This first round of seminar-style presentations seemed to have gone very well. It’s the final year and it is a relief to see the scattered class bonding together. Like in the words of the Ping – paraphrased – it is a miracle; this seminar-style approach to educating every one works for o’three. Throughout this week, a lot was covered – from Wisdom of the Crowd, Mobile Revolution to Facebook.

Search engines throw out their web spiders to collect information via HTML around the vast internet – as WP presented it. I thought there were only the spiders but turns out not; ants and worms are part of the act too! And the text of mankind – be it font-size 12 or 40; lorem ipsum or twit language – collectively form the Wisdom of the Crowd. No wonder Google struck it rich: they were quick to leverage on this opportunity hence created one of the most widely-used search engine today.

I was singled out in the demonstration of that theory. And it did prove – my level of wisdom, however intelligent I may think of myself to be, could not stand up to the class as a whole. Think about it, in actuality, this is more or less along the lines of logic and common sense – the comments and opinions of others, who have come from different background and possessed different interests, are considered more objective than one soul’s point of view. To add on, you will be spoilt for choice and faced with thick walls of dilemma from having to come to your decision. Always remember, the opinions and/or comments of others are just suggestions – the ultimate decision is yours; just compare, contrast and run it through your heart. In other words, be discerning even when seeking the almighty advice from Wisdom of the Crowd.

Let me sum up Mobile Revolution in a line: The advancement in science is unbeatable, though fairly foreseeable, technology will continue to renew with greater things and maybe even realise the reality of ‘Alien v.s. Predator’ causing chaos like in ‘Left 4 Dead’.  Hence in a way, no biggie, revolutions will eventually become passe over time and more will come.

On the topic of ‘Left 4 Dead’ – here’s an interesting treat (rated NC-16):

Facebook? It’s so popular now that it does not need more text in this post.

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Stan and Jan Berenstain’s silly book introduces readers to words that begin with A by following a trail of ants “across an apple and an acorn, across an apricot, an ax, and an angleworm” … all the way to an anteater and an anthill.  The anteater is busy tying on a napkin and preparing for a tasty treat, when CHOMP! — the ants take a bite on her tail, causing her to make a hasty retreat and leave their friends in peace.

Kids might need to be told that what appears to be physical violence — biting — only causes the anteater momentary discomfort because the ants are so small.  But they will certainly understand that animals don’t want to be eaten.

Ages 4-8.

TIP 1: Affirmations

Think about what you want to achieve in life.  Think about a new goal that you want to achieve. 

 Say your goal out loud to yourself everyday:

“I have within me the ability to achieve …..”

“I am so grateful for the fact that I am now earning …..”

You may feel it is a lie right now.  But all truth begins as a lie let’s face it. Keep repeating the goal – see it in your mind, act it out, pretend as if you already achieved your goal.

TIP 2:     Visualisation

Our implicit memory system doesn’t know the difference between reality verses imagined.  So when you start to visualise your next level of success a new neural network will be created in your brain.

To illustrate every person going into a movie theatre attaches their own interpretation to the hero in the movie.  Some people cry in the movie and some people don’t.  The movie is only a script on a screen. 

When we create the emotion in our mind eventually it will become a reality.  Guaranteed!

It’s a fact most of us have been taught “I will believe it when I see it”

It’s a fact “When you create the belief the brain creates the seeing”

Tip 3:   Positive Thoughts

All of us hear in our head ANTs (automatic negative thoughts).  Some thoughts are genetic some are not.

When we have a repetitive negative thought it releases a negative chemical into the blood stream.  We become addicted to the emotion whether it is comfortable for us or not.  We need knowledge of what is happening to take the right measures to stop ANTs from occurring. 

When we have a repetitive positive thought it does the same thing.  However by having positive thoughts and repeating them out loud we feel better and we attract into our life and profession more of the same.  The physical structure of the brain is altered.  This new discovery is called neuroplasticity – the brains ability to create new neural networks through thought and environment do actually change our DNA. 

SUMMARY

We all have the genius ability to

*achieve whatever financial goal we want

*think differently

*feel differently. 

When we take the right ACTION success is predictable.  Highly successful people are not any smarter – they just do smarter things.

When we do

*affirmations that are written properly

*do our visualisations and our neural reconditioning around new ideas

The result will be

*we are retraining the brain at the level where we need success. 

Thought is the most powerful potent piece of energy known to man and when we combine that with the right behaviours we can create millions of dollars. 

Time-lapse imaging in live zebrafish embryos reveals that cerebellar granule cells migrate in chain-like structures as discovered by a recent article [1] [Köster et al., PLoS, Nov. 2009]. Figure above – Granule cells taken from the cerebellum of a pigeon (above, B) are shown in this 1899 drawing by legendary neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal.

Did talk about sticky objects and self-organization in the past,  how positive and negative feedback’s  stigmergic-like agents integrated could promote changes and learning over a complex system.  Same happens to bacteria as also ants. On the other hand, we do know memes are also sticky (e.g. Chip Heath, Dan Heath, “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die“, Random House, ISBN 978-1-4000-6428-1, January 2007). What’s new however, is that there are increasing proofs that our own brains my follow similar mechanisms (as Douglas Hofstadter in the past did made some analogies with how brains could work and how ant colonies raid different environments). In this recent new study, Köster and colleagues [1] [PLoS, Nov. 2009] reveal crucial pieces of this puzzle, showing how (neuronal) cells orient themselves to migrate together (like bacteria, above). The team studied zebrafish, one of the workhorses of developmental neurobiology, because its transparent body allows researchers to track movements of cells inside of it. As explained by Mason Inman [2]:

[...] Neurons in the developing brain complete their own self-organized waltz, coordinating with their neighbors to migrate to the right spots to form the cerebellum, visual cortex, or other parts of the brain. In this issue of PLoS Biology, Reinhard Köster and colleagues show that some of these brain cells behave much like slime molds, coordinating with other cells of the same type to migrate in a herd. They found that one particular protein called Cadherin-2 is crucial in allowing the cells to adhere to their neighbors so they can coordinate their movements and all wind up in the right spot. [...] Slime molds provide a textbook example of self-organization. They live as single cells until food becomes scarce. Then, they broadcast chemical signals that trigger their mass assembly into a fruiting body, with some cells forming a stalk and others turning into spores that cast about in the winds to spread far and wide. [...] Neurons in the developing brain complete their own self-organized waltz, coordinating with their neighbors to migrate to the right spots to form the cerebellum, visual cortex, or other parts of the brain. In this issue of PLoS Biology, Reinhard Köster and colleagues show that some of these brain cells behave much like slime molds, coordinating with other cells of the same type to migrate in a herd. They found that one particular protein called Cadherin-2 is crucial in allowing the cells to adhere to their neighbors so they can coordinate their movements and all wind up in the right spot.[...]

[...] But the mechanisms behind this coordinated movement – in particular, how each cell adjusts its inner workings to move to the right place at the right time – are only now starting to be revealed, using imaging that tracks these cells in live animals as they develop. [...] To figure out what triggers the cells to line up and move together, the authors looked at what other kinds of cells were in the neighborhood. Many studies have shown that support cells, known as glial cells, often help guide neurons during these kinds of migrations. But during the first few days of the zebrafish embryo’s development, Köster and colleagues found, there were no glial cells along the granular cells’ migration route. That means these cells must go it alone, the team reasoned, with their own mechanism for signaling between each other to line up into chains and make their move. [...] Although the study focused on just one type of brain cell, the findings could explain how many types of neurons find their way to their proper spots as the brain develops. There are still some pieces of the puzzle missing, however. While the findings explain how the granule cells are able to coordinate and follow their neighbors, it’s still not clear how the first few cells to head out on the journey – those at the front of the “conga line” – get oriented in the right direction. This suggests there must be some kind of signal from surrounding cells to get them headed in the right direction, the authors argue – yet another level of organization. [...] , in Mason Inman (Nov., 2009) Migrating Brain Cells Stick Together, PloS. [2]

[1] Rieger S, Senghaas N, Walch A, Köster RW (Nov., 2009) Cadherin-2 Controls Directional Chain Migration of Cerebellar Granule Neurons. PLoS Biology.
[2] Mason Inman (Nov., 2009) Migrating Brain Cells Stick Together, PloS Biology.

Can ants count? Not out loud they can’t. Not the way you and I count. But an ingenious experiment conducted in the Sahara suggests maybe ants do count.

How Do Ants Get Home?

Most ants get around by leaving smell trails on the forest floor that show other ants how to get home or to food. They squeeze the glands that cover their bodies; those glands release a scent, and the scents in combination create trails the other ants can follow.

That works in the forest, but it doesn’t work in a desert. Deserts are sandy and when the wind blows, smells scatter.

So how do desert ants find their way home?

It’s already known that ants use celestial clues to establish the general direction home, but how do they know exactly the number of steps to take that will lead them right to the entrance of their nest?

Wolf and Whittlinger trained a bunch of ants to walk across a patch of desert to some food. When the ants began eating, the scientists trapped them and divided them into three groups. They left the first group alone. With the second group, they used superglue to attach pre-cut pig bristles to each of their six legs, essentially putting them on stilts.

Scientists put stilts on desert ants and discovered that in time, the ants could calculate the correct number of steps it took to get home.

The third group had their legs cut off just below the “knees,” making each of their six legs shorter.

After the meal and the makeover, the ants were released and all of them headed home to the nest while the scientists watched to see what would happen.

The “Pedometer Effect”

The regular ants walked right to the nest and went inside.

The ants on stilts walked right past the nest, stopped and looked around for their home.

The ants on stumps fell short of the nest, stopped and seemed to be searching for their home.

It turns out that all the ants had walked the same number of steps, but because their gaits had been changed (the stilty ants, like Monty Python creatures, walked with giant steps; the stumpy ants walked in baby steps) they went exactly the distances you’d predict if their brains counted the number of steps out to the food and then reversed direction and counted the same number of steps back. In other words, all the ants counted the same number of steps back!

Does that mean ants have something like pedometers that do something like counting?

Says professor James Gould of Princeton, commenting on the experiment: “These animals are fooled exactly the way you’d expect if they were counting steps.”

Gould says it’s pretty clear ants don’t have maps in their heads and don’t recognize markers along the route. This experiment strongly suggests that ants do have internal pedometers that allow them to “count” their way home.

Special thanks to OddTodd, our animator, and to comedian Jessi Klein, who provided ant voices in our video.

I don’t understand if I did some against the ants in our house but I think they’re following me. There would always be a group of hyper ants convening in my bed everytime I get home and I would pinch them one by one. Killing them is useless because after a while, new batch of ants would appear. WTF! I would sometimes trace where exactly they’re coming from and would place an object in between the paths they’re following and they will start scattering. The reason for this is they’re actually follow a scent that will guide them back to their turf.

The reason why talking about ant is because yesterday during breakfast, I put my food inside the microwave with ants having some kind of festival around it. Being the crazy, little girl that I am, I watch my food get heated. I was expecting a toasted ant. But to my disgust, they walked out of the microwave as if nothing happened. -_-

When we show compassion towards animals, how many of us show compassion towards little insects as well and protect them from being harmed? Those little insects that are living in our homes with us, usually they are not welcome and are killed by us human beings intentionally and unemotionally. These insects also have the will and the right to live.

They have the freedom to be anywhere on earth even in our homes. When we buy a house it doesn’t mean that we also own the space and the earth. These little insects have been living here at this space and on this earth for many generations long before there were any houses or buildings. We think that these little insects are invading our property and space, but actually we are the ones who have invaded their living space and destroyed their homes.

Shouldn’t we respect these little insects and allow them to live harmoniously with us in our home – a place we call ”our house” just because we have to pay lots of money to the bank and we have a piece of paper stating that ”we” are the owner of this property.

Even though we might pay to build a house, we don’t really own the earth and the space inside and outside that building. Who is the real owner of the earth and the space in the first place? Not the developer, not the land office, not the government, not the people, not the animals, not the insects, not the plants, not the birds…

It belongs to nature, and it allows everything to be on it and in it, it allows every thing and every living being to utilise its resources. Nature didn’t sell this earth and space to anybody, so how come someone came to us and sold us the land and told us it is ours now?

All the plants, insects, birds and animals were living here for a long, long time before we human beings explored this place and took the land, and built houses on it.

How come now after we have invaded their living space we are merciless towards these little insects that come into our homes and we try to get rid of them or kill them with chemical and poisons? Are they not living beings too? Maybe they are not as intelligent as human beings, but they do have the sense of taking care of their baby insects and feed them. They know what team work is and collect food for their whole community, share their food and protect themselves from danger and harm. Isn’t this is far better than many selfish and ignorant human beings ?

On top of non-harming (Ahimsa) towards animals and insects, if every human being was selfless, wise and compassionate towards other living beings then this world will be a truly better place.

In the past, scientists have seen that when army ants from different colonies run into one another in nature, fighting closely follows.  However, researchers at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology recently have found that when a colony of army ants loses its queen, the orphan ants can be adopted by other colonies of army ants, without any fight occurring.  These orphans can become completely integrated members of the new colony within a few days, the time it takes for the odor of the old colony to disappear.  In the research conducted, seven out of ten colonies that were followed exhibited this behavior.  The researchers lost track of two of the remaining three colonies, and the last colony produced small winged males in an effort to try and find another queen and to pass on the genes from the colony. 

Thanks to http://wfsc.tamu.edu/winemiller/lab/UMEB_Experience.htm for the picture.

Article found at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091104122532.htm

I thought I was getting good at keeping the kitchen clean so that the ants would not return. The cutting board is a problem. Cleaning with dish soap using the scrubbing side of a sponge is not enough. They still mill around trying to find what they smell. I’ve tried pouring boiling water over the board after it’s been washed. That works, but is a pain in the butt. One evening I forgot and found this in the morning.

My solution is to treat the cutting board the same way I do fresh bread: hang it from the clothes line in my dirty kitchen.

I hope they don’t learn how to walk a tightrope.

Azteca instabilis, Guatemala

An urgent bleg to Myrmecos readers:

If you have recent collections of Azteca ants suitable for molecular work, and you can mail them out within the week, please consider sending me any samples you can spare.  I’d be especially grateful for species like Azteca instabilis, A. trigona, or A. velox that do not live in Cecropia.

Why the rush?  I am writing an NSF grant with a group of ecologists and plant systematists to look at evolutionary patterns in the famous Cecropia-Azteca ant-plant system. To make our case to NSF we need preliminary data as a proof of concept.

Our intrepid Cecropia collaborators have dozens of their taxa ready to go.  On the ant side we are a little behind, with only about 15 samples usable for genetic research.  The test set of taxa already makes promising trees with just a pair of loci, but our sample size is still low and very biased towards the Cecropia-nesters.  If we could beef it up with about 5-10 more non-Cecropia species we think we’ll have a better shot at getting funded.  The submission deadline is in January, but we’ll need at least two weeks to get the DNA extracted, amplified, and analyzed.  Hence the urgency.

Please contact me if you think you can help.  This is an exciting project- the ant-Cecropia relationship is an iconic element of Neotropical rainforests, and we may have an opportunity to learn about when, where, and why it originated.

[update:  Also, anyone who contributes specimens will get a free 8x10 print, of their choosing, from my photo archive.  That's how happy I'd be to get specimens.]

Here are some photos that we took in and around Langkawi island and nearby our house and yoga center and in our little garden. This is why we have moved to Langkawi from Kuala Lumpur. We are surrounded by beautiful nature here. There are many types of birds, animals, insects, trees, fruit, vegetation, padi fields, flowers, beautiful beaches, refreshing waterfalls, forest hiking tracks, local food and many more.

Army ants are group predators that overwhelm large arthropods and other social insect colonies. Here, a raiding swarm of Dorylus molestus is attacking a grasshopper at Mt Kenya.

Colonies of army ants, whose long columns and marauding habits are the stuff of natural-history legend, are usually antagonistic to each other, attacking soldiers from rival colonies in border disputes that keep the colonies separate. But new work by a researcher at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology and colleagues at the University of Copenhagen shows that in some cases the colonies can be cooperative instead of combative.

In those cases, when an army ant colony loses its queen, its workers are absorbed, not killed, by neighboring colonies, and within days are treated as part of the family.

The research, conducted in an ant-rich area on the slopes of Mount Kenya, is detailed in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Army ant colonies are dominated by a single, large queen who produces the eggs that give rise to all of the colony’s individuals, which can number millions of workers. When she dies, colonies quickly disappear, raising the question of what happens to the many individuals.

The work was conducted by Daniel Kronauer, a junior fellow in Harvard’s Society of Fellows, over two field seasons in Kenya. Kronauer and his colleagues followed the fates of 10 army ant colonies whose queens they had removed. The researchers lost track of two of the colonies but observed two distinct strategies used by the remaining eight.

Most of the queenless colonies, seven out of 10, simply joined a neighboring colony — determined by genetic analysis — with the new workers slowly losing their distinct colony odor, and within days becoming fully integrated.

The last queenless colony stayed on its own, with workers employing a strategy of producing a small brood of winged males. Though these males were removed for analysis, in an undisturbed colony the males would fly off looking for young unmated queens. Though this strategy does provide some chance of passing along the colony’s genes, the small number of males produced — just 31 in this case compared with 3,000 in a fully functioning colony — illustrates that this strategy may not be efficient.

“It is a last option to get some fitness returns before they die,” Kronauer said.

Though the work illuminates where most of the ants go, it doesn’t entirely settle the question of why. Though it makes sense that the accepting colony would want to increase its size and competitiveness by gaining many new workers, the evolutionary drivers behind the queenless colony’s workers absorbing into the new colony are more vague.

Since workers are normally kept from reproducing, Kronauer and his co-authors found, there doesn’t seem to be a direct fitness benefit. Instead, the authors suggested that the fusing colonies are driven by indirect fitness benefits gained because of distant relationships between colonies, and they called for more fieldwork to explore the issue further.

__________

Full article and photo: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091104122532.htm

Sarah Crabtree’s Terror from Beyond Middle England follows one woman escaping her ordinary life, replete with dysfunctional family, for adventure, mystery, and romance. Zara begins innocently enough, hopping on a train to Lichfield, crashing a geriatric party, and falling into bed with a scientist who does not believe in love at first sight. But as Alan invites her to stay and the two try to build a relationship, Zara’s past catches up to her and even stranger events unfold.

Despite mysterious intruders, a suspiciously resilient ant population, genetic modification protesters, unwanted familial nagging via phone, scandalous trysts, laboratory secrets, and missing laundry items, Zara perseveres. She finds solace in cups of tea and new friend Old Marcus. Indeed, Zara’s tenderness for the man foreshadows the reunion with her deranged mother and her rise as the story’s heroine.

Crabtree has created a genre-busting work of British humor and fantastical plot. Unpredictable events and colorful characters speed this read along. Midway through the novel the omniscient narrator surfaces to deliver a memorable, insightful, and utterly hilarious summary of Zara’s bizarre reality and faulted behavior. Nominated for a British Fantasy Society award, Zara’s journey from small-town temp to Doomsday Globe sleuth will keep you reading. Recommended for people who screen their phone calls because they know drama is calling.

…but I only feel like writing.  I know, the blog-o-sphere and reader(s) are getting tired of me writing about random stuff so often.  It’s late, night is when I do my best thinking and my best studying.  I have a presentation due tomorrow and a math quiz which I haven’t prepared for.  I’m pretty content with my practice sessions with my presentation.  I was able to cut my time down to around 7 minutes.  Though, when I actually get in front of the class it’ll be a whole nother story (update below).  Oh, and today I had a Spanish exam.  Me and my partner both missed class on Monday and we came in this Tuesday thinking it was just a quiz we had due.  Then she starts handing out the paper that’s 4 pages and my partner looks at me with an oh shit look and whispers, “that’s an exam”.  Then I smile and say, “yeah, I’m going to fail”….as if I was happy.  Though I do think at a certain point during college, start to not care you just try and as they say, it is what it is.

Can’t wait til next week, cause it’ll be Thanksgiving…which means no school for at least two days.  Then it’ll be Christmas next…where I’ll have no one to give me gifts, by no one I mean a boyfriend.  But, my mom said she already got my gift…kind of early.  I’m sure my dad will say the car and paying my speeding ticket was my Christmas gift.  I hate shopping so this year I’m just going to head over to ThinkGeek.com and get their gifts.  My parents are gadget(y) people but not geeks.  Umm…I have a wishlist at ThinkGeek just in case anyone would consider buying the kindest girl ever a gift I want this mainly, Space Age Ant Habitat

I know you’re saying, why out of all the things would she want an ant farm? Well, ever since I was a little girl I always wanted an ant farm.  No one would buy one for me and it’s one of the voids that haven’t been filled yet.

One of the things I forgot to mention is how I hate to google myself.  My online name, “Sensico” brings up 37,300 links.  A little less then that main because there are other sensicos online.  Also, I can never have the domain name sensico.com cause it’s already taken I mainly hate googling myself cause it brings up irrelevant links.  There’s stuff from places I don’t even visit and my online enemies.  There’s stuff from BC, I’m not even on there anymore and none of the links are relevant to where I’m at now.  What about MyBlogLog….I don’t even remember what that site looks like.  As a political blogger there’s links to blogs posting rebuttals to my blog posts…who want’s to read their crap?? Also, the image search brings up funny pictures but also pictures of me and my stuff, and also gives free advertisement to other people’s crap pictures………..no offense, HA!  I wish Google could be more “nice” to me.

Um, that’s about it.  Wish me luck on my presentation (all of which was done of GoogleDocs), hope that I don’t faint.  I’m running low on money so don’t be surprised if you read an “I’m so hungry but must pay bills instead” post lol.  Oh and I’m working on that “I’m Sorry” post….takes a long time for me to half-ass apologize, but I feel I must do it for my own amusement and humanities sake.  Oh, meanwhile, while typing the last sentence I came up with an idea to write a post about things I don’t like guys to say.  Like the words, “duh” and “shucks” and “lover” and “tweedle” and…well that was about it so guess I don’t need to write a post then huh?

Update: So yeah, I felt nervous talking but apparently people said I did really good….but we’ll see.  They said I looked confident and not nervous.  I thought I was soon to faint and I was scared to pick up the pointer at one time cause I thought I’d drop it from shaking too much…and apparently the teacher loves her pointer so I didn’t want to do that!  Glad it’s over, now I can preoccupy myself with more unimportant things.

The chaotic evolution of colony size in ants. (Tree re-analyzed from Brady et al 2006, colony data taken from Hoelldobler & Wilson 1990 and other sources)

This tree depicts how colony size evolves in ants.  The purple/blue colors represent small colonies with only a few to a few dozen ants, while the yellows and oranges represent species with enormous colonies of tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals.  What’s exciting about this rainbow-colored figure?

If you were expecting ant evolution to be an inexorable march towards larger and more complex societies, this tree should come as a surprise.  Ant colony size is all over the place.  Not only is there no general trend towards larger colonies, some lineages seem to be shrinking down from more populous ancestors.

Colony size evolution is not the subject of this post, though.  I’m going to whinge instead about how frustrating I found the process of making this figure. 

You see, there are ants we know a fair bit about.  We know what they eat, how many queens they have, and how large their colonies are.

Then there are the species that the NSF-funded “Assembling the Ant Tree of Life” (AToL) group sampled for the ant phylogeny.  Those two sets of taxa do not show much overlap.  And this lack of overlap means that using the AToL trees as a platform for revealing patterns in ant evolution will be a slower and more complicated slog than it ought to be.

I made the above tree by taking the AToL molecular data set from Brady et al (2006) and re-inferring it in MrBayes using only those species for which I could find reliable colony size data.  Most of the colony data come from table 3-2 in Hoelldobler & Wilson (1990), but I also drew from the literature.  Of the 162 AToL taxa, I arrived at only 30 with available colony size information. Even so, I still fudged on a couple of species by swapping data in from congeners.

Why did AToL choose the species they did?  Well, most of the AToL PIs are taxonomists. From a taxonomic perspective, Lasius californicus is locally available and works just fine as a representative for the genus.

But for downstream users of the phylogeny, for the folks who wish to use the tree to study how social behavior evolves in ants, the AToL design is odd indeed.  The most researched ant species tend to be either trampy or european, but AToL largely sampled ants from California and Madagascar.  The result is a tree connecting a bunch of species we don’t know much about.

For a taste of the AToL taxon sampling, consider the following.  The most studied Lasius is the common european garden ant L. niger (Google Scholar hits: 3,370); AToL sampled Lasius californicus (G.S. hits: 6).  The most studied Formica species are F. rufa (G.S. hits: 3,280) and F. polyctena (G.S. hits: 1,830);  AToL sampled F. moki (G.S. hits: 39).  The most studied Eciton army ant is E. burchellii (G.S. hits: 830); AToL sampled E. vagans (G.S. hits: 51).  Of the ten most studied ants only one, Linepithema humile, is included in AToL.

Absent field studies to fill in data for the AToL species, we have two ways to wed our knowledge of ant biology to the mismatched phylogeny.  First, interested researchers could drop the money to sequence relevant loci from taxa of interest and re-analyze the AToL data to produce a new, more comprehensive tree.  This option is the more correct one, but it will also be expensive.  (Do any of my independently wealthy readers wish to fund the AToL Patch Project? It’d be the best $100,000 you ever spent.)

Alternatively, and more cheaply, researchers could use the AToL tips as proxies for well-studied taxa.  For example, we could assume that the position and branch lengths for Solenopsis xyloni are reasonable phylogenetic surrogates for Solenopsis invicta and plug in the biological data for the better known species.  An easier option, but one that rests on a shakier set of assumptions.

As way of disclaimer, I don’t mean this post as an affront to AToL researchers.  After all, they are among my absolute favorite people.  And, they’ve done a simply fantastic job covering the global diversity of ants from a systematic perspective.   It’s just that, well, they could have anticipated what the larger ant community might wish to use their trees for.  We’re on the cusp of some powerful analyses on how and why ants evolved, and the lack of phylogenetic coverage of well-studied ants is a frustrating speed bump.

Floating Fire Ant Colony

I saw a video posted on Youtube showing how fire ants form a giant floating colony with there own bodies.  I think this adaptation is a great example of how eusocial insects work together for the greater good of the colony.

Here is the YouTube Clip from the BBC

Pic:  http://bugguide.net/

crazy raspberry ants attack honey bee

Crazy raspberry ants are an invasive species first found in Houston, TX seven years ago by Tom Raspberry.  They have recently spread all the way to Mississippi and Louisiana this year.  The tiny ants themselves are relatively harmless to humans since they lack venom. They also seem to be doing a good job in controlling fire ants that do poses a venomous sting.   Despite being beneficial in the sense that crazy raspberry ants control fire ants, they can become a major nuisance pest and have been known to short circuit electrical equipment.  Even worse, crazy raspberry ants will attack honey bee hives.   One beekeeper south of Houston has lost around 100 hives each year from crazy raspberry ants since they showed up in his area.  The loss of honey bees posses a great threat to many crops that rely on honey bee pollination in Texas.  Pollination fees may skyrocket if a large amount of beekeepers start having issues with crazy raspberry ants.  Research on controlling these ants has lacked funding from the USDA since the ant is currently not considered a pest species.  Because of the threat crazy raspberry ants pose to pollinate crops, this status may change in the near future.

Sources:

http://www.kxan.com/dpp/news/strange/strange_ap_Raspberry_crazy_ants_becoming_problem

http://www.pctonline.com/rasberryant_SHSU.aspx

Picture:

http://crazyrasberryants.blogspot.com/

from an interview with Survivor contestant Kelly Sharbaugh:

When your name showed up, you looked flabbergasted, shocked, dumbfounded.
All of the above. I had no idea that Russell had the idol. When [host Jeff Probst] said my name, I was like. “What just happened? What did I do?” I was so emotional because I was so unprepared. I didn’t even wear my favorite boots to tribal because the thought that I could go never crossed my mind.

Did you ever get them back?
No, fire ants nested in them so I left them in Samoa and after the tsunami I’m pretty sure they got washed away.

Good for Kelly, I say, for helping stop the spread of pest ants.  When contestants are voted off the island, how many do you suppose check their luggage for invasive species?

By Alex Levinton January 18, 2008 cracked.com             read the story here:

I didn’t write this article but I wish I did. Interesting and a lot of facts (he does cuss a little) but he has pictures and a few videos.

There are about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 insects on earth at any given moment. Seriously, that’s a real number. For every one of us, there are 1.5 billion bugs.

But some of them are so horrifying, just one is too many. Here are five you want to avoid at all costs.

Sericomyrmex ants in a laboratory fungus garden

The textbook version of the leafcutter ant and its fungus is a simple story: attine ants cultivate an edible fungus in their nests.  They are obligate farmers, eating only the fungus, and the fungus is a specialized cultivar found only in ant nests.

It’s a nice tale, but as researchers probe deeper they continually uncover just how complex the ant-fungus interaction is.  For example, about a decade ago Cameron Currie discovered that ants employ bacterial antibiotics to keep the garden clean of diseases.  Microbes, too, are integral to the system.

In this week’s Science, a team led by Adrián Pinto-Thomás reveals another player in the partnership: bacteria in the genus Klebsiella. These organisms capture nitrogen from the atmosphere and make it available to the fungus and the ants.  They aren’t just bit actors, either.  The bacteria may provide the primary fertilizer for the gardens.  Here’s the abstract:

Bacteria-mediated acquisition of atmospheric N₂ serves as a critical source of nitrogen in terrestrial ecosystems. Here we reveal that symbiotic nitrogen fixation facilitates the cultivation of specialized fungal crops by leaf-cutter ants. By using acetylene reduction and stable isotope experiments, we demonstrated that N₂ fixation occurred in the fungus gardens of eight leaf-cutter ant species and, further, that this fixed nitrogen was incorporated into ant biomass. Symbiotic N₂-fixing bacteria were consistently isolated from the fungus gardens of 80 leaf-cutter ant colonies collected in Argentina, Costa Rica, and Panama. The discovery of N₂ fixation within the leaf-cutter ant–microbe symbiosis reveals a previously unrecognized nitrogen source in neotropical ecosystems.

At this point I’d not be surprised if further research reveals ants to have a stash of John Deere tractors and little radios for tuning in to the morning report on mushroom futures.

source: Pinto-Tomás, Adrián A. et al. Symbiotic nitrogen fixation in the fungus gardens of leaf-cutter ants. Science 326, 1120-1123.
Doi: 10.1126/science.1173036

Additional coverage at Not Exactly Rocket Science and Science News.