Gigantiops Destructor Jack O' Lantern

Amy's lovely pumpkin carving -- Gigantiops destructor. Happy Halloween!

Updated Ant Quiz

Along with my misspelling of a major ant subfamily, I also apparently had some errors in my online ant quiz. When I went through to correct them I decided to add a few more questions and include the genera in the message you get when you choose correctly. If anyone else notices any problems, please let me know!

How to spell Myrmicinae

So I got an email the other day from James Trager pointing out that I had misspelled Myrmicinae all over my webpage. Yikes! He's right. I've been spelling it Myrmecinae and it is supposed to be Myrmicinae. From his email:

"There are two related but different roots from Greek that have entered the language of ant taxonomy, namely "myrm-" "myrmec-". The name Myrmica and its derivative Myrmicinae, rather confusingly, are based on the first root plus the suffix "-ic", so people make the error in spelling the subfamily Myrmicinae quite often."

I did a quick search on google and found out that it is really true. There were over 1100 pages that used the wrong spelling, including Wikipedia and several articles published on scientific journal webpages (although I don't know if they were duplicated in print versions). Anyway, I think I have now changed everything on my research webpage to the correct spelling. Thanks James!

More Wasmannia

After going over all my Wasmannia again, I have come to the following conclusions:

• All the specimens I originally labeled as sigmoidea are actually cf lutzi.
• All the specimens I originally labeled as lutzi are actually rochai.
• And all the queens I originally labeled as auropunctata are cf lutzi. These queens are all quite large with head width around 1.1 mm and thorax length around 1.75 mm.
  
• Interestingly, all the rochai specimens were collected from the canopy and all of the cf lutzi specimens were collected from the ground except for 2 of the queens.

So now my Wasmannia species list is: auropunctata, iheringi, cf. lutzi, rochai, and scrobifera.

Wasmannia Update

Sent my Wasmannia off to Jack Longino and he has already identified them. Yay for Jack! So sure was I about my identifications, that I only sent a few specimens for verification. The one I was mostly concerned with was the sigmoidea, rightly as it turns out. I sent what I thought were four sigmoidea specimens and they all turned out to be lutzi. And the one I thought was lutzi was rochai. I also sent a queen which I thought was auropunctata but which he said was actually lutzi. So I clearly have some issues with lutzi, although to be fair he said that:

"...the stuff I labeled lutzi could be called cf. lutzi. I've only seen one collection of lutzi, the types from Sao Paulo. So I don't know what variation is like. But your specimens are almost exactly in between lutzi and auropunctata. The workers are nearly identical to auropunctata except with petiole shape of lutzi. The queen is bigger than auropunctata, but the shape of the head and frontal carinae are like auropunctata instead of lutzi. I bet it is an undescribed species."

And as I recall my issue with (what I thought was) sigmoidea was that they seemed a lot like auropunctata except for that petiole, so actually that seems like a reasonable mistake for me to have made. The critical couplet is the one which involves the antennal scrobes being narrow or broad. If this key ever gets published, I would caution folks to be especially careful on that couplet.

The auropunctata (workers), iheringi, and scrobifera were all correct and pretty easy to ID. I'm guessing that all my sigmoidea are all cf. lutzi, but I will have to look at them all again before saying that. And I will definitely have to recheck my lutzi, rochai, and the queens of auropunctata.

On the subject of the queens, Jack has this to say:

"That “lutzi” queen is kind of intermediate between the type of lutzi and queens of auropunctata, so it will be interesting to see if you can sort queens into two piles, lutzi vs auropunctata. They may be really hard to tell apart. The queen you sent looks just like an auropunctata queen, just bigger than any I have seen. So they may just sort out by size, or there may not be any differences!"

So, that is what I will be doing next.

Oil spill in Tiputini River

Apparently there has been an oil spill on the Rio Tiputini. I am unclear where exactly this is in relation to the station, but it is certainly bad news for the wildlife and ecology of the area. Link to original post (In Spanish): Orellana: derrame de petroleo en el rio Tiputini por parte de Petroecuador.

ebay item of the week: baltic amber Islamic prayer beads with real ants inside

'nuff said