Fieldwork — Barden Lab at NJIT

Queensland, Australia

Collecting extant ants, termites, and dragonflies with the Ware Lab. Australia is home to many endemic species, including ants and termite groups found nowhere else on Earth today.

Termite mounds in cattle land

Termites at home

Workers of Mastotermes darwiniensis at home on a hot summer day.

Shield Bug

A pentatomid, Poecilometis sp., posing politely

Centipede brood care

Iridomyrmex attack

Iridomyrmex workers raiding a freshly damaged termite mound.

Gujarat, India

Lignite mines near Surat, India also yield fossil amber dated to the early Eocene, around the same time the Indian subcontinent collided with Asia, forming the Himalayan mountains. With David Grimaldi and in collaboration with other paleontologists from India, Germany, and the United States.

Cambay Amber

Industrial Excavation

We watch as a Backhoe fills trucks bound for nearby a powerplant with thousands of pounds of lignite.

Industrial Excavation

Cambay Amber

Hukam Singh

Paleobotanist Hukam Singh searches for fossils in the lignite.

Guyana

Part of a Ware Lab collection trip focused on ants and termites for phylogenetic analyses from Georgetown and the Rupununi valley in Guyana, South America. The Rupununi valley is subject to heavy flooding in the wet season, which made our dry season collecting an opportunity to explore the composition of species within inundation forests.

Daceton armigerum

Giant River Otter