The Daily Ant
Myrmecology Dies in Darkness
Category: Reports
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Dedicated readers of our myrmeco-media outlet will remember our first editorial (that went mildly viral) on efforts by the vertebrate media to bury the lede (ants) with a dinosaur tail. We’re happy to report, via Fossil Correspondant Dr. Regan Dunn, that ants are actively asserting their dominance over the paleo realm.
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Dedicated readers of The Daily Ant may remember that earlier this year, we featured myrmecologist Dr. Adrian Smith and his work on ant babies. Such readers may also remember our coverage of the Field Museum AntLab’s Dr. Shauna Price in a Theatre Thursdays installment. Well, recently, the same Dr. Price shared with us a marvelous BBC feature on ant…
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It’s hard to believe it, but it’s true. What started out one year ago from yesterday as a podunk formicid-friendly online media project with an inaugural post on loving your house ants has grown into a podunk formicid-friendly online media project with 196 published articles. Whether you’re joining us now for the first time, or have…
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In a recent episode of the (wonderfully named) Science for the People podcast, University of Illinois – Chicago PhD student Anika Hazra interviewed myrmecologists Stephen Pratt and Simon Garnier. You may remember Hazra, also a myrmecologist, from her great antforgraphic on ant colony optimization! Now check out her engaging and informative interview of Pratt and Garnier, on…
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The Daily Ant is thrilled to report that we have launched a historic GoFundMe campaign: “AntSongs: A Daily Ant Experience“. Bring such remarkable tunes as Tom Waits’ “Army Ants”, Frank Sinatra’s “High Hopes”, and Calle 13’s “El Hormiguero” to life! The Daily Ant will partner with Jordan Blanchard, a singer-songwriter from Michigan, to produce interpretive covers of these…
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Freelance CG artist Eric Keller reached out to The Daily Ant, and brought to our attention an absolutely fantastic animated video he created two years ago. Do check this 8.5-minute animation out – it’s truly worth every second!
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We start this post with an unusual sentence: A recent headline in New York Daily News caught our attention. What was the headline? “Fire ants could be used to help Kim Kardashian” It turns out that a component of the chemicals released in a fire ant sting also may alleviate some symptoms of an auto-immune disease…
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Here at The Daily Ant, we know that so much of the mainstream media enjoys focusing on (allegedly) negative ant characteristics. Our online newspaper actively works to counteract this insidious bias. However, there are a few truly bad actors within the formicid family that deserve genuine condemnation. Fire ants are one of these few bad actors.…
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Ant Colony Optimization is an excellent example of ant biology directly improving human affairs (in this case, planning delivery routes and other uses). Thus, we were excited to learn that University of Illinois at Chicago graduate student Anika Hazra created an interesting antfographic that introduces the Ant Colony Optimization algorithm and explains its utility! Hazra…
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Well, the most recent mega Powerball jackpot of $759 million has been claimed. But did you know? A single supercolony of Argentine ants in southern Europe numbers in the billions, so if this supercolony is the winner, each ant receives less than a dollar. Too bad!
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Are ants really that important? Clearly, readers of The Daily Ant ought to be settled on this question. But for the unantlightened, what strong evidence exists in the scientific literature to support the unique importance of ants in, say, tropical ecosystems? A skeptic could make the argument that such a view is only tentatively supported by qualitative assessments,…
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Christian Alexander Stidsen Pinkalski and colleagues have a paper about ant poop forthcoming in the Journal of Ecology. Unfortunately, the full article is apparently not yet available online. But if the abstract is to be believed, the researchers confined weaver ants (Oecophylla smaragdina) to the canopy above coffee plants, and fed the ants a diet labelled with a particular…
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