Notices by Alex Wild (alexwild@mastodon.online)

For those who know anything about ants, here's a weird one: Lasius xerophilus.

Most Lasius species live in north temperate/boreal forests. This one? Sand dunes in North American deserts. A total oddball, and unexpected, living alongside classic desert species like Pogonomyrmex harvester ants.

Photographed at Monahans Sand Dunes, Texas.

#Ants #Lasius #Deserts #Insects

Got this shot out in west Texas a couple days ago. It’s a Pogonomyrmex harvester ant sprinting across a sand dune carrying one of her nestmate sisters. The carried ant curls into a stereotypical pupal position to be easier to transport.

#Ants #Insects #Deserts #Pogonomyrmex

A gallery of ladybird beetles from around the world.

My favorites are the little brownish ones, because there are a ton of them and no one knows that they’re ladybirds.

#insects #beetles #Photography #Coccinellidae

https://www.alexanderwild.com/Insects/Coleoptera-Beetles/Coccinellidae

UT Austin, my employer, beats and jails students engaged in peaceful protest, then manufactures propaganda that deeply misrepresents what the students were doing and had planned to do.

How am I supposed to work at an institution willing to hurt any students I recruit to come here? This is untenable.

#UTAustin #Texas

https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2024-05-03/uts-war-on-students/

Biology faculty at UT are meeting today to talk about a hiring plan. I really don't envy their job of trying to make a department located in Texas attractive.

We're in the middle of an ongoing purge of black staff, the adminstration just called in the state police to beat and jail students, and no one in their right mind would want to risk pregnancy to have a family here. It's bleak.

Campuses aren't being rocked by protests.

They're being rocked by politicized administrators ordering students beaten and jailed to satisfy the political elite.

Let's be clear who is causing the violence.

While the blame for the climate crisis can be spread around to quite a lot of humanity, few people bear more culpability, throughout the history of the crisis, than Texas and its ruling elite.

We’re sweltering in the climate created by the fossil fuel industry and the corrupt governments it has bought.

Austin is about the break its all time record for consecutive days over 100.

#atxwx #climate #Texas

I never thought *my* atmosphere would boil, says the state that voted for the Boil The Atmosphere party.

Things are going extinct before we even know they exist, is my executive summary of the environmental crisis and the biodiversity funding deficit.