Arboreal ant diversity in a central African forest

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

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

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 cultured for nest architecture by the ant subgenera Dendrolasius and Chthonolasius. The ants probably manage their fungal mutualists by protecting them against fungal competitors. The ant subgenera display different ant-to-fungus specificity patterns, one-to-two and many-to-one, and we infer vertical transmission, in the latter case overlaid by horizontal transmission. Possible evolutionary trajectories include a reversal from fungiculture by other Lasius subgenera and inheritance of fungi through life cycle interactions of the ant subgenera. The mosaic indicates how specificity patterns can be shaped by an interplay between host life-cycles and transmission adaptations." 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

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

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

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!

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!"