The meeting is organized by young researches, and this year will be specially interesting because there will be a discussion about creating a national society of evolutionary biologists.

I will be talking about the evolution of mouthparts within ants, covering some fascinating new discoveries that I haven’t share here yet but will blog about some time in the near future. In the mean time, here are a couple of my slides.

Media sources: antweb.org; Roberto Keller/AMNH.

Media sources: Wiki Commons; Alex Wild (http://www.alexanderwild.com/); R.E. Snodgrass 1935.

It has been a highly enjoyable experience so far. My readership has grown beyond my modest expectations, currently averaging about 100 visitors a day. I have gotten the most traffic whenever one of the much more popular bloggers direct readers to this site– this has been specially so everytime I get the Myrmecos bump, but there are a few other people to thank.

When I started, I decided that if I could post at least once a week I would be satisfied (so far the case). I have thousands of Scanning Electron Micrographs from my PhD research, many that will never make it to formal publications, so I thought I would just share a nice-looking one every week to keep a constant pace. Thus the Homology Weekly series was born. But from the very first post in the series I also realized that just throwing in an image wasn’t going to be of the interest of readers and myself. The emphasis then changed from the purely visual to telling a short story about a morphological character.

It also became apparent from the very first post, however, that I wasn’t going to assemble these stories once a week. I then decided to go with the whenever-I-feel-like-it pace (also known as rate heterogeneity in molecular evolution parlance). I also decided to keep the original name of the series to remind myself that things doesn’t always turn out as you expect them to (for the good).

As for the dreaded question among bloggers of for whom do you write, I still don’t know, but I am glad to have science enthusiastic people as well as colleagues among my regular visitors.

Thank you all.

Grant proposals have been dealt with (more or less), and next week I will be in Turin, Italy, for the congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology. I just don’t want to won’t have time to blog during the congress, unfortunately.

But do not fear, for I leave you with a very tough quiz. Let see if someone knows what’s depicted below. A couple of tips:

- It is one of the few sclerites (skeletal pieces) in adult workers that is completely internal.

- It comes in pairs (left one pictured).

The answer will be revealed upon my return.

The mysterious sclerite X (Scanning Electron Micrograph, Roberto Keller/AMNH)

And if I make it into the final cut due to your submission, you will receive a T-shirt… no, wait, a button… no, hmm… well I’ll think of something involving tiny ants magnified to huge proportions using an electron gun.

1.1. Post overview (Address your readers in a clear and concise way. Maximum 280 characters)

Regular readers of this blog know that I am a slow blogger to start with. I am comfortable with this style of blogging and hope you appreciate the effort I put into my posts. That said, you may have noticed a change from slow to plain sluggish in the past couple of weeks.

1.2. Post explanation (Describe your excuse for not posting. Maximum 380 characters)

I have some large grant application deadlines coming fast my way (that is, as opposed to my manuscript deadlines that are long gone). These are crucial deadlines– success or failure in securing research funding will determine if I keep posting about insect morphology and evolution or if the topic of this blog changes to something like Archetype: insect taxonomy on a budget.

1.3. Relevance of your blog (In detail describe why your readers should keep subscribing to your feed. Maximum 60 characters)

Wha… 60 characters, are you serious! That is not enough to

1.4. Future prospects (Make up a promise in order to incite false hope among your readers. Maximum 220 characters)

I’ll keep posting any interesting things that come by and, as a break for myself, I promise will definitely assemble one regular morphological post with lots of nice images during the next few days. Stay tuned.

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From Keller, R. A. 2008. A phylogenetic analysis of morphology for the poneromorphs ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Ph.D. thesis, Cornell University.