegetation and detritus. Adult males, on the other hand, do not feed.

The webspinner's silk glands are located along the edge of the third segment of the forelimb tarsus, which is noticeable broadened as shown in the diagram above from BugNetMAP. The German name for embiopterans, "tarsenspinner", is therefore entirely apropos. The stunning "Life in the Undergrowth" series that I've had cause to mention before included spectacular footage of a webspinner constructing its silken fortress, waving its forelimbs in front of itself in a motion that can only be described as "wax on, wax off". So impermeable is the resulting wall that the spinner must actually cut through it with its mandibles in order to drink from water drops lying on the surface if it is not to dry up completely.

Master of the Killer Ants" on NOVA next Tuesday

2007-11-17T17:37:00.000-05:00

This looks awesome! From PBS NOVA:

Deep within a termite mound in Africa, soldier termites spring into action, slicing their smaller opponents in half with a snap of their powerful jaws. But the attacking driver ants use strategy to overwhelm the defenders. Little do these six-legged combatants know that their marching orders come from a drought-plagued human village that is counting on them to drive out the termites.

Filmed in High Definition with advanced macro-shooting techniques, "Master of the Killer Ants" garnered best film awards at the Shanghai Film Festival and Japan's Wildlife Film Festival. The stunning footage includes different castes of termites coursing through their intricate tunnels—and the monstrously egg-swollen queen herself, rippling with the contractions that deposit thousands of eggs per day. (For more on the queen phenomenon, see Being Queen.) The climax comes as the invading driver ants close in on the queen's royal cell.

Although known for their ruthless aggression, driver ants also have a beneficial side. This is traditionally exploited by the Mofu people of northern Cameroon, who call the local species of red driver ants jaglavak. (To hear more of the Mofu and their traditions, go to Jaglavak, Prince of Insects).

"Master of the Killer Ants" tells the story of the Mofu's intimate relationship not only with jaglavak but with other insects. For instance, the people know that a crablike, bright-red insect serves as a harbinger of rain and a sign that it is time to prepare the earth. Winged insects and grasshoppers make a valuable food supplement and are especially tasty when grilled. (For more on edible insects, see Bugs You Can Eat).

But the insects provide a guide to behavior as well as an aid to survival. The Mofu say that they must work as hard and selflessly as the ants and termites if they are to survive, and they attribute drought and misfortune to their moral shortcomings.

One special quality of jaglavak above all concerns the village elder Matsgrawaï. When the film opens, he is called to inspect a neighbor's house. Termites have infested the earthen floor and are attacking the walls and roof. Worst of all, they threaten the adjacent granary with its crucial stock of grain sorghum.

From past experience, Matsgrawaï knows that jaglavak can drive the termites away, thereby securing the grain sorghum stores on which the villagers' lives depend. Under special circumstances, driver ants will attack termite colonies, and Matsgrawaï begins with prayers and offerings to jaglavak. When the ants fail to show up, he sends children to seek them out. (Play the Amazing Ants Game).

Thus commences a charming, instructive true-life fable on how to fight fire with fire—termites with ants—and not get burned, or rather too badly stung, in the process.

Robo-Roaches Can Control Insect Groups

2007-11-15T19:49:00.000-05:00

Via National Geographic:

Cockroaches will often choose shelter unwisely when under the influence of robots, a new study shows.
Usually when the creepy crawlers are let loose in a brightly lit area, they gather under the darkest shade they can find.

"Nice means dark, for a cockroach," said lead study author Jose Halloy, a social ecologist at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium. "They look for shadows."

But when the bugs were joined by tiny robots designed to smell and behave like roaches, the machines were able to control the insects' behavior.
If the robots lingered beneath a less desirable, more brightly lit shelter, for example, the cockroaches did too—a choice they rarely made when the robots weren't around.
The findings show that such robots can influence group behavior in animals, the authors report in this week's issue of the journal Science.
This means that the tiny machines could be valuable tools in helping to understand how animals that move in swarms make collective decisions.
Susan Brown
for National Geographic News
November 15, 2007

Read rest of link here

Law enforcement key to saving Borneo's rainforests -- an interview with Borneo scientist Rhett Harrison

2007-11-15T15:20:00.001-05:00

Law enforcement key to saving Borneo's rainforests
An interview with Borneo scientist Rhett Harrison
Rhett A. Butler, mongabay.com
November 13, 2007

Via mongabay.com:

In an interview with mongabay.com, Dr. Rhett Harrison, a Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) associate researcher and Secretary for the Asia-Pacific Chapter of ATBC, says that law enforcement could be the key to safeguarding biodiversity contained in Borneo's lowland parks.

"Simply investing in protecting the existing protected area system and enforcing wildlife protection laws would achieve far more [than "Heart of Borneo]," he said. "If the current protected area systems were actually protected things wouldn't be so bad. However, throughout Borneo hunting and wildlife collecting are rampant (both inside and outside protected areas), and in parts of Kalimantan (Indonesia) you even have logging in some parks."

Harrison, who is helping organize the 2008 ATBC-Asia-Pacific Chapter meeting in Kuching on sustainable land use, further states that there may be opportunities for conservationists to work with oil palm to developers to ensure that existing forests are not converted for plantations and that palm oil can be produced in a sustainable manner. He adds that carbon offsets may eventually offer a means to fund conservation and sustainable development efforts in areas that still have standing forest.

read interview here
Image: Forest clearing near Tanjung Puting National Park in Central Kalimantan. Courtesy of Google Earth.

“From Ants to People, an Instinct to Swarm”

2007-11-15T15:16:00.000-05:00

Via Antomatic:

Yesterday’s New York Times Science section has a lengthy article that looks at some of the recent work by mathematical biologists Daniel Grunbaum and Iain Couzin on the instinct to swarm.

If you have ever observed ants marching in and out of a nest, you might have been reminded of a highway buzzing with traffic. To Iain D. Couzin, such a comparison is a cruel insult — to the ants.

Americans spend a 3.7 billion hours a year in congested traffic. But you will never see ants stuck in gridlock.

Army ants, which Dr. Couzin has spent much time observing in Panama, are particularly good at moving in swarms. If they have to travel over a depression in the ground, they erect bridges so that they can proceed as quickly as possible.

“They build the bridges with their living bodies,” said Dr. Couzin, a mathematical biologist at Princeton University and the University of Oxford. “They build them up if they’re required, and they dissolve if they’re not being used.”

The reason may be that the ants have had a lot more time to adapt to living in big groups. “We haven’t evolved in the societies we currently live in,” Dr. Couzin said.

[read the rest of the article]

The graphics that accompany the article are quite interesting, although unfortunately that’s not always obvious from the thumbnails displayed in the margin. Better descriptions would be most helpful.

Exceptions prove rule of tropical importance in biodiversity

2007-11-09T11:11:00.000-05:00

Via EurekAlert:

Exceptions prove rule of tropical importance in biodiversity
Even a group of shellfish that appear to violate the overarching pattern of global biodiversity actually follows the same biological rules as other marine organisms, confirming a general theory for the spread of life on Earth. The University of Chicago's David Jablonski and his colleagues present this finding this week in the advanced online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"There's more of everything in the tropics. More genetic diversity, more diversity in form, more diversity of species," said David Jablonski, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor in Geophysical Sciences at Chicago. Biologists call this the "latitudinal diversity gradient." They have known about this phenomenon for more than a century, "but there's remarkably little agreement on how it's formed," Jablonski said.

Scientists have offered dozens of different theories to explain the evolutionary underpinnings of the tropics' rich biodiversity. In their Proceedings article, Jablonski, the University of Chicago's Andrew Krug and the University of California, Berkeley's James Valentine present findings that highlight the importance of the tropics in maintaining the entire planet's biodiversity.

Scientists had debated for three decades whether the tropics were a cradle of diversity, where new species originate, or a museum of diversity, where old species persist. Last year Jablonski, Valentine and Kaustuv Roy of the University of California, San Diego, potentially resolved the debate by showing that the tropics is both a cradle and a museum of biodiversity.

But there is a problem nagging at all research on the latitudinal diversity gradient. "So many variables correlate with latitude" - temperature, environmental stability and many other features of the oceans - "that it is tough to separate cause and effect," said Krug, a Research Associate in Geophysical Sciences at Chicago. To do exactly that, the team sifted through a database consisting of 4,600 species of bivalves that occurred in more than 200 locations worldwide.

The research focused on bivalves because of their rich fossil record. "They're known from the shallowest intertidal zone to the deepest of the deep sea," Jablonski said of the bivalves, a group that includes clams, scallops and oysters. "They're known in every latitude, from the north polar ocean to the Antarctic."

The vast majority of bivalve groups show the standard pattern: a peak of diversity in the tropics, tailing off into less diversity in the higher latitudes. "We found one major group that didn't do that. We call that a contrarian group," Jablonski said. That group, called the Anomalodesmata and dubbed the Anomalos by the Chicago-Berkeley team, displayed a striking diversity pattern. Contrary to virtually all other marine life, Anomalo diversity peaked in the mid-latitudes of both hemispheres, but dipped in the tropics.

"We knew we had to take a closer look at these guys," Jablonski said. "We had to see how they fit into the bigger picture, how they got into this strange state. They could've shown a whole new evolutionary dynamic." But they didn't, which actually excited the scientists even more.

"We found out that they do follow the same rules, that they are an exception that proves the rule," Jablonski said. "This was really exciting: science is always about the search for rules, generalizations that can explain nature in new ways." Krug agreed: "The results of the research were a bit surprising, as general rules governing natural systems can be hard to come by."

The origin of new Anomalo lineages was concentrated in the temperate zones, coinciding with their peak diversity. The coincidence between peak diversity and prolific evolution was seen in that group's relatives, too, and because both fell in the tropics, a normal diversity resulted.

"You could imagine a situation in which all their evolutionary action was still in the tropics, but they just had so much extinction there that by default their diversity peak was in the temperate zone," Jablonski said. "But if you know where the diversity peak is, you can predict where evolution is the most prolific."

"Thanks to the fossil record, we can show that their weird diversity pattern is because of a failure to diversify in the tropics and not because of supercharged evolution in the temperate zones. Our rule came through with flying colors."

These results show how important the tropics are for life on Earth: "The tropics are the engine of biodiversity. As the tropics are undermined or deteriorate for a whole variety of reasons, that actually undercuts evolutionary production on a global scale," Jablonski said.
Contact: Steve Koppes
skoppes@uchicago.edu
773-702-8366
University of Chicago

Publishing in the New Millennium: A Forum on Publishing in the Biosciences

2007-11-06T08:39:00.000-05:00

Via A Blog Around the Clock:

Back at Scifoo I met Anna Kushnir. And then we met again. And then, inspired by the conversations at Scifoo, Anna decided to organize a day-long, student-hosted conference about the future of scientific publishing - Publishing in the New Millennium: A Forum on Publishing in the Biosciences. And she decided to invite me to appear on one of the panels.
So, later this week, I will be in Boston, more precisely Cambridge MA, discussing Open Access and Science 2.0. I am arriving on Thursday in the early afternoon and leaving on Saturday in the early afternoon, so there is plenty of opportunity to meet me, even if you cannot make it to Harvard on Friday afternoon (and I hope you can - it promises to be quite exciting!). Just let Anna know about. Apart from Anna, I also hope to meet some other old friends, like Corie Lok, Alex Palazzo, Evie Brown, Moshe Pritsker, Kaitlin Thaney and YOU! So, check out the conference schedule and try to be there if you can.

The Carnivorous nights taxidermy contest

2007-11-06T08:34:00.001-05:00

Via Make:

Photos and more from The Carnivorous Nights Taxidermy Contest, a Secret Science Club event held at Union Hall in Park Slope, Brooklyn, last Friday night - [via] Link & more.
More:
Obscura Antiques & Oddities, 280 East 10th, New York City - Link.
"Dogseat's" Carnivorous Nights Taxidermy Contest" photoset on Flickr - Link.

I'm not sure why this appeals to me, but it does...

Feynman and ants

2007-11-05T09:14:00.000-05:00

Via MAKE Magazine

LanBo, the folks who distribute the gel-based ant habitats have a fun story about a DIY ant experiment from the famously curious physicist Richard Feynman -
"I wanted to see how long it would take the other ants to get the message to go to the 'ferry terminal'. It started slowly, but rapidly increased until I was going mad ferrying the ants back and forth." After a while, he started taking the ants from the sugar to a different spot. None of them went back to the original starting place, which would have returned them to the sugar. They followed one another, but not to the sugar.
Feynman did other experiments with ants. In one, he laid out glass microscope slides and got ants to walk back and forth on them to some sugar. When he rearranged the slides or replaced an old one with a new one, the ants got confused and couldn't figure out how to reach the sugar. "It was pretty clear, from rearranging the glass slides that the ants left some sort of trail." He concluded.

He tried to figure out whether the trail indicated which direction to take to the sugar or only that an ant had been on the slide already. He also wanted to know how long the trail lasted. "I tried at one point to make the ants go around in a circle, but I didn't have enough patience to set it up." He wrote.

More than ten years later, after he had worked on a number of important projects, including the Manhattan project, Feynman was still wondering about ants. He was frustrated because the experiments he had done to demonstrate the ants' sense of geometry had not worked. He still wondered, "Why do ant trails look so straight and nice?" By this time he was teaching at the California Institute of Technology.
Feynman and ants - Link.

Posted by Phillip Torrone | Nov 5, 2007 02:00 AM

Graduate studies in Comparative Biology

2007-11-05T09:11:00.001-05:00

Via antbase:

Some months ago, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City was granted official authority to award it own Ph.D. degrees. What this mean is that, starting in the Fall of 2008, a first generation of graduate students will be able to pursue a full state-of-the-art program in Comparative Biology at the best setting possible: an institution devoted to collection-based science.

The AMNH has already a long history in graduate level education through its join programs with Columbia University, NYU, CUNY and Cornell University. Many courses are already taught right in situ by the Museum's curators, and the students enjoy use of the various resources for their research (besides the collections, there are molecular laboratories, digital imaging with a SEM facility, and the fastest computer clusters for phylogenetic analysis ever assemble, just to name a few). However, further governing autonomy will surely create a more cohesive atmosphere and save a few headaches to its students. Nevertheless, as far as I know, the AMNH will keep its join programs with the universities.

This post was prompted by the launching of the new Ph.D. program website. The application deadline is December 28, 2007. I highly recommend anyone interested to contact some of the curators and apply for this or subsequent academic years.

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