awild

Photos posted to myrmecos.net rarely go straight from the camera to the web. Through some combination of errors related to exposure and the innate properties of digital sensors, raw images can be a surprisingly poor match to what is seen through the viewfinder. Raw images are often relatively…

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.

Blogging will resume after Christmas. Happy Holidays!

Paraguay may be the world's most important country. Never mind that it is economically isolated and geopolitically forgettable. Rather, I measure importance by less trivial metrics, and by that of course I mean ants. Paraguayan ants have changed the world. Many of the world's worst pest species…

...reviewed by Phil Ward here: Ward, P.S. 2007. Phylogeny, classification, and species-level taxonomy of ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Zootaxa 1668: 549-563. Abstract: The current state of ant systematics is reviewed. In recent years substantial progress has been made in identifying the major…

Trachymyrmex pomonae Rabeling & Cover 2007 Arizona Nothing warms the heart more than a new ant species close to home! An all-star team of ant specialists, headed by Christian Rabeling at the University of Texas, describe the Arizonan species Trachymyrmex pomonae in Zootaxa this week. This…

An image search for one of my favorite ants, the Atta leafcutters, returns a jarring juxtaposition of terrorists and ants: Google Search: "Atta"

  Nephila sp. Giant Silk Spider Panama   details: Canon 100mm macro lens on a Canon 20D f/2.8, 1/200 sec, ISO 400 handheld, natural light levels adjusted in Photoshop

    Leafcutter ants are the most conspicuous insects in Central and South America. Every photographer who happens across their bustling trails seems to take pictures of them. The world really does not need any more photos of leafcutter ants, but I can't help myself. They're pretty. My latest…

Warning: long ranty post to follow. Taxonomy is an unusual discipline in the balance it strikes between legal and scientific concepts. There's the obvious biology bit about discovering and defining taxa, but unlike any other science there's a backbone of legalistic code that regulates the…

In an earlier post about flash diffusion, I wrote about camera flash being a necessity of the trade-off between depth of field and shutter speed. Most insect photographers- myself included- work hard to improve the depth of field in our photographs, trying to bring as much of our diminutive…

Technomyrmex fisheri Bolton 2007 Madagascar, line drawing by Barry Bolton Last month, British myrmecologist Barry Bolton published the first ever global synthesis of the ant genus Technomyrmex. The tome describes 37 new species, including Technomyrmex fisheri from Madagascar, named after Brian…

Light posting over the last couple days, I'm afraid. Our kitten Mingus came down with a little kitty fever this morning of 106º (That's 41ºC for the Fahrenheit- impaired) and is spending the night in the pet hospital, enough of a distraction to derail my blogging schedule. Don't despair, though…

Flash is a necessary evil in insect photography. This necessity is due to two unfortunate traits shared by most insects: small size and stubborn unwillingness to sit still for the camera. These traits confound each other in a way that renders insect photography uniquely challenging. Small…

  The Saguaro might, one could fancy, be a tree designed by someone who had never seen a tree. -Donald Culross Peattie, 1950    

Zut alors! This blog seems to have developed a following of Frenchmen. The shame of it is, I studied French for 5 years in High School and don't remember a word of it. The French ant-enthusiast forum Acideformik looks like a fine place to hang out on the intra-webs. Most online myrmecology…

Bombus impatiens details: Canon 100mm macro lens on a Canon 20D bees on plain white paper f/14, 1/250 sec, ISO 100 Canon 550EX speedlite flash, bounced off white paper levels adjusted in Photoshop

Idioneurula donegani Huertas & Arias 2007     Huertas, B. and J. J. Arias. 2007. A new butterfly species from the Colombian Andes and a review of the taxonomy of the genera Idioneurula Strand, 1932 and Tamania Pyrcz, 1995 (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae: Satyrinae). Zootaxa 1652: 27-40. The…

  Aglyptacros sp., Tiphiid wasp, California   details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon D60 wasp on plain white paper f/13, 1/200 sec, ISO 100 MT-24EX twin flash diffused through tracing paper levels adjusted in Photoshop

  Mystrium maren Bihn & Verhaagh 2007 Discoveries of new species on our little-known planet continue apace. The two known specimens of the impressively toothy Mystrium maren were collected in 2001 in Indonesia, and Jochen Bihn and Manfred Verhaagh just published a paper in Zootaxa describing…

A few months ago I started playing about with the placement of the flash unit, and almost immediately hit on a new favorite trick.  When lit from behind, insects look even more zingy than usual. Their translucent bodies glow, they are ringed with little halos, and they stand out dramatically…

Colliuris sp. long-necked ground beetle, Arizona   details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon 20D beetle on plain white paper f/13, 1/250 sec, ISO 100 MT-24EX twin flash diffused through tracing paper levels adjusted in Photoshop

PZ Myers gives an excellent holiday gift suggestion for aspiring scientists: a microscope. To fully appreciate the small animals around us, they must be visualized on their own scale. For the uninitiated, the first glance of live insects through a microscope can be shocking. My favorite…

    If I had to pick a favorite myrmicine ant, I'd go with the heavily armored Neotropical genus Cephalotes. These arboreal ants are typically thought of as rainforest canopy dwellers, but we have a desert species here in Arizona, Cephalotes rohweri, that is the northernmost species in an…

Matt Dowling's Ontogeny Blog welcomes me to the blogosphere. Thanks Matt! ***update*** Hey, I've drawn the attention of The Ant Room, too!

Once, I showed the above photograph to an expert on ground beetles. His only comment: "That looks dead". It wasn't dead, I had merely stuck it in the fridge to cool it down enough to sit still for a shot or two. I had spent the previous 20 minutes chasing the darn thing around the living room.…

details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens, f/11, 1/200 sec, with diffuse flash.

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