Crowd-sourcing Ant Science

Earlier this week, the internets were buzzing with a claim that Kickstarter is funding more projects than the National Endowment for the Arts.  It turns out that may not be strictly true, but it certainly is true that a lot of cool projects are being crowd-sourced that otherwise would never have made it off the ground.

I’ve mentioned some insecty Kickstarter projects before, like Meet The Beetle (a film about an endangered tiger beetle).  Unfortunately, Kickstarter is limited to arts and humanities. But now the concept of crowdsourcing has been harnessed for science!

Petridish.org is so new it hardly has a bacterial film growing on its website yet. Its first science crowd-sourcing project involves two awesome things: Insects and Madagascar.

“Unique” doesn’t begin to describe Madagascar. This giant island split from the African Continent over 160 million years ago, and over 90% of it’s mammal and reptile species occur no where else in the world.  Deforestation and erosion are critical threats to the island’s ecosystems, and many native species are endangered.

Brian Fisher, one of the folks behind AntWeb, is leading a project to document the ant species of a high remote preserve.   You might be wondering why you should care about ants in Madagascar.  You may especially be wondering this because you have figured out that at some point later in this post I’m going to hit you up for a donation.  I really like this statement from AntWeb that puts ants in context:

“At this moment, more than one thousand trillion ants are scurrying all over the Earth. If every human climbed aboard one side of a scale, and every ant crawled onto the other side, the scale would just about balance.”

Ants probably move more earth and recycle more dead things yearly than a whole army of human undertakers with bulldozers ever could.  Ants are a critical part of making the world’s living systems function.  The project description:

“Ants are the glue that hold forests together. But Madagascar’s hotspots of biodiversity are vanishing, and along with them unknown species. An estimated 40 percent of the island’s species, in fact, have already perished through human encroachment.

While ants aren’t as popular as furry and feathery animals, the insects turn over forest soil, breakdown debris, disperse crucial nutrients and otherwise support an unimaginable number of species both up, down and across the food chain. The insects are also a growing resource for antimicrobial and antifungal compound discovery, as many ants manufacture such chemicals to ward off disease and even farm food.

I need to reach one of the last standing pristine forests, called the Kasijy, before nearby populations burn them down to raise cattle. Researchers have visited the remote site only a handful of times because it’s a rugged, canyon-filled landscape resting on high blocks of limestone and sedimentary rock.Because Kasijy is so pristine, it also serves as a crucial data point of what Madagascar used to be like before the advent of modern civilization. The region and other forests are great places to understand the ongoing impacts of climate change on highly specialized ecosystems.

My expedition aims to:

• Inventory Kasijy’s untold new species and document their roles in a pristine natural ecosystem.
• Understand the biodiversity patterns of Madagascar and resolve our “bioilliteracy” of the Kasijy forest.
• Set up more robust conservation plans for the island.
• Raise awareness of Madagascar’s natural wonders and its ongoing plight.”

There are 39 days left to fund this project–I hope you can spare a dollar or two to help a researcher out!  Note that a large gift gets you acknowledged in any manuscripts published from this research.

Donate!

Book Review: The Gentle Subversive

The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement.  Mark Hamilton Lytle, 2007. Oxford Univ. Press.
Bug Rating: (with some caveats)

I have written quite a bit about Rachel Carson, mainly because I am baffled at the amount of vitriol still spewed over her book Silent Spring nearly 50 years after it’s publication.  It’s turned out to be my own personal mini-crusade, since everytime I mention the name of this woman people come out of the woodwork to say…well, ill-informed wing-nutty things, frankly, including people who should know better.

I find Carson fascinating not just because she is the focus of a modern dis-information campaign, but because she was a scientist that could write. And I mean REALLY write, not just to communicate, but to bring the beauty and love of the natural world that she saw around her alive.

In all the DDT hoopla, it seems people have forgotten that Carson wrote beautiful prose about science.  She wrote well enough to win a National Book Award, and to have her science book stay #1 on the New York Times best seller list for 86 weeks:

“If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.”

I was interested this short biography of Carson, and picked it up.  I’m really glad I did, because it helped me gain a better understanding of this woman and the huge challenges she faced.  And there were a lot of challenges.

Carson did not come from a wealthy family, and much of her life was occupied in chasing enough money to support herself and her extended family.  Carson moved her mother, her brother and sister, and her 2 nieces into one house–and became the primary financial support for all of them during the Depression.  In 1929, women did not commonly apply to Johns Hopkins, or gain admission to graduate school at Woods Hole.  Carson did both of those things successfully, and recieved a Masters in 1932.

She skipped pursuing a PhD in order to seek work, and was lucky enough to find a home in the Department of Fisheries.  She began writing radio scripts, and progressed to writing USFW publications and magazine pieces.  Carson published her first book in 1941–which was promptly eclipsed by a world at war, and did not prove to be very profitable.  In 1950, she got her big break with The Sea Around Us, which did bring enough income in to allow her to purchase a home in Maine and become an independent writer.  In 1950 Carson also had her first cancer tumor removed from her left breast.

Reading her story now, I can’t help but think of my many freelancing writer friends, and how they struggle to support their families and to try to make a living. It doesn’t seem to have gotten any easier in the last 50 years to be an independent writer.

Carson had a demanding family life. Her mother wanted to be connected and involved in Rachel’s life in a way that…well, I found kind of creepy.  Rachel’s niece (who was, remember, living with her and diabetic) had an out of wedlock child.  Carson became the primary caregiver for both her elderly mother and disabled niece, and could not afford to put either of them in a nursing home or have home help.  That Carson could write well under those conditions is pretty amazing.  And that doesn’t even begin to cover how much stress she must have been under when writing Silent Spring.

In 1958 Carson began work on what would become Silent Spring–her last book.   She had a radical mastectomy in 1959.  Early excerpts of the book attracted vitriolic criticism, and lots of gendered slurs.  ”Shrill.” “Emotional.” “Unscientific.”

In 1960 Carson developed secondary tumors and blood poisoning, and was confined to a wheelchair for many months.  In 1961 she developed an infection that caused her to loose her sight for several months, and was unable to read what she had written. In 1962, as Silent Spring was going to press, more tumors were found in her abdomen.  She wore a wig to testify in Congress, hiding her loss of hair from radiation treatments.  By late 1963 compression fractures in her spine from radiation treatments made walking difficult and painful. Carson died in Spring 1964.

This woman had ovaries of brass.  I am in awe of how tenacious and determined she must have been to finish this last project.  Her letters show she was hanging on by her fingertips, determined to see it through.

As for this book—how does it compare to other Carson biographies? It is short, and a quick read, and has enough footnotes you can be fairly sure of source material. I was very happy that the author chose to not speculate about the nature of Carson’s close friendships with other smart, sciency women of her time, since we don’t know for sure if they were or were not platonic or romantic.

The book itself sort of falls into two parts: things jerks said to Carson while she was alive, and things jerks say about her now that she’s dead.    It’s not comprehensive, but for a quick dip into the issue and a history of what Carson endured, it’s a good read.  I don’t think the author covered modern attacks on Carson very well, but much of the documentation of who paid for the “hit” on Carson  came out in late 2007/2008, so that’s understandable.

At one time I was pretty actively writing about Carson and DDT, and trying to combat the misinformation campaigns put out by various astroturf groups.  I eventually stopped, mostly because the people that comment on that topic scare me.  I have gotten many, many threats over those posts, most of them threats of sexual assault. Those posts about DDT and Rachel Carson are the reason that comments on posts close after 40 days on this blog, since that way I don’t have to go in daily and remove nasty spittle-flecked comments.

I can’t be intimidated into believing their lies about a brave woman and a wonderful writer, but I was intimidated enough that I stopped writing about Carson to stay under their radar.   I think I need to take a lesson from Ms. Carson herself. In the face of terrible pain and opposition, she WON with good writing and truth.

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”   Rachel Carson

I wonder if sometimes I feel driven to defend Carson because I see so much of my sister in her.  Both women are talented, had breast cancer much too young–and neither one seems able to catch a fucking break. Anything that could go wrong does seem to go wrong.

And by God, if you mess with my sister, you mess with ME.
I got your back, Rachel. I got your back.

Additional Reading:

• If you haven’t read Carson’s  “The Sense of Wonder” you should.
• How well have claims in Carson’s 1962 book held up? Pretty well, actually!
• A collection of things I and others have written to try to set the record straight about Carson and DDT
• PBS Carson Documentary
• Audio Interview with the Biography Author
• Interview with the Biography Author at Oxford Press Blog

A Different Kind of Bug Girl

Alternate title:

I Could Not Make This Shit Up If I Tried.

I’ve mentioned before that the nickname Bug Girl is occasionally used by people that are not me.  But this one is a new and unusual twist.

It appears that Wicked Pictures is making a “hardcore parody” of the film Men In Black.  If you haven’t seen MIB, it features a lot of alien insects, many of which just go Splat!

The parody apparently stars some actual Bug Girls (additional photo here).  Presumably there will also be insectile bodily fluid sharing in the parody version.

I think they look remarkably like my avatar.

What do you think?

ScienceOnline2012 Postmortem (and a book review)

When I got back from ScienceOnline, my boss asked me how it went.  (I was sort of AWOL from the first week of class, and she was not real thrilled about that.)   “It was one of the greatest experiences of my life” was my response.  That’s what I feel–but I’ve been trying to figure out WHY.

You can see the full list of attendees here–it’s a really fascinating bunch.  To name check just a few:  Wired. BoingBoing. Nature. Science. Ed Yong. Carl Zimmer. Museums. And, uh, independent blogger/social media types like me.  And so here I am, feeling like a little bug scuttling among giant writers. And I discover…that people actually read my shit. And know who the hell I am. Whoa.

Everyone was geeked about science and about communicating science.  IT WAS AWESOME.  But Why was it so awesome? I think Ed Yong nails it in his summary–we “knew” everyone before we arrived. Even though I hadn’t ever met 447 of the 450 folks attending in meatspace, I had chatted with them online, commented on their blogs, and read their books. From further discussion in the comments from David Dobbs:

“The steady message, via the unconference idea, that it’s a relatively level playing field — or, as someone put it on Twitter, that it’s not experts and non-experts, but different people all bringing different experiences in areas we’re all interested in. It’s a steady insistence that it’s not a producer-consumer model, with the audience full of consumers, but rather a conversation.

The other key, it seems to me, is that it’s a fairly balanced mix of mainly-scientists and mainly-journalists/communicators, so it’s not a single peer group, as it were — not a single discipline. There’s always this chemistry of excitement, of mixing with another tribe. To me that’s an important part of what distinguishes ScienceOnline. And I think it helps create the sense of humility and egalitarianism: Prominence in one area doesn’t make anyone top dog at this conference, because even the most distinguished people in one area are among not just their own discipline’s peers but amid those of another discipline in which they have little expertise or distinction.”

Just before I went to ScienceOnline, I read a book called Cognitive Surplus.  And it kind of blew my mind.  Shirky’s central thesis is that the web and the relatively large amount of leisure time in the first world (i.e, time not spent working for the man, or raising our food) has created an amazing opportunity.

We kill a lot of that free time in very unimaginative ways.  Americans spend 200 BILLION hours each year watching television. What if all that brain power was directed toward something?  Shirky posits a surplus of creative energy exists, and is only beginning to be tapped.  For example, take the humble LOLcat:

“Formed quickly and with a minimum of craft, the average LOLcat has the social value of a whoopie cushion and the lifespan of a mayfly.  Yet anyone seeing a LOLcat gets a second unrelated message: You can play this game too.”

The internet bridges the gap between doing nothing and doing something.  Creating a LOLcat is more than passive consumption of pre-packaged TV shows…and opens the door to doing other original things.

Time and space are not a constraint to community formation–ideas or passions now bring people together, rather than physical locations.  Scientists that blog online–even when it’s looked down upon by fellow scientists? We are modeling positive deviance.  It’s not so much what we write that is important, but THAT WE WRITE AT ALL.

We are creating a model for a new way of science communication.  And we are having a bitchin’ time doing it, which invites new people over to have fun with us.  You can play this game too.   We are showing lots of different ways to share science online to our friends, our friends’ friends, and to the random strange people who keep searching my blog for “sex with insects.”

It’s a kind of nerdibacter called social contagion.  The internet creates social change among total strangers. Think it’s too sparkly-kumbaya to really work?  Just look at an example from earlier this month: A shark researcher calls out a company for sponsoring a shark hunt.  He manages to mobilize an amazing network via Twitter, and the company not only pulls the promotion, but blacklists the person from ever posting with them again.  And that all played out within the space of one day.

Small individual creative acts (tweets or blog posts) can become a thing of lasting value.  Shared and unmanaged effort can produce useful and meaningful results.  No one is in charge, and that’s OK. The beauty of the web is that we don’t all have to have the same motivations, or skills, or professional level of skill. We don’t all have to be working toward the same goal.  We can still make change happen simply by putting our ideas out there.  And the value of that work isn’t from professional production values; it’s from the sharing.

A lot of the attendees at SciOnline were people like me–folks who don’t get paid to write about science. We do our thing (write, podcast, tweet, whatever) simply for the love of it.  And we are wearers of many hats–as Bora reports in his ScienceOnline2012 wrap-up post:

According to our registration form report, ScienceOnline2012 had 243 bloggers, 153 journalists, 151 scientists, 115 educators, 71 students, 43 enterpreneurs, 34 Web developers and 46 who identified as ‘other’. That total is almost 900, so on average everyone (457 people checked in at the registration desk) checked two boxes.

Even though the US is clearly falling apart politically, in a lot of ways SciOnline left me more optimistic and hopeful about the future than I’ve been for a long time.  All these people doing something because of a passion for science–it was wonderful.

Kevin is right:

“Magical things can happen when you enthusiastically open your mouth on the internet….Looking into others causes you to look into yourself. And then something really magical happens – we learn we are not alone.”

I will totally be up at 1AM next year trying to get a seat for ScienceOnline2013.  But you know what? If I don’t get a seat?  Or if I don’t have the time or energy to keep blogging/tweeting/whatevering at the same rate I do now?

It’s ok. The kids have it covered.

Hexapod Haiku Contest!

It’s time once again for the NCSU Insect Museum’s Hexapod Haiku Contest!

hexapod haiku -
short poems that celebrate
most Arthropoda

The goal of this contest is to encourage people to think about the myriad ways in which insects and other terrestrial arthropods interact with their environments and other organisms (including humans!) and to express these thoughts through short poems. Despite the name of this contest we actually encourage any short poems you’re inspired to write, including (but not limited to!):

• Haiku (of course): An elegant medium, traditionally focusing on seasonal changes and nature and with a relatively standard format and objective.
• Senryū: Similar in structure to haiku but focused on the foibles of of humans and, in our case, insects, rather than seasons and nature.
• Haiga: A haiku that is accompanied by an illustration. Include a photo or draw a picture!
• Any other short poem you want to write!

We offer four awards with (small) prizes: 1) best in show, 2) runner-up, 3) best entry from poet under the age of 13, 4) runner-up from poet under the age of 13. Poems from any of the categories listed above are eligible to win any of the awards and therefore are judged together.

We also have honorable mention categories that change every year depending on the submissions we get (most traditional, funniest, best IPM-themed poem, etc.)

Visit the NCSU Insect Museum website for details on how to enter.

You can also browse through the past 5 years of winners with the tag “haiku” for inspiration and enjoyment.  A favorite of mine from 2011:

flowers’ bouquet
rousts them from their slumber
— bacon for bees

Ento Box

Some time ago, I got an email from a student in the UK working on an Entomophagy project:

“I’m a postgraduate design student studying at the Royal College of Art in London, who is currently knee deep in a project on Entomophagy. Myself and 3 other students have spent the last four months developing a roadmap to western acceptance of bug eating.”

I referred them to Dave Gracer as the local Entomophagy Maven, and then sort of forgot about it. And then….Lo and Behold! They produced this project, with input from Dave and entomologists.

I’m not entirely sure what a Masters Degree in Innovation Design Engineering is, but if it produces results like this, I think we need more of them.  Well done!

More about the project:

“Ento is a project by Aran Dasan, Jacky Chung, Jonathan Fraser and Julene Aguirre-Bielchowsky, who are a team working together on the Innovation Design Engineering joint Masters course at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. We also collaborated with Kim Insu in producing the food, who is a chef in training at Le Cordon Bleu.

This project is the outcome of the team’s motivation to tackle the growing issue of food security in an increasingly hungry world. Discovering the environmental and nutritional benefits of insects as a sustainable alternative to the high energy required to produce other meats, we wanted to see how it could be introduced into Western cultures through design.

It’s not just about introducing a new food, it’s about understanding human perceptions and psychology, then using the design of innovative experiences and strategic thinking to drive cultural change.”

In other words, addressing the mental hangups we have about eating insects, as well as making the food look amazing. Their video addresses some of the ecological benefits to insect eating in a very amusing way.

Mercury in Birds and Bats

I want to highlight this research report for a couple of reasons.   First, it’s a summary of a lot of research on birds and bats–and it is alarming.  Major findings include:

• Current environmental mercury loads have the ability to significantly reduce reproductive success in several songbird species of conservation concern in the northeastern U.S. including the saltmarsh sparrow and rusty blackbird.
• Bats also build up significant body burdens of mercury;  individuals from multiple species from all 10 areas sampled exceeded the subclinical threshold for changes to neurochemistry.
• Mercury loading in songbirds is not only restricted during the breeding season; some species, such as the northern waterthrush, build up high levels of mercury during migration and in tropical wintering areas

Basically, this expands what we know about the dangers of biomagnification out into song birds and bats.  I’ve written about some of the research this report is based on before.

From an interview with an author:

“It is a game-changing paradigm shift,’’ Evers said. “For years, we’ve understood the notion that birds like an eagle can obtain toxins by eating a bass, which has eaten a perch, and the perch has eaten a fly. Now we understand the same kind of analogy can be applied to a water thrush, which eats a spider, which has eaten a smaller spider, which has eaten a fly.’’

The other reason I want to point you at this is because it’s a great example of how to produce a report on complex research and make it really accessible.  They don’t just have data; they have information on how to interpret the graphs.

The PDF report itself is beautiful to look at, and focuses on specific actions/conclusions that can be drawn from the data.  It’s a report that I could hand to any of my non-scientist coworkers and be confident they could read it and understand it.  The PDF is presented within the context of a page with lots of supplemental info, including jpgs of some of the figures.  This makes it easy for journalists to build a story.

A thermometer is used to indicate risk to certain species–which cleverly uses something commonly associated with Mercury, but also something a lay-person knows how to interpret without a lot of special background knowledge.

Lastly, they cited their research through the report in ways that let you look up the original research, but that doesn’t detract from your reading.  It makes a powerful case that we need to really start paying attention to the mercury in our environment–because it’s not just the birds that are exposed.

Additional Reading:

• Aquatic mercury in food webs
• USGS: Mercury in the Environment
• Game Changers: a report on how global warming and toxins might change hunting and fishing.
• EPA advisories on which states have fish too contaminated to eat

Spinning Spider Silk into Gold

What do you do if you are textile artists in Madagascar and want to promote traditional Malagasy weaving techniques?  You make a scarf and a golden cape spun from spider silk.  Using half a million dollars of your own money.

The story has been making the rounds lately, but these videos about its creation were so captivating I had to post them!  A team of people labored for years to capture spiders, and then persuade them to produce enough silk to weave a garment.  It’s a rather mind-boggling process:

“The spiders are harnessed … held down in a delicate way,” Godley says, “so you need people to do this who are very tactile so the spiders are not harmed. So there’s a chain of about 80 people who go out every morning at four o’clock, collect spiders, we get them in by 10 o’clock. They’re in boxes, they’re numbered, and then as they get silked, about 20 minutes later, they get released back into nature.”   (NPR interview)

The Madagascar Golden Orb Weaver Spider is the spider-goose that laid the golden…er, thread.  It’s estimated that  1,063,000 spiders contributed silk.  The color of the silk is amazing–I had no idea!  The embroidery is also beautiful, with a spider motif.

This second video has more info about the history of trying to make textiles out of spider silk, footage of the apparatus they used to collect the spider silk, and some natural history information about the orb weavers.

Enjoy!

I also scored a copy of the book Spider Silk:Evolution and 400 Million Years of Spinning, Waiting, Snagging, and Mating, so I’ll be posting a review soon.