- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The event, free and open to the public, takes place from noon to 1:30 p.m. in the half-acre bee garden, located on Bee Biology Road, next to the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, west of the central campus.
Among the native ants at the haven are
- Dorymyrmex insanus (workers small, ~3 mm long, black; conspicuous crater-shaped nests in bare soil)
- Dorymyrmex bicolor (workers small, ~3 mm long, bicolored, dull orange and black; conspicuous crater-shaped nests in bare soil)
- Prenolepis imparis (also known as the “winter ant” or “winter honey ant”; workers small (3-4 mm long), brown, with shiny gaster; inconspicuous nests in soil)
- Formica moki (sometimes called “field ants”; workers medium-sized (6 mm long), with a dark head, orange-brown mesosoma (thorax) and silvery-gray gaster; nest in soil)
Images of these species can be found on the AntWeb (www.antweb.org).
The haven is home to many insects other than bees, noted Christine Casey, director of the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven, which is owned and operated by the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. It was planted in the fall of 2009.
Approximately six other species of native ants reside in the vicinity of the garden, including Formica aerata, Pogonomyrmex subdentatus, and Solenopsis xyloni. The introduced Argentine ant (Linepithema humile) occurs around the Bee Biology building, but it appears not to have colonized the bee garden.
Attendees will learn how to observe and identify California native ants, and learn about the differences between bees and ants.
The program is part of a brown bag lunch series. For more information see the flier and access the haven web site.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
John "Jack" Longino, professor and associate chair of biology at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and the adjunct curator of entomology, Utah Museum of Natural History, University of Utah, will speak on "Project ADMAC or Ant Diversity of the Mesoamerican Corridor" from 12:10 to 1 p.m. in 122 Briggs Hall.
Ant specialist Phil Ward, professor of entomology, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, will introduce and host him.
"The MesoAmerican corridor is a zone of complex tectonic history, episodic biotic interchange between large continents, and frequent mountain-building," Longino said. "Ants blanket this landscape, forming a tapestry of fine-scale habitat specialization and geographic replacement. Many taxonomists have contributed to the description of species in the region and this fundamental 'biodiversity mapping' continues apace. Project ADMAC (Ant Diversity of the MesoAmerican Corridor) combines morphological analysis with large-scale DNA sequencing (targeted enrichment of Ultra-Conserved Elements) to reveal the evolutionary history and geographic structure of ant species in MesoAmerica.
"Ants show very strong patterns of elevational specialization and geographic turnover, and Project ADMAC will address questions of (1) how and when montane species evolve, (2) the effects of differing mountain ages on communities, (3) the impact of lowland barriers on montane ant dispersal, and (4) whether ants experienced a major biotic interchange on the closure of the Panamanian isthmus."
Longino addressed the Entomological Society of America meeting last November on the topic. He told of plans
1. to build a detailed biodiversity map for an ecologically dominant group of insects (ants) in a biogeographically important region of the world (the MesoAmerican corridor);
Longino's fascination with insects began in his childhood. His research statement:
"We share the planet with millions of species, and many of them are insects. A childhood fascination with insects led me to an interest in ecology and the desire to explain patterns of diversity, and I settled on ants as an ecologically dominant group of insects worthy of study. As it became clear that I was living during a time of enormous biotic change caused by human activities, I developed a strong conviction that it was important not only to understand patterns of diversity but to document it in detail for this time in history. I divide my time between two research fields: taxonomy and ecology. On the taxonomy side, I have coordinated large-scale inventories of Neotropical insect biodiversity, I discover and describe new species of ants, and I further refine our understanding of species ranges and morphological variability. I make use of advanced imaging technology, specimen-level databases, and Web-dissemination to make biodiversity data available to the widest audiences. On the ecology side, I use quantitative inventory techniques that allow analysis of diversity patterns. I am interested in how species are distributed on tropical mountainsides, what ecological factors explain the elevational range limits of species, and how species might respond to climate change."
Longino was interviewed in August of 2013 by NPR on his research. He told NPR he started out collecting stamps in his childhood, but that bored him. He decided to "get small."
"If you're shopping for a home entertainment system," he says, "you can't do better than a good dissecting microscope," he said. At the time of the NPR interview, Longino had just published two papers describing 33 new species of ants, bringing his personal "new species" total to 131, NPR reported. In the article, Longino described himself as "average" among entomologists, pointing out that some entomologists have described thousands of new species.
Longino received his bachelor's degree in zoology, with distinction, in 1978 from Duke University, and his doctorate in zoology in 1984 from the University of Texas, Austin. He then served as an assistant research biologist at UC Santa Barbara; academic director of the Monteverde Tropical Biology Quarter, UC Education Abroad Program; adjunct assistant curator of the Florida State Museum of Natural History (Allyn Museum of Entomology), and scientific director of Project ALAS. He joined the Evergreen State College, Washington, serving from 1991 to 2011 before becoming a professor in the Department of Biology, University of Utah.
His recent publications include:
Longino, J. T., M. G. Branstetter, and R. K. Colwell. 2014. How ants drop out: ant abundance on tropical mountains. PLoS ONE 9:e104030.
Longino, J. T. 2013. A revision of the ant genus Octostruma Forel 1912 (Hymenoptera, Formicidae). Zootaxa 3699:1-61.
Longino, J. T. 2013. A review of the Central American and Caribbean species of the ant genus Eurhopalothrix Brown and Kempf, 1961 (Hymenoptera, Formicidae), with a key to New World species. Zootaxa 3693:101-151.
Longino, J. T. 2012. A review of the ant genus Adelomyrmex Emery 1897 (Hymenoptera, Formicidae) in Central America. Zootaxa 3456:1-35.
Longino, J. T., R. K. Colwell. 2011. Density compensation, species composition, and richness of ants on a Neotropical elevation gradient. Ecosphere 2:art29.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Unfortunately, those ant encounters neither cement good relationships with the family of ants, Formicidae, nor the world's family of ant researchers, known as myrmecologists.
“All myrmecologists are united by stories of meeting people and having them ask what they should do to get rid of the ants,” says ant specialist Brendon Boudinot, a doctoral student in Phil Ward's Department of Entomology and Nematology lab, University of California, Davis.
Boudinot, who recently won a first-place President's Award for his presentation on “Revising Our Vision of Ant Biodiversity: Male Ants of the New World” at the 2014 Entomological Society of America meeting in Portland, Ore., is passionate about ants, particularly male ants.
Like the late Rodney Dangerfield who proclaimed “I don't get no respect,” male ants get little respect or attention, said Boudinot, who aims to raise public awareness of their importance and demystify them through his scientific research.
“There are about 12,800 living species of ants described to date,” explained Boudinot, who enrolled in the UC Davis doctoral program after receiving his bachelor's degree at Evergreen State College, Olympia, Wash., in 2012. “Males are known for only 27 percent of these species, and no identification resource exists for identifying male ants for most bioregions.”
Addressing this concern, he provided the first male-based identification keys to subfamily and genus level for the New World. The keys cover 13 of the 16 subfamilies and 151 of the 324 genera. This, coupled with a global male-based key to all 16 ant subfamilies he submitted in November, will enable male ants to be identified by genus in the New World---encompassing North, Central, and South America---for the first time.
Boudinot's first research publication, “The Male Genitalia of Ants: Musculature, Homology, and Functional Morphology (Hymenoptera: Aculeata: Formicidae),” conducted as an undergraduate, appeared in the January 2013 volume of The Journal of Hymenoptera Research). Subsequently, he guest-blogged about the research for Alex Wild's Myrmecos column. Wild, now with the University of Texas, holds a doctorate in entomology from UC Davis and is an alumnus of the Phil Ward lab.
As for telling the difference between a male and a female ant, that's not easy, even for many ant researchers, Boudinot acknowledged. “Males and reproductive females, queens, usually have wings and look different from workers. Males are usually differentiated from females by having slightly different morphology. Besides having complex and strange genitalia, male ants also tend to have one more antennal segment, larger eyes, and in general look more ‘waspy.' "
The genitalia of male ants are fascinating, he said. “Think of a Leatherman or Swiss Army knife which has paired muscular claspers, graspers, and sawblades. Male ants have evolved winglessness and worker-like morphology at least five times in the ants, which has historically led to the accidental description of these wingless males as new species. This is a weird phenomenon which I will be focusing on for a chapter of my dissertation. Why have they evolved winglessness? What are the evolutionary patterns of skeletomuscular reduction? Are there trade-offs for a colony when they lose the ability to produce dispersing males? Anyway, this should be fun.”
In addition to the United States, Boudinot has studied ants in four Latin American countries: Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama, and Brazil. “Ant-wise, my colleagues and I have collected numerous new species,” he said. A surprising example is a new species of Aphaenogaster he collected in 2010 in the foothills of Mt. Diablo, outside of Danville. He discovered it in a cow pasture less than 100 feet from suburban sprawl in a densely populated part of the state. On a recent trip to Brazil, he discovered the male of the martian ant (Martialis heureka) which is remarkable, as the martian ant is arguably the earliest branching lineage of living ants and yields important implications about the evolution of ants.
Boudinot looks forward to more ant collecting trips, especially to Brazil. “I really liked visiting Brazil because I had to teach myself Portuguese, had a tiny budget, was traveling alone, met awesome people, and visited some great places,” he recalled. “I worked in museums in São Paulo, Curitiba (in the South East), and Manaus in the Amazon basin. I got to see the Amazon river and rainforest (and ants), discovered some important things for my dissertation, and spent time with amazing people!”
Boudinot became enthralled with ants while volunteering as an undergraduate for a major research project, Leaf Litter Arthropods of Mesoamerica (LLAMA). “Initially I was saddled with the job of sorting and curating hundreds of samples which contained thousands and thousands of ants, but later I became involved in the field expedition to Honduras and independent research,” he said. “In one day I ended up individually counting over 8,000 specimens; at this point I forgot why my mentor made me count them. I was drawn to ants by their spectacular form and variation; every third genus of ants has some bizarre modification of the mandibles, or some weird structure on their body which is mysterious and in many cases simply unexplained. It took me a long time to become familiar with ants, but eventually I developed expertise in male ants, which very few people study.”
Why should people get interested in ants? “Ants are incredibly diverse social animals, with over 12,800 species and many more to be described,” the UC Davis myrmecologist said. “Their biology is spectacular; for example, their diet ranges from granivory and predation to agriculture. Ants invented agriculture about 55 million years before humans evolved, refining their agricultural practices to a remarkable degree at least 20 million years ago. (These are the famous leaf cutter ants and their relatives, see Wikipedia for some more information about them.) Ants are known to be agriculturally important in various parts of the world, are used in food dishes in Latin America and Southeast Asia, and are a critical system for studying sociality and numerous evolutionary and ecological questions.”
Boudinot noted that the inaccurate portrayals of ants in Hollywood movies lead to lifelong misinterpretations. “There is a perception that there are two kinds of ants: red ants and black ants--and sometimes yellow ants--and that the workers of ants include both sexes, as in the Disney movies A Bug's Life and Antz,” Boudinot said. “Really, ants are incredibly diverse---which is why I am fascinated with them in part.”
Reproductory misinformation abounds in “A Bug's Life,” the 1998 American computer-animated comedy adventure film, Boudinot said. All worker ants are female and sterile, but Princess Atta marries a male, Flik. “Flik and Princess Atta wouldn't have married, and if they did, Flik wouldn't be the dad as chances are she, as a worker, would be able to lay only unfertilized eggs which would become clonal males.”
If there's one thing that Boudinot wants youngsters of today to know about ants, it's this: “There are remarkable things to discover everywhere, and unanswered questions abound. Discovery is borne out of observation, and there is so much to observe in any single square meter of Earth's surface. I like ants in this respect because they are everywhere! In tropical rainforests ants and termites (another group of social insects) may make up to one-third of the total animal biomass, dwarfing that of vertebrates such as panthers, birds, and amphibians. There are about 90 species of ants in Sonoma, Napa, Yolo, and Sacramento counties alone, including fungus-cultivating ants!”
Boudinot encourages people to check out AntWeb.org. “This website is a digital database of thousands and thousands of species of ants, many of which look like they are extraterrestrials or are strange beasts out of nightmares,” he said, adding “Okay, and some of which are just fluffy and adorable.”
Ants and honey bees, which belong to the same order, Hymenoptera, are more similar than once believed. “In 2013 scientists discovered that ants are more closely related to bees and bee-like wasps than to yellowjackets and other wasps,” Boudinot said. “Our knowledge of this relationship is so new that we haven't even had time to reevaluate their physical similarity.”
“Ants are terrestrial, with a suite of adaptations for walking, while bees are highly efficient flyers. Bees are much more diverse than most people believe. In addition to the honey bee, there are about 20,000 described species of bees, not all of which are highly social like the honey bee! Unlike bees, there are no known non-social species of ants.”
“Bees are critical pollinators; ants are really poor pollinators. Ants are really good at protecting plants, though. Tight ant-plant mutualism has evolved several times, with the plants providing homes and food for ants while the ants provide protection for the plants from insect and vertebrate herbivores as well as competitor plants.”
After receiving his doctorate in entomology, Boudinot aspires “to be a professor so that I may continue to do research and to fulfill my love of teaching and mentoring.”
In the meantime, “I am just trying to learn as many valuable skills as I can while feeding my burning fascination with ants and insects in general. I have gained so much in terms of learning how to see and think about the natural world. Above all, I want to communicate this knowledge to people in whatever manner I can.”
“There is a logic to the biological universe,” Boudinot said, “and once you start to pick up this logic, interpreting the complex tapestry of life becomes a routine and deeply enjoyable task.”
(Editor's Note: More information on the ant images above: These are all males of the subfamily Leptanillinaea. This plate appears in Brendon Boudinot's manuscript, "Contributions to the Knowledge of Formicidae (Hymenoptera, Aculeata, Formicidae): A New Diagnosis of the Family, the First Global Male-Based Key to Subfamilies, and a Treatment of Early Branching Lineages" which he submitted to the European Journal of Taxonomy in November. "They have highly variably and spectacular morphology, and are extremely poorly known," he said. "Some of these males are so highly modified that they violate the diagnosis of the Formicidae." The genera: A, B, and D are Protanilla; C is a Leptanilla; E is Scyphodon; and F is Noonilla.)
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Host is graduate student Katharina Ullmann of the Neal Williams lab. Plans are to video-record the seminar for later posting on UCTV.
"Citizen Science is a powerful tool that scientists can use to harness the power of the public," Lucky says. "Public participation in science offers both scientific and educational benefits, including the possibility of massive and openly accessible data. This approach holds the promise of a new way of doing science and a new way of learning science, but also poses challenges of organization, quality control and funding. Two projects, the School of Ants and Backyard Bark Beetles, were developed to address the main concerns with Citizen Science projects, and demonstrate how modern public participation in science can be an effective tool for teaching science and investigating topics including, but not limited to biodiversity, invasive species, population genetics, and systematics."
Lucky describes herself as "an insect systematist and science communicator with a particular interest in ants and citizen science."
Lucky, a graduate of Brown University, Providence, R.I., with a bachelor's degree in biology, with honors, received her doctorate in entomology from UC Davis in 2010, working with major professor/ant specialist Phil Ward.
She joined the University of Florida in 2012 after serving as a postdoctoral researcher and director of the School of Ants citizen science project from 2010 to 2012 in the Department of Biology, North Carolina State University (NCSU). In 2009-10, she worked with Conservation International, Rapid Assessment Program, conducting ant biodiversity surveys in Papua, New Guinea: field collections, specimen sorting, curation and analysis.
Lucky was an invited speaker at the 2012 International Congress of Entomology, Daegu, South Korea, Aug 2012. She has also presented her work at the Entomological Society of America (ESA), and Pacific Branch of ESA and has taught numerous classes, seminars and workshops. At UC Davis, she designed a course on “Insects and the Media,” which she taught in the spring of 2006 and the fall of 2008.
Among her honors and awards:
- Global Change Award, NCSU Global Change Forum/NC Museum of Natural Sciences, 2011
- Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award, UC Davis, 2009
- Center for Population Biology Research Awards, UC Davis, 2007, 2009
- Australian Biological Resource Study Grant, with principal investigator P.S. Ward, UC Davis, 2007-2008
- Australian Biological Resource Study Grant, with principal investigator P.S. Ward, UC Davis, 2007-2008
- Jastro-Shields Research Award, UC Davis, 2006, 2007, 2008
- Center for BioSystematics Research Grant, UC Davis, 2005
- UC Davis Dept. of Entomology Fellowships, Vansell 2005, MacBeth 2005
- Fulbright Fellow, Quito, Ecuador, 2000-2002
- William Gaston Premium Scholarship in biology, Brown University, Providence, RI, 2000
Lucky is a member of the Entomological Society of America, Society for Systematic Biology, Society for Conservation Biology, American Association of University Women, Association of Women in Science, and American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Her latest peer-reviewed publications include:
Hulcr, J., Latimer, A.J., Rountree, N.R., Fierer, N., Lucky, A., Lowman, M.D., Henley, J.B. and Dunn, R.R. (Submitted to PLoS One). It's a Jungle in There: Bacteria in Belly Buttons are Highly Diverse, but Predictable.
Guenard, B. and A. Lucky (2011). Shuffling leaf litter samples produces more accurate and precise snapshots of terrestrial arthropod community composition. Environmental Entomology 40: 1523-1529.
Lucky, A. (2011).Molecular phylogeny and biogeography of the spider ants, genus Leptomyrmex Mayr (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 59: 281-292.
Lucky, A., E.M. Sarnat and L.E. Alonso (2011). Survey of the ants of the Muller Range of Papua New Guinea. RAP Bulletin of Biological Assessment 60: 45-53.
Lucky, A., K. Sagata and E.M. Sarnat (2011). Survey of the ants of the Nakanai Mountains of East New Britain, Papua New Guinea. RAP Bulletin of Biological Assessment 60: 158-157.
Lucky, A. and P.S. Ward (2010). Taxonomic revision of the ant genus Leptomyrmex Mayr. Zootaxa 2688:1-67.
Lucky, A. and E.M. Sarnat. (2010). Biogeography and diversification of the Pacific ant genus Lordomyrma Emery. Journal of Biogeography 37: 624-634.
Lucky, A. 2009.Urb-ants (Book review of Urban Ants of North America And Europe by Klotz et al., 2008). Systematic Entomology 34: 406-407.
Lucky, A. and E.M. Sarnat. 2007.New species of Lordomyrma (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) from Southeast Asia and Fiji. Zootaxa1681: 37–46 (2008).
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Snelling, 74, an internationally known entomologist who primarily studied ants, wasps and bees and worked in collections at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County for more than three decades, left behind an unfinished manuscript when he died April 21, 2008 while on an ant expedition in Kenya.
His work included 10 new species of Temnothorax ants, mostly from California but also from Nevada and Baja, California.
Today it is seeing the light of day, thanks to two ant specialists at the University of California, Davis: Marek Borowiec and Matthew Prebus of the UC Department of Entomology and Nematology. They recently published the work, with Snelling listed as a co-author, in ZooKeys and linked each described specimen to the AntWeb database.
Snelling's son, Gordon, gave the draft to Borowiec and Prebus to complete and publish. Both are doctoral candidates in the Phil Ward lab.
The 10 new species of a Temnothorax ants doubles the number of species of this genus in California.
The era of electronic publishing in taxonomy has greatly facilitated the accessibility of specimen data, the entomologists said. ZooKeys has been long spearheaded the wide and rapid dissemination of taxonomic information.
"We include 20 species known from California in our study but at present, there are about 60 species, including those described, of Temnothorax known from North America and more than 350 species worldwide so our study is of somewhat limited scope,” the authors said in a news release. "Nevertheless, we believe that by officially describing these forms and giving a new illustrated key, we are providing a useful resource for myrmecologists working in western North America."
AntWeb is an online ant database that focuses on specimen level data and images linked to specimens. In addition, contributors can submit natural history information and field images that are linked directly to taxonomic names. Distribution maps and field guides are generated automatically. All data in AntWeb are downloadable by users.
The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM) where Snelling worked, houses more than 35 million specimens, some dating back 4.5 billion years. Snelling built up the ant collection there.
Roy Snelling "is one of the most significant figures in modern myrmecology," wrote ant specialist/insect photographer Alex Wild in his Myrmecos blog. Wild holds a doctorate in entomology from UC Davis, where he studied with major professor Phil Ward.
Snelling, born of Cherokee Indian heritage in 1934 in Turlock, was basically a self-taught entomologist. He studied at a junior college in Modesto and later in life, did graduate-level studies at the University of Kansas. Snelling served in the U.S. Army and was an inspector with the California Department of Food and Agriculture before joining NHM.
Wrote Wild: "Roy's prolific career as a curator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County produced dozens of studies on the taxonomy of bees, wasps, and especially ants. Among other accomplishments, his works are the primary reference for the honeypot ants of North America, numerous groups of carpenter ants, and the entire Chilean myrmecofauna. Roy was a devoted desert rat, an aficionado of fine Mexican food, and- and I mean this in the very best way- a curmudgeon's curmudgeon."
Borowiec, a fourth-year doctoral student, joined the UC Davis entomology graduate program in 2010. He received his master's degree, with honors, in zoology in 2009 from the University of Wroclaw, Poland. His thesis focused on the taxonomy of Cerapachys sexspinus group.
Prebus, a third-year Ph.D student, received his bachelor of science degree in biology from Evergreen State College, Olympia, Wash., in 2010 and then joined the Phil Ward lab. His research goals are to investigate when--and where--the hyperdiverse ant genus Temnothorax arose, and how it diversified on a global scale. Additionally, he willl revise the members of the genus from the Neotropical biogeographical region and investigate the relationship among members of the genus on the mainland and the Greater Antilles.
Links to their work:
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