Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸

@lovetheants

Professor of Biology Comparative physiology, collective behavior, and natural history of ants Providence, Rhode Island 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸

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Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· 20d

Some sights and scenes from last night’s Cambridge Moth Ball! #mothball #blacklight #ants #mothweek

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· Jul 9

There is still time to sign up and join us for for a week of ANT CAMP in Downeast coastal Maine at the beautiful Eagle Hill Institute!

Ant Biodiversity, Natural History, and Collective Behavior
July 26-August 1, 2026

In this summer field seminar, we will gather for an in-depth and transdisciplinary study of our local ants and their complex behaviors and societies both in the field and in lab settings. Participants will be trained to find and collect ants using a range of methods (hand-collecting using aspirators, traps, baits, and UV-blacklighting), identify specimens to species using microscopy and morphological keys, to image them using macrophotography, culturing colonies within formicaria and artificial enclosures, to listen to them with sensors, and to track their movements and behaviors.

Jane S. Waters is a myrmecologist and a professor in the Department of Biology at Providence College.

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· Apr 1

Happy trans day of visibility #tdov Photos by Rose De Guzman where I was part of the faculty collection modeling at the Science Ball 🩵🩷🐜🩷🩵

Jane on the runway in a custom labcoat black dress ant aspirator white boots smiling and making her ant antennae hand pose

Jane on the runway with an ant bedazzled and UV-glowing lab coat

Jane exiting the runway smiling in her ant bedazzled purple fringed labcoat

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· Mar 27

Vive la résistantsce! #tetramorium #ants

Portrait of a single worker of an immigrant pavement ant colony with a lavender background

Portrait of a single worker of an immigrant pavement ant colony climbing a micropipette tip with a black background

Portrait of a single worker of an immigrant pavement ant colony with a light green background

Portrait of a single worker of an immigrant pavement ant colony with a light blue background

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· Mar 5

Grateful for the statement by @iuscientist.bsky.social! Science is an inherently political activity and we must speak out and fight to promote its peaceful applications and continued existence!

IUS Condemns US-Israeli Military Aggression Against Iran

[Photo of graves]

Graves are being prepared for over 165 young girls killed in a US–Israeli airstrike on an elementary school in Minab, Iran. (Image: X/ @aragchi)

We, in the International Union of Scientists (IUS), strongly and unequivocally condemn the wanton military attack on Iran by the USA and its Israeli accomplice, carried out under the pretext of a “preventive” strike, at a time when active negotiations were going on between Iran and the USA for a peaceful resolution of the nuclear dispute. The attack began with the assassination of the head of state and top government officials and has since caused the destruction of schools and hospitals and deaths of hundreds of Iranian civilians, including schoolchildren. It is nothing but an act of thuggery, violating all considerations of humanity, international law, and the sovereignty of a nation.

While the current Iranian government has faced longstanding allegations of human rights violations, the responsibility to address these issues rests solely with the Iranian people. No external imperialist power has the moral or legal authority to impose regime change through bombardment, coercion, and destruction. The right to self-determination must be upheld without exception.

The USA has a despicable record of having close ties with several tyrannical dictators, and President Trump's declared sympathy for freedom and democracy in Iran sounds hollow. History repeatedly demonstrates that wars waged in the name of democracy and security bring devastation, destabilization, and the destruction of societies built over centuries. Genuine freedom cannot be delivered through military aggression, nor can democracy arise from the killing of innocent people. It is evident that this attack by the US and Israel is not about defending democratic rights or peace, but about reasserting geopolitical dominance and enabling the exploitation and plunder of Iran’s and the Middle East’s natural and human resources—at the cost of human lives and widespread destruction.

We call upon people around the world, including members of the STEMM community, to raise their voices against the naked aggression of the imperialist USA, its Israeli accomplice, and their allies. We demand an immediate cessation of hostilities and a return to diplomacy, peace, and respect for the sovereignty and dignity of nations.

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· Jan 9

Renee’s poem… poets.org/2020-on-lear...

On Learning to Dissect Fetal
Pigs
by Renée
Nicole Macklin

i want back my rocking chairs, solipsist sunsets,
& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches.
i've donated bibles to thrift stores (mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—
the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):
remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures; they burned the hairs inside my nostrils, & salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms. under clippings of the moon at two forty five AM I study&repeat ribosome endoplasmic— lactic acid stamen
at the IHOP on the corner of powers and stetson hills—
On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs by Renée Nicole Macklin

i repeated & scribbled until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere i can't point to anymore, maybe my gut-
maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.
it's the ruler by which i reduce all things now; hard-edged & splintering from knowledge that used to sit, a cloth against fevered forehead.
can i let them both be? this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom
now i can't believe—
that the bible and qur'an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths "make room for wonder" — all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:
life is merely to ovum and sperm and where those two meet and how often and how well and what dies there.
On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs by Renée Nicole Macklin

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· Nov 24

Sorry, I keep thinking about this plate! It depicts Newton and a vision for physical laws... but all in such stark contrast to the luscious complexity and micro-fractal nature of the boulder and life (and ants!) he sits above... missing something key in the vision, perhaps?

William Blake's Newton (1795), colour print with pen & ink and watercolour. Blake's picture of Newton as a divine geometer was one of a series he created while living in Lambeth in the late 1790s.

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· Nov 24

I will definitely be reading more about Enitharmon, for so so so many reasons, but including her being queen of heaven, born of sexual problems to dominate men, mother of revolution, and representing what cannot be found within nature! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enithar...

The Night of Enitharmon's Joy, 1795 William Blake

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· Nov 24

Though perhaps Los is a better character fit for physiologists, representing the divine aspect of imagination, but also creating life and described as a smith, 'beating with his hammer on a forge, metaphorically connected to the beating of the human heart; the bellows of his forge are the lungs.'

Los's Spectre torments him at his smithy in Jerusalem. This image comes from Copy E. of the work, printed in 1821 and in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art.

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· Nov 24

One of Blake's other artworks should be familiar to my fellow comparative physiologists, from the cover of Lighton's book on measuring metabolic rates, depicting Urizen, one of a set of imagined mythological figures who created the world with reason and laws, only to be tormented and later fall...

Blake's watercoloured etching, The Ancient of Days, with a deistic entity in gold and red extending a measurement instrument out from the heavens, against a dark background

Plate 100 depicting Los and Enitharmon of Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion

Plate 2 of Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion, copy E. Relief etching with watercolour additions, mythological hybrid feminine forms and lots of color.

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· Nov 24

I'm not very familiar with William Blake's work but came across this mention of ants (emmet) in a 1789 poem, "A Dream" from his Songs of Innocence

Once a dream did weave a shade,
O'er my Angel-guarded bed,
That an Emmet lost it's way
Where on grass methought I lay.

Troubled wilderd and forlorn
Dark benighted travel-worn,
Over many a tangled spray
All heart-broke I heard her say.

O my children! do they cry
Do they hear their father sigh.
Now they look abroad to see,
Now return and weep for me.

Pitying I dropp'd a tear:
But I saw a glow-worm near:
Who replied. What wailing wight
Calls the watchman of the night.

I am set to light the ground,
While the beetle goes his round:
Follow now the beetles hum,
Little wanderer hie thee home

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· Nov 7

Proponent of Good Faith, by Sue Johnson (Premonition of a Natural History, 1991)

$Image of a page in Sue Johnson’s 1991 book, Premonition of a Natural History (Fireflies Burning). The page shows an artistic black and white illustration of a butterfly seen from the dorsal perspective; its right wing has been replaced with what appears to be a fractal branching circulatory system. The title on the previous page reads “Proponent of Good Faith” and you can almost see the next image’s title on the page below this one, “There’s a second tier. Do you want to go up?”$

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· Oct 4

Isn’t she perfect?

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· Aug 30

Starting my second decade as a #trans #womeninSTEM on the faculty at Providence College. We've got ants to study, biology to teach, and barriers to break down! motifri.com/ants-in-the-...

Photo of Jane standing on a rock, arms raised and in a purple dress, facing the ocean

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· Aug 18

Not sure who wants a postcard but look at these gorgeous USPS stamps!

A sheet of 20 forever stamps from the LIFE MAGNIFIED collection by the USPS featuring brilliant colorful macro photographs of cells and tissues! Moth wing scales. Diving beetle foot, and barnacle legs are my favs.

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· Jul 15

Assemblage of Joy, a poem for our Ants in the City column with Motif RI motifri.com/ants-in-the-...

Ants in the City: Assemblage of joy

Dr. Jane Waters
Providence College

Running along the boardwalk
on the way to the shore,
In two's and in three's, racing
on their way, Crematogaster
sisters, acrobats with heart.

The farmers brought us out
to see the mystery, a crop
had been targeted, thirsty
broccoli, the youngest
sprouts, Tetramorium encircled.

Clinging to the bottom of
a small boulder small and
black, almost entirely invisible
Myrmecina, cryptic but textured,
residents on the roll.

Cinnabar creps, witch's
butter, and hexagonal polypores,
Deana finds the Aphaenogaster
hiding inside every gill, when they
fungal foray and festival slay.

Antennae curving to insertion, or
bent abruptly, with a notched
clypeus or curving propodeal spines,
One character at a time, Myrmica
unidentified.

It's easy to feel small
and helpless, with never-ending
war and evil all around.
But under foot and the weight
of the world, the ants still
make their homes together, they
still breathe --

and so too, should we.

Illustration by Danika Valentine and with thanks to Skyler Jay. Follow Dr. Jane and her research lab on Instagram @antlabpvd or on the web www.lovetheants.org.

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· Jul 2

Myrmecina americana ants filmed in #slomo exiting and returning to their nest through a portal they constructed from nest debris #myrmecology

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· Jun 13

This TikTok is probably my favorite, it shows needle ant vibe checks and a queen too! #lovetheants #brachyponera #myrmecology

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· Jun 13

We used to post a lot of needle ant tiktoks… maybe should share a few?

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· Jun 13

Not sure who needs to hear this but Needle ants (Brachyponera chinensis) can really be quite lovely.

A student holding up a needle ant walking on her finger

Chest tattoo of two needle ants doing a vibe check, just on the right side of Jane’s ant necklace

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· May 15

Join us for the 26th annual Rhode Island Bioblitz, June 6-7th! www.rinhs.org

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· May 12

Also some some pretty sweet things in the city too, including the manhatt-ant :)

The will to exist brings the conception of mutation

Scenes from the very pro-queer nonbinarian bookstore bathroom!

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· May 12

Loved seeing behind the scenes!

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· May 12

Privileged to meet with students and staff at @amnh.org last week and honored to get to speak about how the integrity and future of our biology research programs depends on political activism and the call for a Free Palestine, in our classrooms and across our communities.

Seminar poster:

"Metabolic rates, natural history, and collective behavior of ants from Rhode Island to Palestine"

Dr. Jane Waters

American Museum
of Natural History
Comparative Biology
Seminar
Monday, May 5*h, 11 AM

Dr Jane and Kate in the insect collection holding a tray of large pinned ponerine ants

Dr Jane and Rin making silly ant antennae poses for a photo outside in NYC.

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· Apr 1

Just a slightly belated post about #TDOV #trans visibility from a transfem prof and a nonbinary theoretical anthropologist and flight attendant doing a little exploring in Arizona (ft. @skylerjay.bsky.social)

Jane posing for a photo in a black dress, dark tights, pink shirt, and with a sunny desert landscape

Skyler in all black with the sun glowing behind them on a desert landscape

Skyler and Jane at a rock outcropping vortex site, dressed in fleece for warmth on a cold morning for the sunrise

An ant, Messor sp, standing on a red rock beside her colony’s entrance

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· Mar 14

“Her relentless determination is proof that there is always a way, so long as you are willing to put the effort into discovering it.” Kaylee Mulligan reflecting on being inspired by myrmecologist and postdoc Dr. Ioulia Bespalova

Photo of ants in the city column in motif magazine

Motif magazine cover illustration showing a woman wearing a black bandana with the text “we protect each other” by artist Grechel Rosado

Illustration by Danika Valentine for the Ants in the City column, featuring a graphic depiction of Mary Talbot collecting ants in front of the Chicago city skyline!

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· Jan 16

Coming out, transitioning, and being trans is HARD. Fortunately, there's a lot we can all do, whether cis or trans, to help our colleagues and strengthen our departments. In addition to all the actions we can take, we've also gathered a list of resources.

Hyperlinked list of resources to create a gender inclusive environment, advocate for name changes, improve information accessibility, and consider daily language and use. The full text document and the links can be accessed on this linktree: https://linktr.ee/trans_inclusion

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· Jan 16

Collaborating with @rin-krichilsky.bsky.social and Kanako Shimizu, we put together what's basically a top-ten list of ways to help foster trans inclusivity and awareness within our scientific and academic communities and would love if you could help share the guide!

How to Support Trans Colleagues

Create a Gender-Inclusive Environment

Research institutional, governmental, local, and other bureaucratic procedures and policies that recognize and support gender transition.

Support training and advocacy for colleagues’ personal/professional safety (ex. in fieldwork, lab work, conferences, institution visits, affinity groups).

Establish and/or identify gender-neutral bathrooms throughout your building. Implement trans-inclusive recruitment and hiring procedures.

Acknowledge intersectionality and the unique needs and barriers that someone with multiple marginalized identities may face.

Consider the importance of representation in your field.

Advocate for Name Changes

Research institutional, governmental, local, and other bureaucratic procedures and policy to recognize and support an individual’s name change.

Identify journals in your field that allow authors to change their names post- publication.

Improve Information Accessibility

Publicly share information on inclusive practices throughout your departments and institution. (Ensure the content centers and is created by trans people.)

Consider Daily Language & Use

Decrease use of gendered terms to avoid exclusionary language.

Ask for personal pronouns.

List on all public-facing directories, and consider including them in email signatures and on professional websites.

Practice discretion. Don’t out your colleagues without their consent.

Jane Waters 🏳️‍⚧️🐜🇵🇸@lovetheants· Dec 28

So sweet of you, thank you! I was a guest at a friend’s house, don’t think they’d ever lit a menorah there before and was grateful they didn’t mind me lighting one. Also feeling a lot of what Katie Bowen shared earlier tonight…