[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hi, I'm Laura Lichtman, and you're
listening to Science Friday.
“In the seminal insect film, a bug's life,”
we're given a bug's eye view of the world. Now, stay calm. We are going around the leaf. Around the leaf? I don't think we can do that.
Oh, nonsense. This is nothing compared to the twig of 93. We come face to mandible with ants. They're in 10 other spindly legs, everything. And they're delightful.
But perhaps the accuracy left a little something to be desired. Enter the ants scan project, which has generated high resolution x-ray images of over 2,000 real ants from over 700 species.
And I had to say the results really are stunning. This is ants in all of their beautiful and frightening glory, joining me now to dig into this amount of ant data is Dr. Julian Katzka. He worked on this project while a PhD student
at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. Hi, Julian. Hi, Flora. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being here.
OK, so you came into this work, comparing the mouth parts of dozens of ants species. Why mouth parts? So if you're a human, and you live anywhere in the world, there's a pretty high chance that ants are all around you.
And there's this now pretty well-known fact that the biomass of all ants equals or surpasses that of all humans. And the total diversity of ants species is enormous. And that also extends into the forms and shapes,
particularly in the mouth parts, because they are sort of the first tool that ants use in their daily lives. So like, our mascot model is this South American army and they have like small ant workers, but they're also large soldiers.
And these large soldiers have these official, like, manobus that you could even use to like staple a wound.
They're by the so fierce that they would never let go.
“And I think the theory here is that these manobus”
are really just there to hurt something that is as big as a human. And so really like learning more about the evolution of these different mouth parts was motivating my PhD research. - Describe for people who can't see it.
And we'll put some on our website at scienceraday.com/ ants. What does the images look like? - So the images, they are derived from x-ray images, right? So if you've ever taken an x-ray image at a hospital, you have this C-through x-ray image.
And then if you would like turn yourself around while taking these x-ray images like enough times, you could mathematically reconstruct the 3D volume. So that is like the technology behind computer tomography. And that's exactly what we did with the ants can.
The data that we end up with are like slices of images that are like gray scale. And so they contain the anatomy of the ants. - And then you put them together and you can color them and make them beautiful too.
- Yes, so yeah. So the tomography data is like the raw data and they are like plenty of methods that you can use to generate something out of it.
So in the first instance, it might just be like a measurement,
like body size or whatever, but you can also use them in a way like Hollywood 3D animators would.
“- Yeah, I mean, that's what that's what caught my eye.”
They were just amazing. They're sort of like 3D, but in this extreme detail. And they look like aliens. - I mean, the ants only look like aliens because they look alien to us, right?
They are a bit strange because they're so small. And like our eyes are just not good enough to really take it all in at once. And that's, I think it's like one of the basic aspects why digital library of animal shapes and forms
can be very important. It's because so much of like the world out there, it's just so tiny and for us to engage with it more, we need them at like the same scale or even at like larger scales than ourselves.
- Tell me about the tool that you used. I mean, is this something that you could do in your local lab or like with a CT scanner in a hospital or do you need something special? - So definitely not with a CT scanner in a hospital
because the resolution is like usually much lower. But what we use here was a synchrotron light source. So a certain type of like particle accelerator that generates really high energy synchrotron X-ray radiation and we harness that to do a micro CT scan very, very fast.
But that's not the end of it, right? Because like a lot of X-ray radiation in a room
Would make it very dangerous.
So another key part of the technology here
that we have a robot that exchanges the samples for us and then the last thing is that we need a high speed camera to like cope with all that speed.
“- When you say it's really fast, how fast are we talking?”
For one ant. - So for one ant, the imaging itself would be just about 30 seconds and then at the time when we recorded just another 30 seconds just to transfer the data.
- Oh wow, so very fast. - Very fast, especially compared to what we do in laboratory micro CTs for insects. So there we talk about like more like A to 12 hours for one ant. - Wow, okay, so you can do a lot in a short amount of time.
I mean, and can you load up your robot with like two thousand ants and just press play? - At that time, it was a little bit more limited. So we did 50 at a time and we still had to like turn through a few night shifts to make it work within a week.
- What resolution can you get to? - So just in terms of numbers, the absolute resolution of like a voxel, which is a 3D pixel, is 1.2 to micrometers. That's the highest resolution that we have.
But in terms of like outer shape and that to me, you can resolve the delicate hair that you find on like ant bodies and then on the internal side, you can resolve up to like individual muscle fibers. - So you're getting like all the squishy stuff
inside the ants, not just the shell.
“- Yeah, and it's really important like especially”
for scientific application that we have the technology where we cannot only look at like the outer appearance of the ants, right there's so much insight that's going on and that used to be very, very difficult to study in that like the brain or the guts
and the musculoskeletia of the ants, right? So like ants are really well known for their insane strength and that must come from somewhere, but it's very challenging to study that. Having 3D data to look inside of them,
that makes it a lot easier. - You made the data freely accessible. How do you want people to use it? - The way it's developing right now,
I would always like see this in like two different ways.
So there's the scientific aspect of using the data for like large scale projects on like ant evolution and biodiversity. But we also starting to see this kind of like more engagement with people that are not coming from the science world
that might just be happy with like learning a little bit more about ants and like ant shapes and stuff. - That's us, by the way. That were your use case for that. - Nice.
“I think the number of like people working with like 3D data”
like video games are getting ever more popular that would be the other side of it. So there's like people that want to engage with like 3D data of things that they don't like normally see in their daily 3D lives.
- These images are arresting. Would you describe them as beautiful? - I think yes, I would say it's beautiful and it's in the quiet taste. I think like the aspects of like symmetry and asymmetry
and sculpture and like forms, extreme forms. They are something that like the more you look at it the more you understand that the more you come to appreciate it. - Is there a world where you're gonna try to train AI on the status of that we can learn more
about ant biology or ant evolution using those tools? - Yes for sure. I think as soon as we're done here I would have to sit down and do a bunch of like annotations to train these models.
No one's going on Instagram and just like posting a picture of an ant and just like oh this particular is like the left-hine leg
of the ant and then we would have to do this like a million
times over to really be able to generate a model like that. So we need to all start from scratch here and make use the data that we're given now. - I mean how would you use an ant AI model? Like why would that be useful?
- So for science I would just use an AI model that might be able to distinguish in the 3D data what is the access skeleton of the ant and what is the muscles of the ant and what is like all the nervous tissue of the ant
and then I could do this for all 2,000s of them and then bring in the phylogenetic tree and then I can really say something about the evolution of these traits. And then on the society aspect
like when I have an AI model that can tell me that like this part of the ant is its head then we would have a much easier workflow to like getting like better and more accurate animations. - Yeah, for a bug's life, you know, two or three.
- Yeah, it's like a bug's life, two and boogaloo. (laughing) - Are you hoping to do this with other creatures? - Yeah, so that's really like why we're calling it
The pilot study.
Is that really like by using this like key technology
that breaks the bottleneck of like scanning time and then arranging around the like the collaboration effort but then also the processing efforts. We're really trying to show that it's possible to scale this up even further and like I'm still,
I still have a vested interest in doing more of this for ants but there should be nothing that like excludes other small and vertebrate groups or like other insect groups to be scanned like this.
“- Was there anything that made you as an ant person?”
- Just go, what? - That's really, let me just think.
That is a question that has never come up.
No, I think as an ant person, right? I speak a lot about like the diversity of ants and sometimes it just becomes like an automatic response where I say like that ants are so diverse but with this data set, like every time I open
one of those scans and there's like two thousand of them, right? So there are still a lot of scans
“that I've never opened before that just makes me realize”
again and again how different these ants actually are.
And so even to me as like a researcher, I sometimes like brush over the fact that they are so diverse and so different and like I don't really fully encompass it but when I open one of these scans, that really hits me immediately.
- Right and it's easy to overlook as you say because we can't resolve those details with our eyes. So it's really appreciate that diversity you need a tool like this. - Exactly.
- Dr. Julian Katzka, a postdoc
“at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History,”
he worked on this project while he was a PhD student at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. Thank you Julian. - Thank you. - And you can see some of this ant glam
on our website sciencefriade.com/ants. Seriously, it is worth a look. I promise you will not regret it. This episode was produced by Charles Berkwist and if this podcast helps you get
a different view of the world, please recommend it to a friend, insect, or otherwise, or leave even just like a teeny, tiny little review, wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening.
I'm Florlik Twin.
