Agapostemon sp. – Halictidae
Fairport, NY, USA

Photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 20D.
ISO 100, f/13, 1/250 sec, twin flash diffused through tracing paper

A couple years back I posted a short bit on how to register photo copyright with the U.S. government. That turned out to be the last time I filled out a registration with pen and paper. For all subsequent submissions I’ve used the new ECO system at http://www.copyright.gov/eco.

Let me disabuse you of any preconception that the online method is easier. You’ll need to clear an hour or two out of your schedule to prepare a submission. The new process involves clicking though an interminable array of confusing steps, filling out an order of magnitude more information than was requested in the paper form, and jockeying awkwardly between upload and payment sites.

Fortunately, photo attorney Carolyn Wright has created a set of directions that are clearer than anything the copyright office provides. I won’t duplicate her efforts by explaining how it works, other than to offer the following pointer: compress your images into a series of .zip files before you begin. How many files you’ll need will depend on the speed of your internet connection, as ECO logs you out after an hour. As with the old system, you can register an unlimited number of images in a single batch and a single fee.

Despite the hassle, I find online registration worthwhile. For one, it’s ten bucks cheaper. And more importantly, the turnaround time is several months faster than paper submission. So if you need your reg numbers quickly, ECO is really your only option.

Anyway, this is been an absolutely thrilling post. So here’s an ant:

this photograph is registered copyright VAu 979-301

15 points to the first person who can identify it.

Theo Jansen’s amazing roaming artwork:

more here and here.

Photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 20D.
ISO 100, f/13, 1/250 sec, twin flash diffused through tracing paper

In reading various web reactions to news that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act contained nearly 1 million dollars for ant research at Arizona State University and the University of Arizona, it seems there’s a lot of confusion about how something like ant behavior winds up getting a stimulus check.  Here’s an explanation.

Our starting point is the observation that stimulus has to be fast to be effective.  The obvious problem is that we all know how fast goverment usually acts, and if the government were to put out a call for stimulus proposals with a full process of review and oversight, stimulus money wouldn’t arrive until 2012 or so.  Just as costly, but far too late to do any good.  So the architects of the stimulus needed to find job-creating projects that were pre-reviewed and ready to roll as soon as the cash hit the accounts.

A rich source of boots-on-the-ground projects is the National Science Foundation (NSF), which got 0.3% of the stimulus package.  NSF receives at least four times as many proposals as it can fund.   Every year, a great many projects that the reviewers recommend for funding do not receive a penny.  So NSF has a backlog of unfunded studies that are deemed excellent.  The labs are in place, the experiments are planned, and all that is needed is salary to hire students and postdocs to do the work.

The stimulus allowed NSF to take projects they’d already recommended for funding and fund them.  The offending Arizona ant projects were just two of many. That’s it.

So if you were planning to picket ASU in protest of misguided stimulus money, remember that those naughty ant researchers never asked for stimulus funds.  They submitted regular proposals through the normal NSF pipeline.  Their grants were reviewed and approved by a panel of experts before the stimulus bill was even conceived.  There was no back room deal between Rahm Emanuel and an international cabal of shady myrmecologists.  Just a higher rate of funding through the existing infrastructure.

Now, we can debate whether deficit spending in a recession is sound policy.  Or whether the stimulus should have gone to science agencies in the first place.  Valid issues for discussion, all.  But one thing that really is ridiculous is the notion that somehow John McCain and Tom Coburn know best what sort of research should be funded.

Current funding allocations are decided by anonymous panels of scientific reviewers.  As a system it works relatively well for supporting research on the merits.  However, I can’t imagine anything that would turn the system into a bigger barrel of pork than allowing members of Congress to give line-item funding approval to individual projects.  If John McCain had his way, our national science establishment would become little more than politics as usual.

Heterospilus sp., undescribed species, Costa Rica
click to view the original image

I’ve been playing around a bit more with the freeware program CombineZP, and I thought I’d share this image of one of the wasps I’m working on in my current position.  The image is a composite from 14 photos taken through a microscope at different focal depths.

The parasitic wasp genus Heterospilus is common and hyperdiverse in the new world tropics.  It is also almost entirely unstudied.  Our project is restricted to the taxonomy of the Costa Rican fauna, and we have about 500 new species just from that small country.   The diversity is insane- I’m not sure how we’re going to come up with names for all of them.

The Republican Party speaks:

GOP senators on Tuesday highlighted “pure waste” in the billions of stimulus funds spent this year, including money for fossil research in Argentina, puppet shows and to protect cruise ships from terrorist attacks…

What does the Republican Party consider wasteful? Science, apparently:

Half a million dollars went to Arizona State University to study the genetic makeup of ants to determine distinctive roles in ant colonies; $450,000 went to the University of Arizona to study the division of labor in ant colonies.

“I had no idea that so much expertise concerning ants resided in the major universities of my state,” said McCain. “I say that with an element of pride, but I’m not sure it’s deserving of these taxpayers’ dollars.”

This is bullshit. How does taxpayer-funded ant research produce value for the economy? I’ll let National Geographic explain:

Other companies also have profited by imitating ants. In Italy and Switzerland, fleets of trucks carrying milk and dairy products, heating oil, and groceries all use ant-foraging rules to find the best routes for deliveries. In England and France, telephone companies have made calls go through faster on their networks by programming messages to deposit virtual pheromones at switching stations, just as ants leave signals for other ants to show them the best trails.

In the U.S., Southwest Airlines has tested an ant-based model to improve service at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix. With about 200 aircraft a day taking off and landing on two runways and using gates at three concourses, the company wanted to make sure that each plane got in and out as quickly as possible, even if it arrived early or late.

Ants are faced with the same logistical problems that we face in our own societies. With limited resources, how should ants most efficiently transport cargo? What are the fastest ways to share information? How do ants manage traffic congestion? What is the best way to patrol to territorial boundaries? How do agricultural species maintain their cultivars free from weeds?

120 million years of evolution have produced over 12,000 extant ant species. Each of these has found solutions to various logistical issues appropriate to their ecological context.  Some solutions- maybe even most of them- will not directly apply to human problems. But some do. And taxpayer-funded research into ant behavior is yielding organizational insights that may already be saving companies more than the public originally invested in the research.

I suppose a valid ideological counter-argument might be made that science should not be a responsibility of government, and that research investment should be left to the private sector. Fair enough. Or perhaps a careful cost-benefit analysis might show that programs other than myrmecology would prove a more lucrative research investment. Fine.

But either of these approaches are vastly more sophisticated than what the Republicans are doing. In the place of staking out a coherent position, they’ve instead read through the stimulus bill and fingered words that made them snicker.

Money for bee learning? Ha, ha, must be wasteful. Fossils in Argentina? Ho Ho!

And this is the entirety of Republican intellectual engagement on spending policy. Juvenile theatrics of pointing and laughing at things they neither understand nor wish to.

Formica integroides wood ants tending pine aphids (California, USA)

Photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS D60.
ISO 100, f/13, 1/200 sec, twin flash diffused through tracing paper

The annual Entomological Society of America meeting is next week (Dec 13-16) in Indianapolis.  I’m giving two presentations- one on Pheidole and one on Heterospilus- that the sadistic conference organizers scheduled for the very last day when no one is around.   So if you are attending and happen to miss your flight out, consider heading back to the conference center to catch my talks.

The 2009 meeting will be a good one for we social insect people.  I am especially looking forward to the Hoelldobler & Wilson symposium, but the rest of the program is packed with goodies.

Also.  Apparently, we bug bloggers are supposed to dress like Princess Leia so that people recognize us.

I dare you not to get this Sesame Street classic stuck in your head.