
Sunday, November 08, 2009
Use of panoramic skyline for navigation: Melophorus bagoti

Thursday, April 16, 2009
Asexuality in ants

Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Cane toads: ants to the rescue

Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Updates: Cataulacus

Monday, August 11, 2008
When & Where do ants do it
In some ant species males are known to aggregate and wait to attract females, while in others females stay put at a particular place & attract males. However, there is surprisingly little known about where and when ants prefer to mate and hence this recent article is a welcome addition. In this article Noordijk & others set up window traps in 3 locations: open field, forest edge and in the forest to capture flying ants. They set up pitfall traps to identify the ants that occupy these 3 regions. They studied six ant species Lasius umbratus, Lasius niger, Myrmica rubra, Myrmcia ruginodis, Stenamma debile and Temnothorax nylanderi. By regularly checking the window traps from April to December, they were able to identify specific duration of nuptial flights for each ant species.

The really interesting bit is that though nesting habitats of Temnothorax nylanderi, Myrmica rubra & Myrmcia ruginodis were located in forests, maximum alates were captured in the forest edges. Though nesting locations of Lasius niger was in the open field, alates were captured not only in the the open field, but also along forest edges & in the forest. The pitfall traps failed to capture Stenamma debile and Lasius umbratus, but alates of these two species were captured in the window traps. And guess where the maximum alates were found – forest edges! The authors suggest that preference of forests edges might have something do with specific micro-climate the ants require. But they think it could be more to do with the edges acting as a conspicuous landmark which ants use to find mates. For now, I am leaning towards the second possibility.
Read this article here:
Noordijk et al. How ants find each other; temporal and spatial patterns in nuptial flights. Insect Soc. DOI 10.1007/s00040-008-1002-9
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Temporal niches & sympatric ants


Monday, April 21, 2008
Updates


Monday, April 14, 2008
Argentine ant or not?
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Shooting in the dark
Here is a ant called Rhytidoponera which I found while I was at Nadgee nature reserve, a few kilometers south of Eden on the east coast of Australia. I found a nest of these ants so close to where my tent was pitched that I could watch them by actually lying down on the sleeping mat with half of me jutting outside the tent! One of those days, by late in the evening, after finishing off some experiments with solitary wasps, I set up the sleeping mat, flicked on the torch and lay there watching these fellows go about their work. They became active just before sunset and continued activity all through the night, till sunrise. They regularly returned to the nest with dead insects. I tried taking some pictures but with light levels being very low, it was proving to be a challenge. The twin lite flash I use comes with a lamp but the light was just too bright and almost always scared the ants away. So after having taken pictures for a couple of hours with no luck, I gave up and decided that just watching them may be a better option. Soon I realised that I could predict where an ant returning to its nest would be say after 5 secs. I decided to see if this would allow me to take some pictures which meant clicking in completing darkness. It turned out that in a matter of 30 mins I actually had a few nice pictures [see one below]. A gentle drizzle in the night led to a rain drop on the ant also being captured.
More and some new images of Rhytidoponera here.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Restructuring & some additions

With help from Dinesh Rao, a new spider gallery is up and running with live feed. The tricky ones have been Salticidae and Lycoidae members and we are in the middle of tackling these. Will post here of any additions, but thats unlikely to happpen till the end of the next week: juggling with some lecturing, running experiments and moving houses!Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Back from Alice
Been absconding for almost a month now! The most significant bit during this period was a visit to Alice to watch Melophorus bagoti. Here we began an ambitious project of trying to determine what is that the ants see while returning to the nest. While watching Melophorus, by sheer luck I ended up finding the Muscle-man ants Podomyrma species (pictured) in this site, a species which I hadn't seen here since 2003! So, yes in short that was really exciting!Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Updates: Pheidole
A genus that is hard not to get excited about, a genus in which most species exhibit distinct dimorphism in the worker caste, a genus renowned for having several specialist seed harvesters, a genus present in both the New and Old World and often not merely present but ecologically dominant - the ant genus Pheidole. I have just added some images of Pheidole in a valient attempt towards clearing up space on the hard drive.Thursday, January 10, 2008
Asian Myrmecology
Just heard from the Editors of the Journal, that all articles in the first issue of Asian Myrmecology are available for free download. Kudos to them!Tuesday, January 08, 2008
More updates
Genus pages of Tetraponera and Pachycondyla are up and running! I also added images of a male ant, Myrmecia croslandi, that has a chromosome number of 2n=2. All at the Ant GallerySunday, December 30, 2007
Updates, updates and updates
More in 2008!

