For the Love of Art

It is amazing what people will do for the love of art (and maybe a cash payout)...

A Political Allegory

I see this video as an allegory of US politics. Two parties who busy themselves in "competitive" politics...



So who's who in this drama? I see the harvester ants as the grimly determined Democrats busy trying to eke a living out of a tough patch of ground. I see the night ants as the Republicans, a party more dedicated to destroying everything around it (blocking the harvester nests) than concentrating on their own job at hand (seed collecting). The Republicans were willing to sink the US economy in its debt ceiling fight than to find a compromise and a "live and let live compromise", the balanced approach, that was required.

I love ants. I hate Republicans.

Ant Architecture

Here is a fun video of a scientist who has developed a technique to document ant colony nest architecture.



Walter R. Tschinkel's web site has more information.



And here is an article in Popular Mechanics on the more general topic of "animal architectures" with some wonderful photos.

How the Natural World Really Works

Everybody "just knows" that what is natural is better than the artificial man-made stuff. Everybody "knows" that before Western society brought their brutal colonizing ways to the rest of the world, the primitives and other cultures lived in a natural harmony because nature is good and kind. Like the Bible says: in the natural world the lion lies down with the lamb.

But scientists didn't get the memo. They go out and look at the "natural" world and bring back some real horror stories. Here's a blog post by Robert Lamb on Tor.com that helps dissolve the illusion that "natural is better, natural is good, natural is beautiful"...

To quote esteemed mad scientist Seth Brundle, “Insects don’t have politics.” Theirs is a world of intricate brutality and wasps have been excelling in it for more than a hundred million years.

This latest example comes to us in this paper from France’s CNRS (Délégation Paris Michel-Ange) and it concerns a wasp that not only hatches from its egg inside the belly of a ladybug, but upon emerging forces its eviscerated host to guard its cocoon while it transitions from larva to full-grown horror wasp.

Dinocampus coccinellae is its name and one can only imagine that Zombie author Joyce Carol Oates keeps a few of them as pets.

To recap, parasitism runs big in the wasp world. As I explain in How Wasps Work, the ancient wasps of the Cretaceous period were predatory and carnivorous. They ate arachnids and other insects and they LOVED it. But then the rise of the angiosperms introduced an even better food source: nectar and pollen. So the wasps of old largely abandoned their flesh-eating ways, except for the carnivorous feasts required by their squirming young. Some wasps abandoned this practice all together (and became bees), but you’ll still find countless varieties of wasps that either deposit their eggs inside a living host (that’s what the stinger evolved for) or who fill larval chambers in their nest with stunned meals.

So the fact that that Dinocampus coccinellae hatches inside the belly of a host bug following some makeshift, catastrophic surgery by its parent is nothing out of the ordinary. But when it celebrates its Chest-Burst Mitzvah, that’s when it gets all weird and noteworthy. Normally, the host organism mercifully dies at this point, but DC’s ladybug is not so lucky. Not only does it live, but a little behavior modification forces it to hang around and “guard” its parasite-baby as it grows into adulthood beneath its protective bulk. Scientists believe that secretions left by the larva when it bursts out might play a role in reprograming the host.

But then the ladybug dies right? Surely once the wasp reaches adulthood, our long-suffering host can at last rest in peace. No such luck. This is the insect world, after all. The researchers found that 25 percent of the manipulated ladybugs recovered normal behavior following their ordeal.

I’m really hoping this makes it into the next PIXAR A Bug’s Life movie.

I get a chuckle out of people who believe that "natural" cures are better than scientifically developed drugs. They are so deluded. But the joke is on me. This kind of anti-science and looney thinking is spreading. A hundred and fifty years ago you could have destroyed science and the world would have trudged on to miserable future compared to what we live in, but it would have struggled on without a mass die off. But if you removed science today, something like 80% of the population would die within a few years. We can't feed or clothe ourselves without modern science. Despite this, a rising majority shun science and hold tight to a warm-and-fuzzy lie that "natural is best".

People buy "organic" groceries not realizing that (1) everything is "organic" unless you redefine it from its original meaning of "from organisms" and (2) all plants are loaded with poisons to try to protect themselves from grazers and modern chemicals are really just more of the same (sure some of them are really bad for you, but that's why we have government and regulations to protect us from bad stuff like that).

Nothing is more "natural" than to be parasitized (or at least co-habited by other organisms). Right now I'm host to 100 trillion bacteria and only 10 trillion human cells. I'm ten times more bacteria than I am "human". Bacteria are only one of a range of "natural" organisms that live in and on me. This includes fungi and arachnea. This is the human microbiome.

A Connoisseur of Pain

Here are some delightful descriptions trying to descriminate the levels of pain from various insect bites. Here is a bit about the Schmidt Sting Pain Index...



And the winner is...the Bullet ant:

The pain caused by this insect's sting is purported to be greater than that of any other Hymenopteran, and is ranked as the most painful according to the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, given a 4+ rating, above the tarantula hawk wasp. It is described as causing "waves of burning, throbbing, all-consuming pain that continues unabated for up to 24 hours".

Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.

Razzle Dazzle in Arachnid Land

This is a most impressive video of a spectacularly gorgeous spider, the peacock spider of Australia..



I can't help anthropomorphizing the video and believing it holds some "courting" cues for human males, i.e. spiff up with fancy duds, be sure to signal you intentions (not by swizzling your legs about, but by splashing money hither and yon), and be very careful in your approach to the female of the species. If she show disinterest, run like hell to avoid a bad outcome!

Confusing the Tool with the Object of Study

There is an interesting controversy in biology over the concepts of eusociality and inclusive fitness.

This blog posting by Carl Zimmer on the Discover magazine site sums up the state of the controversy and identifies the key paper that is driving the current intellectual battles. Zimmer sides with the mathematical modelers. The other side is led by E. O. Wilson and is represented by this paper "The Evolution of Eusociality" in the Nature journal.

But I worry that the argument of inclusive fitness is an example of science mistaking the tool for the object of the science. Sure, if you make the assumptions of inclusive fitness you "explain" a large number of eusocial species. But I fear that models, as tools to tweeze out principles and help understand complex phenomena, get reified into "solutions" when in fact they are idealizations and can't handle all cases.

Carl Zimmer is dismissive of the E. O. Wilson paper, but it appears to me that Wilson has a valid criticism of the modelers. His point is the eusociality, while being extremely successful as a strategy, is rare in nature because it requires some unlikely series of steps and especially because it requires multilevel selection (a viewpoint that is anathema to the inclusive fitness crowd and many geneticists). But nature is complex and the drive to find simple models boxes you in conceptually. It is as if physics only allowed ideal gas laws and ignored any explanatory mechanisms that went below the level of an idealized billiard ball (i.e. models that attempt to describe real gas behaviour).

In a multicellular organism you have "eusociality" at a level of cells. Clearly you have reproductive division of labour, overlapping generations, and cooperative care of the young. And in this case, this is a degenerate and simplistic case of "inclusive fitness" because the genes in all cells are exactly the same. The odd cells that don't fit this pattern, e.g. blood cells, in fact do have the same genes until late in their "maturation" where they discard the nucleus with the DNA and go into a robo-mode. So in fact they do fit exactly the assumptions of inclusive fitness. But what about symbionts? How do lichen flourish? How does this cooperation arise since the originating algae/cyanobacterium and the fungus share no DNA? It does despite no fitting the mathematical model of inclusive fitness.

I like Wilson's attempt to understand the rise of eusociality in five phases:

1. Formation of groups in a freely mixing population.


2. Historical accidents that lead to the accumulation of traits that make the change to eusociality more likely (i.e. preadaptions).


3. The rise of eusocial alleles.


4. Natural selection operating on emergent traits among the cooperating organisms in a eusocial group.


5. Natural selection operating on competing eusocial groups with their variant emerging eusocial traits.

That explanation has the richness to ring true to me. It is a much more credible account than the simplistic inclusive fitness model which is a simple calculation that can't explain how eusociality arises and changes over time.

I enjoy Carl Zimmer, but I think he has made a mistake in picking a "winner" in this controversy. Sure the inclusive fitness guys may have the "numbers" to be persuasive. But science isn't a political contest. Ultimately it is effectiveness of a theory in explaining the real world. It may take some time, but I expect that Wilson and his crowd will win this argument, not the simple modelers of the inclusive fitness crowd. They have a very useful tool for analysis, but (in my humble opinion) they've made the mistake of confusing the tool with their object of study.

Another Doomsday Scenario

There are a lot of "threats" out there and people love to build up anxiety of doomsday scenarios. But here is one that I think is more real than most. I think it is serious but not hair-on-fire serious. It needs serious scientific study and generous funding (something that in the US will get Republicans to guffaw about "throwing dollars at insects"). Here is a bit from a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) bulletin on the honeybee CCD (colony collapse disorder) and other threats to food crop pollination:

Current evidence demonstrates that a sixth major extinction of biological diversity event is underway. The Earth is losing between one and ten percent of biodiversity per decade, mostly due to habitat loss, pest invasion, pollution, over-harvesting and disease. Certain natural ecosystem services are vital for human societies.

Many fruit, nut, vegetable, legume, and seed crops depend on pollination. Pollination services are provided both by wild, free-living organisms (mainly bees, but also to name a few many butterflies, moths and flies), and by commercially managed bee species. Bees are the predominant and most economically important group of pollinators in most geographical regions.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that out of some 100 crop species which provide 90% of food worldwide, 71 of these are bee-pollinated. In Europe alone, 84% of the 264 crop species are animal pollinated and 4 000 vegetable varieties exist thanks to pollination by bees. The production value of one tonne of pollinator-dependent crop is approximately five times higher than one of those crop categories that do not depend on insects.

Has a “pollinator crisis” really been occurring during recent decades, or are these concerns just another sign of global biodiversity decline? Several studies have highlighted different factors leading to the pollinators’ decline that have been observed around the world. This bulletin considers the latest scientific findings and analyses possible answers to this question. As the bee group is the most important pollinator worldwide, this bulletin focuses on the instability of wild and managed bee populations, the driving forces, potential mitigating measures and recommendations.

From the bulletin, here is a graph showing the decades long decline. CCD began being reported in 2006. Obviously there are many "issues" about bee populations:

Click to Enlarge
From the conclusion of the UN bulletin:

Currently available global data and knowledge on the decline of pollinators are not sufficiently conclusive to demonstrate that there is a worldwide pollinator and related crop production crisis. Although honey bee hives have globally increased close to 45% during the last 50 years, declines have been reported in several locations, largely in Europe and Northern America.

Creepy Crawlies

I remember reading a science fiction story back in the 1960s that stuck with me. It was about an alien invasion that captured people, planted an egg inside them, and left them frozen, but conscious, as the egg grew within them to produce a new alien.

This world, our world, has such a nasty life form: fungi. Here's a newly discovered fungus taking control of an ant and using it for its own reproductive purposes. From Alex Wild's Myrmecos blog:


A Camponotus femoratus carcass sprouts an Ophiocordyceps stalk (Ecuador)
This week the biodiversity news is abuzz with tales of new Zombie-Ant Fungi. The sensationalized name aside, these are common rain forest fungi that infect an ant and convince it to walk to an area of optimal fungal growth conditions before killing it and consuming the carcass. It’s a classic case of parasites manipulating the behavior of the host for their own benefit.

If you click on the link in Alex Wild's posting you get to read the Wired article which starts:

Four new species of brain-manipulating fungi that turn ants into "zombies" have been discovered in the Brazilian rain forest.

These fungi control ant behavior with mind-altering chemicals, then kill them. They're part of a large family of fungi that create chemicals that mess with animal nervous systems.

...

Once infected by spores, the worker ants, normally dedicated to serving the colony, leave the nest, find a small shrub and start climbing. The fungi directs all ants to the same kind of leaf: about 25 centimeters above the ground and at a precise angle to the sun (though the favored angle varies between fungi). How the fungi do this is a mystery.

"It's related to the fungus that LSD comes from," Hughes said. "Obviously they are producing lots of interesting chemicals."

Before dying, ants anchor themselves to the leaf, clamping their jaws on the edge or a vein on the underside. The fungi then takes over, turning the ant's body into a spore-producing factory. It lives off the ant carcass, using it as a platform to launch spores, for up to a year.

"This is completely different from what we see in temperate zones where, if an insect dies from a fungal infection, the game's over in a few days," Hughes said. "The fungi rots the body of the insect and releases massive amounts of spores over two or three days. But in the tropics, where humidity and temperature are more stable, the fungi has this strategy for long-term release."

Of the four new species, two grow long, arrow-like spores which eject like missiles from the fungus, seeking to land on a passing ant. The other fungi propel shorter spores, which change shape in mid-air to become like boomerangs and land nearby. If these fail to land on an ant, the spores sprout stalks that can snag ants walking over them. Upon infecting the new ant, the cycle starts again.

Chemicals from this global group of fungi, known as Cordyceps, have been a part of traditional medicine for thousands years, and part of Western medicine for the last 50.

Organ transplant patients, for example, receive ciclosporin — a drug that suppresses the immune system, reducing the chance the body will reject the new tissue. Chemicals from this same fungal group are also used for antibiotic, antimalarial and anticancer drugs.

There's more with more pictures and text. Go read the whole article.

Death Spiral

Nature is endlessly fascinating. Here's a tale about army ants and the occasional death spiral they can fall into. First, a home video of a death spiral:



This behaviour is explained by a scientist in this video:



Here is a comment on the phenomena by Alex Wild in his blog Myrmecos:

The phenomenon was first noted by pioneering army ant biologist Schneirla, who published a paper on it in 1944 under the less sensational term “circular milling”. Schneirla’s detailed analysis is worth a read, not just for the natural history and a surprising amount of physics, but for a remarkable concluding sentence in which he asserts that people are clearly better than ants.

”It may be observed that while army ants are constitutionally susceptible to the predominance of circular-column behavior and can be freed from it only by the incidental fact of environmental variation, man is by no means susceptible in the same sense, with his cortical basis for versatile corrective patterns which under encouragement may reduce milling to the minor role of an occasional subway rush.”

If you follow up the paper by Schneirla, you get this wonderful bit:

8:30 P.M.: Somehow the group has divided into two distinct circling rings of ants. These rings, nearly equal in size, presumably were caused by the heavy though brief rain which came shortly before 4:00. Both groups rotate counterclockwise, with their outer margins about 20 cm. apart; both nearer the wall than was the exposed margin of the single ring at 3:45 P.M. In each group a few ants occupy the central area, where they huddle together or turn narrowly in irregular ways. During an hour of observation more are shunted into the central huddle, drawn from ants in the inniermost file, where many have difficulty turning rapidly enough to evade bumping by others in line. At 10:00 P.M. the two rings still rotate counterclockwise, and in both, the central clusters have grown in size. The rate of general movement has become very slow.

September 5, 6:30 A.M.: On the spot of yesterday's phenomenon little or no circling is to be seen. The entire area is strewn with the bodies of dead and dying Ecitons. A few of the survivors wander about slowly, while no more than three dozen of them form a small (ca. 7 cm. D.) and rather irregular circular column in which they plod around slowly, counterclockwise. At 7:30 A.M. virtually none of the ants are on their feet. Circling has stopped, and various small myrmecine and dolichoderine ants of the neighborhood are busy carting away the dead.

Alex Wild points to the following simulation of the creation of a death spiral by army ants:



I can't help thinking of the tenuous connection between the death spiral behaviour in social insects and the recent mass demonstrations in the Middle East and now in Wisconsin in the US. These are collective behaviours driven by some elemental features of their social life. They can lead to mass extinction in the death spiral of army ants or, in humans, the overthrow of a dictatorship in the Middle East and hopefully the back down of a fanatical Republican governor in Wisconsin. But in all cases, the concerted efforts by so many individuals is awe inspiring!

The Wondrous World of Nature and Natural Exploitation

Here's a very nice video of how a stick insect has learned a trick to exploit the gullibility of an ant...



Now that you've viewed the charming little "nature story" about imitation and exploitation, you are ready for the real horror story: army ants!



I remember as a kid sitting in a dark theatre terrified by the tale of South American army ants and their utter devastation of a farm. Here's the plot:

It's 1901. At 19, tough, stubborn Christopher Leiningen came to South America and built levees to claim thousands of acres of Rio Negro river land for a chocolate plantation. Now 34, with no knowledge of women, he recruits a mail-order bride in New Orleans. She's beautiful, independent, and arrives ready to be his stalwart helpmate; however, no one has told him she's a widow. He rejects her. During the next week, as she awaits the boat to take her back to the US, they learn that legions of army ants will strike in a few days' time. She joins the fight to save the plantation; their courage and his probable loss of all he's worked for may crack his resolve to send her away.

And what's the film? The 1954 classic The Naked Jungle!

Ants Do Math! & Rocks Race!

Here's a fun report from the frontier of "ant science"...



So bees can dance to spell out where the food is. Ants normally leave scent trails from food back to the next to guide the others. But desert ants do something different... they count steps.

Hmm... I accept the experiment, but "counting steps" is too simple. Ants wander all over the place as they walk. What says 2000 steps of a crooked random path equal 2000 steps of another crooked random path? And how does the ant know which direction to head from the nest? There is more going on than counting. I accept the counting result, but it only accounts -- sort of -- for getting home. It says nothing about how the ant finds the food, nor does it explain how one desert ant can communicate with other ants to spell out the location. More science is needed!

A less controversial bit of science covers the phenomenon of rocks that race across a playa:



There are so many wonderful, strange, bizarre things out there in the real world. I wonder why people waste their time with "ghost stories" or the "spirit" stuff of religion.

Alien Movie

The aliens have landed! The aliens have landed!

And here's a movie they left behind. I can't really understand it. It doesn't have the typical human plot of boy meets girl, boy falls in love, they marry, and live happily ever after. In fact, it doesn't seem to have a plot. And no dialogue. It does have a strange kind of "musical" background. I'm guessing these aliens are communicating but in either subsonic or ultrasonic range. They may be trying to tell us something. I just done know...

ant-views from Jörg Brönnimann on Vimeo.

OK, I confess. I love ants. They are so wierd. As a kid I spent hours pestering them, watching them, puzzling about them. They simply ignored me until I imposed on them too much, then they stung me to try and give me a message, something that I definitely could understand.