Pheidole Key

Amy Mertl has put her key to the Pheidole of Tiputini, Ecuador on her website. I just got finished looking it over and it is awesome. Check it out.

Pheidole pics

I have just updated my research webpage with links from my Pheidole page to my labmate Amy Mertl's webpage. She has been working hard on the Pheidole of Tiputini and has lots of lovely pictures and is also working on a key which is driving her loopy. Check it out at http://people.bu.edu/amymertl/Pheidole.html.

Preliminary Solenopsis Key Online!

Well, I finally managed to get my key online. It can be found here. It takes a little while to load -- give it a chance. There are no pictures and no actual species names, just morphospecies, but it does show all the characteristics that I used. Perhaps that will be useful to someone. In a few weeks I plan to have pictures of characteristics and species to make it more useful. If anyone decides to try it out, I would love any and all feedback. Thanks! If you are confused by the Lucid3 program, you can email me or check out Lucid's help page.

Reader comments and...(wait for it)....Solenopsis!

By the way, I am super excited to see that actual people not related to me are reading this blog. Thank you so much for the comments! I am finished with my Solenopsis but want to wait a week to put up my results so that I can have them verified by Stefan. No doubt there will be a few adjustments. But I know how frustrating it is to deal with Solenopsis, so I am hoping to also include a key I have been working on and some photos of the characteristics I used. Not sure how useful this will be, but it certainly can't hurt. I have been using a program called Lucid3 which is fantastic. It really helped me keep track of my morphospecies and figure out when I had accidentally made two groups of the same ant. I will put this program up on my website, too, as soon as I figure out how to do that. I ended up with 29 morphospecies, one of which was S. virulens and one of which was all the queens I didn't want to deal with. Characteristics I used (briefly -- I will put more detail later): color, opacity, mesosomal length, scape length, distance from scape to vertex, head shape, head width, size and shape of clypeal carinae and clypeal teeth, size and shape of first and second funicular segments, pilosity of mesosoma and head, mesosomal shape, severity of metanotal groove, propodeum shape, petiole shape, and punctation.

Ants of Tiputini Poster

When I got fed up with the Solenopsis, I would go back to work on my Ants of Tiputini poster, which I have been working on for awhile now. It is finally finished and I am super proud of it. Every ant pictured was collected and photographed by me. And it took me forever to get the spacings and the layout just right (algebra was involved). I used to say to myself, why are there no good ant posters out there? I would love to have a cool ant poster on my wall. Well, now I do. If anyone else is interested in this poster, it is for sale at my cafepress.com webstore, The Gigantiops Destructor Store.

E. O. Wilson on the Meaning of Life

My husband just pointed out to me a cool website called meaningoflife.tv or Cosmic Thinkers on Camera, which is connected to Slate Magazine. They have on camera interviews with Big Idea Guys on Big Ideas. I just finished watching the interview with E. O. Wilson and enjoyed it greatly.

At one point he is asked to comment on the idea that many people have, that in some ways sociobiology devalues human traits like love and altruism: "...the very idea that these things originated for self-interested reasons and sometimes are still deployed in a covertly selfish way, a lot of people say this devalues love or somehow unsettles them..."

To which Wilson replies: "I don't think so. I don't think it does devalue it, I imagine that some feel that it might but it's somewhat comparable to the truth that would come from thinking of the brain as the ... musical instrument that has been developed over millions of years and of the playing out of human nature ... in an evolving culture as a beautiful melody, and the emotions felt as part of it. And when you look at it that way and you realize there is almost infinite beauty possible from the instrument from the permutations and creations of the melodies then an organic origin ... does not become debasing at all."

I like that a lot. You can watch the entire interview here or read the transcript here. Interesting stuff, no matter what your beliefs are.

The frustrations of describing new species

I sometimes feel frustrated at the difficulties inherent in describing new ant species. Especially when they seem to be so prevalent. I myself am 100% sure that I have found at least six new species; the actual number is most likely quite higher. But what to do? It's such a chore to describe them and I have so many other things to do that they get pushed aside. And the general consensus in the ant world seems to be that it isn't worth describing a single new species. Much better to revise an entire genus. But who has time to do that? And the truth is that my new species may just as easily have been "discovered" by some other myrmecologist who also hasn't had the time to describe them.

But I suppose it could be worse. This was brought to mind this morning as I read about a recently described new species of plesiosaur. I say recently described, but not recently discovered. According to the article (published in the May 25, 2006 issue of Nature), it has taken 40 years to describe this thing. It took seven years just to dig it up and assemble it. After that it mostly just sat around since there was no money available to get the appropriate references, travel to museum collections, etc. The new species was finally described this month (T. Sato, Y. Hasegawa and M. Manabe. Palaeontology 49, 467–484; 2006). Describing new species might be a pain for myrmecologists, but at least what you're describing still exists, doesn't have to be constructed from random parts found in the ground, and doesn't need a crane to put together. I should count my blessings. The authors lament the lack of funds available for descriptive work. Amen, brother. The past couple of years seem to have had an upsurge in interest in biodiversity and the cataloging of all the species on earth. But I can't say any of these things seem to be resulting in actual money being given out to people involved in descriptive work. There are large grants being given out to institutions (PEET, for instance) but I don't know of any grant that I, as an individual, could apply for that would assist me with my work. There are all sorts of websites online now trying to put out lists of every species on earth but here I sit with a bunch of new species and I basically have no reason in the world to do anything about it except maybe a personal desire to further science and the satisfaction derived from giving something a cool name. And at this point in time, that's just not enough.