When Ants and Physics Collide: Traffic Jams

It has been about 8 months since my last post, and since then I have returned from China and begun my Ph.D. program in the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago. More information on this work is here.

To start off the resumption of my blogging, I leave you with today’s NPR story on ants and how they prevent traffic jams: here.

(iStockphoto image from the NPR piece)

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Crime and Punishmant

Somewhere in Bolivia, two men decided to steal some motorcycles. They were excited about their loot, until they ended up being tied to a tree with venomous Pseudomyrmex triplarinus ants. This, as reported via the Associated Press in The Guardian and The Washington Post, was the near-fatal penalty suffered by these two miscreants for their ill-advised behavior. Unfortunately, this isn’t the only tragedy in this story.

In both newspapers, the portrayal of the key players – the insects – is horribly botched. The Guardian refers to the “venom of fire ants” in the caption of what looks to me to be a beetle (certainly not an ant), and fails to follow basic conventions like capitalizing the name of the genus “Pseudomyrmex” and italicizing the entire scientific name. The Post mercifully spares us a photo, but sticks “fire ants” in the title of its article that contains the same egregious errors as the one in The Guardian (having essentially identical AP-sourced content).

Pseudomyrmex triplarinus is completely different from fire ants. Completely different. Two-second Google search different. So is the difference between an “ant” and a “beetle”. And failing to properly capitalize and italicize the scientific name betrays the scientific illiteracy of the writer. But, despite these errors, the intriguing nature of the story makes it worth a read.

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Ants Go Marching Win by Win

I’ve covered Fort Wayne’s NBA D-League team, the Mad Ants, a couple times before. Well, per my presciant prediction in my first post on the Ants, they are “irrefutably the team to beat” at this year’s playoffs, as reported in the surely unbiased Fort Wayne-based The Journal Gazette. I look forward to their ultimate success.

 

 

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Ant-Man

It is pretty old news at this point, but I figured that as I haven’t recently given it or this blog the due attention that each deserves, I should now mention that Ant-Man the film will be hitting theaters in 2015. Paul Rudd has been cast as Ant-Man (Ant-Man is the main character in the film).

I have two hopes for this movie. The first is that it is riddled with actual facts about ants. The second is that it features at least one cameo by at least one actual myrmecologist. An obvious candidate would be someone like Mark Moffett, who has been interviewed by Stephen Colbert (in 2007, 2008, 2010, and 2011), Conan O’Brien, and NPR, among others I’m sure, and therefore should already be primed for the public eye.

But with or without copious ant-facts and myrmecameos, I can’t wait to see this film, which will surely be the greatest thing since the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Because could the fusion of ant and man on film be anything else?

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ANT Surveillance

Turns out that even ants are being swept up by the NSA. Well, at least their name.

According to a Der Spiegel article from the end of last year, the NSA created an “ANT catalog” that apparently allows NSA employees to “order technologies from the ANT division for tapping their targets’ data”. However, these revelations seem to come from an “impression gained from flipping through the 50-page document”, with even the meaning of the acronym only “presumably” standing for “Advanced or Access Network Technology”.

Regardless of the true name and nature of the division, the most appalling fact from this report is the NSA’s practice of tapping into the wonderful world of ants for its secretive ends. However, it should be noted that the NSA chose to name seemingly omnipotent hacking powers “ANT”. Not “FLY”, or “GRASSHOPPER”, or “BEETLE”, but “ANT”. So, although appalling, it is at least encouraging that the NSA understands a bit about the true nature of the ant.

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More on the Space Ants

See here for a nice video from NASA on the space ants I mentioned a few days ago, as well as other information on the launch’s purpose. The article proposes the name “ant-ronauts”, but I’m partial to “antstronauts”. I think it flows better.

Image from the article.

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Mad Ants, China, and Detroit

Since learning about the Fort Wayne ‘Mad Ants’ NBA D-League team last year, I occasionally check in on the team, and it seems to be doing well. Last season, Tony Mitchell was the D-League Rookie of the Year (Are we surprised he was a Mad Ant? No.), part of an effort that brought the Mad Ants to the playoffs for the first time. Well, he then decided to do something different. Which, according to this article in The Journal Gazette, turned out to be going to China for 2 1/2 months to play with the Jilin Northeast Tigers. He also has been drafted by the Detroit Pistons, and, according to Wikipedia, is playing with the Mad Ants “on assignment” from the team.

I find this particularly notable because Mitchell’s trajectory has been Detroit -> Ants -> China, which essentially mirrors my own. Perhaps there is some fundamental property of nature that follows: (Detroit metro area) + (Ants) = (China).

 +  =  

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Ants on the ISS

The most important story of the year has already occurred! It has nothing to do with the NSA, or the midterm elections, or anything else so mundane. It has everything to do with ants. Specifically, space ants.

Outer space, already home to the Ant Nebula, will now be joined by real live ants, thanks to the recent launch of a rocket to the ISS carrying “swarms of ants”. According to the ABC article reporting the event, NASA hopes that the experiment will “help cultivate ‘a better understanding of swarm intelligence,’ which could lead to more refined mathematical procedures for solving complex problems, such as routing trucks and scheduling airlines, back on Earth.”

These are not the first space ants, but I believe they are the first to actually live on the ISS. The earlier launch used harvester ants, but this launch decided on Tetramorium caespitum, the pavement ant, according to the NASA release describing the experiment. I hope the ants love their stellar new home!

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Attack of the Ants

Check out this “horror show” about a woman who says that there are “hundreds” (hundreds!!!) of ants “in her kitchen, her bathroom, and even her bedroom!” An example of the horror:

You feel, like, a little tingle and you’re just, like, “What is that?!?” and you see, like, one ant on you. I’ve had it happen to me three times.

THREE TIMES! Anyways, check out the video. It is actually not a piece by The Onion, but an important news story by CBC.

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Three Common Misconceptions

Ants are amazing. Everyone knows this. But even with an innate sense of wonder at the workings of such tiny beings, mankind is rife with misconceptions about this omnipresent family of fascinating species. Here are what I consider to be the top three misconceptions about ants:

1. Fire ant bites are very painful

This is probably the most consistent mistake I come across in conversation and in print. Many people believe that the sharp, chemical-induced pain delivered by some species of ants, like fire ants, originates from a bite. This faulty belief likely derives from the fact that many species do in fact bite, as an anchor for more effective stinging. Alex Wild has this great image of such a fire ant attack:

For an example of this misconception in action, see this confused New York Times information sheet on fire ants that fails to discriminate between “bite” and “sting”. I should note that you often can feel something from an ant bite, especially from larger species, but this is nothing more than a slight pressure or mildly painful pinch.

2. Some species are special “winged ants”

During the summer, you may find your place of abode momentarily invaded by a horde of winged ants. When I was younger, I thought that these were a special species of ants with wings, and I’ve found that this belief is not unique to my younger self. In actuality, nearly every ant species produces winged individuals at some point during the year, as “winged ants” are members of the reproductive caste (queens or males). During the nuptial flight, males and queens (or, according to some, “princesses”) will emerge, generating both new nests for the species and fresh misconceptions for people.

3. A worker ant is a “he”

Ants are similar to humans in so many ways, that I think this mistake is understandable. Many people assume that ant workers include both males and females, and will therefore resort to “he” when referring to an ant they encounter. However, all ant workers – without exception, to my knowledge – are female. Such sex uniformity is preserved via the haplodiploid system employed by most ants, where the unfertilized eggs the queen lays become reproductive males (among the “winged ants” addressed above), and the fertilized eggs become females (either winged queens or unwinged workers).

So, in summary: Sting, not bite. Reproductives, not species. She, not he.

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