Month: October 2016

Rare ant found in OKEON sample

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A rarely-collected ant species, Protanilla lini, has been identified from a SLAM trap sample that was collected from Hentona High School (site04) between September and October last year. Protanilla lini belongs to the subfamily Leptanillinae. All members of the family are small, subterranean and often blind ants that are very rarely collected. We know very little about their biology, but we believe they are predators of larger prey such as centipedes or earthworms. It is likely that they perform some form of “dracula ant feeding behavior”, where the adults hunt large prey, but instead of feeding on it themselves they take their larvae to the prey, the adults then drink the haemolymph (or “blood”) of the larvae without causing any physical damage.

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Distribution of Protanilla lini, image from antmaps.org

 

This species has been recorded only in Taiwan and Okinawa. It has been collected only once before in Okinawa, and a couple of times in Taiwan.

The information and the specimen images were provided by our staff scientist Paco Hita Garcia.

Soundscape of Okinawa during Obon

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On top of SLAM traps that collect arthropod samples and weather stations that record physical parameter data, acoustic traps that gather sound data are also set up at various OKEON field sites. The soundscape of the sites differ based on their habitats and their proximity to urban areas, as illustrated by the sounds collected during the period of Obon in Okinawa.

Obon is a Japanese Buddhist custom to honor the spirits of one’s ancestors. During Obon, Bon dance (bon odori) is performed to welcome the spirits of the dead. The bon dance performed in Okinawa is known as eisa. Across different OKEON sites we can hear different eisa dances with different species either in the foreground or the background. For example, in Nago the eisa dance is in the background, with sounds of many cricket species (Hexacentrus unicolor, Cardiodactylus guttulus, Ornebius kanetaki, Ornebius longipennis) in the foreground while in Nakagusuku the eisa song is in the foreground. By contrast, given its well-preserved continuous forests far from civilization, the soundscape of Yanbaru consists only of natural sounds.

Below are the soundscapes of four different OKEON sites during Obon as well as part of their spectrograms:

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Soundscape of Nago on the night of Obon, recorded from Nago Castle Park

Link to sound here

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Soundscape of Nakagusuku on the night of Obon, recorded at Nakagusuku Park

Link to sound here

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Soundscape of Naha on the night of Obon, recorded from Sueyoshi Park.

Link to sound here

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Yanbaru Forest on the night of Obon, recorded at the Yanbaru Discovery Forest Park.

Link to sound here

Sound data contributed by our Post-Doctoral researcher Nicholas Friedman.

OKEON Churamori Project presented at International Congress of Entomology 2016

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The nearly one-week long XXV International Congress of Entomology, under the theme Entomology without Borders, took place in Orlando this year from September 25-30. It brought together the largest delegation of scientists and experts in the history of the discipline with over 7000 participants and over 2000 talks, with topics ranging from biodiversity conservation to ecology and evolution to science communication.

Yoshi, a staff scientist of arilab and the coordinator of the OKEON project, represented the rest of the OKEON team at the conference by presenting a poster on the project. The poster, titled OKEON Chura-mori Project: A new environmental monitoring project in Okinawa, Japan , introduced the project and described its various components, including GIS, field network, genomics pipeline, as well as emphasized its collaborative nature by outlining the various partners of the project.

You can see the original poster here.

Highlights from the International Congress of Entomology in Orlando

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The nearly one-week long XXV International Congress of Entomology, under the theme Entomology without Borders, took place in Orlando this year from September 25-30. It brought together the largest delegation of scientists and experts in the history of the discipline with over 7000 participants and over 2000 talks, with topics ranging from biodiversity and conservation to ecology and evolution to medical entomology to taxonomy to IPM to science communication.

Various members of our lab participated in this conference by either giving a talk or presenting a poster, as listed below:
Evan Economo (Talk) Reconciling global macroecological pattern and macroevolutionary processes in ant biodiversity.
Paco Hita Garcia (Talk) Evolution, biogeography, and diversification of the genus Terataner.
Julia Janicki (Talk) antmaps.org: An interactive client-server mapping application for visualizing the ants of the world.
Cong Liu (Talk) Reorganization of taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic ant biodiversity after conversion to rubber plantation.
Eli Sarnat (Talk) Applied systematics of Pheidole: An interactive review of the world’s most invasive ant lineage.
Masashi Yoshimura (Poster) OKEON Chura-mori Project: A new environmental monitoring project in Okinawa, Japan

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Symposia on ants, phylogenetic methods, biodiversity and taxonomy were popular among the myrmecologists in our lab. Other symposia that were very interesting included one on weevils, another on science communication, and one on the use of biological specimen data.

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