Sticky feet!

A video from Cambridge University highlights an infectiously enthusiastic Chris Clemente as he figures out how ants stick to smooth surfaces:

Wow.

Two things strike me about the video. First, they simplified the science for a lay audience without fundamentally changing it. That’s something of a rarity, as any scientist who has seen their work covered in the media can attest. Second, they did this while retaining a sense of humor and the strong sense of humanity in the scientific process.

Most scientists I know have a similarly intense fascination with their subjects- that’s a rich vein for promoters of science to tap. This obviously was an expensive piece. Professional grade equipment and skilled videographers, of course.  But if these sorts of productions can affect the public perception of science, they may be an investment worth making.

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Arizona Daily Star covers “Planet of the Ants”

A British film crew is in Arizona to film “Planet of the Ants,” a National Geographic Television documentary about the picnic-spoiling arthropods.

The filmmakers, who shot in Phoenix and Tucson over the past couple of weeks, are now in the town of Portal, near the New Mexico border, until Wednesday, when they’ll head back to England.

The leader of the crew, producer Martin Dohrn, director of the British production company Ammonite Ltd., said Arizona is a prime spot for ant filming.”

More here, and my photo essay on the filming is here.

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Random associations of photo and story

Speaking of bad science reporting…

Not the right ant.

Nope.

Camponotus?  You’ve gotta be kidding.

It isn’t Lasius, either.

Nor Ectatomma. (And isn’t that Corrie Moreau’s copyrighted photo?).

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The media’s coverage of the Martialis discovery

Here’s something that bugs me.  Instead of emphasizing the real significance of the find, a discovery like the “Mars ant” Martialis heureka is usually condensed down to  “Wow, this ant is weird!”.

I’ve pasted below a sampling of leads:

Newly-Discovered Bizarre Ant – Boing Boing

‘Ant From Mars’ Discovered in Amazon Rainforest – Fox News

‘Ant from Mars’ found in Amazon jungle – Science News

But weirdness misses the point.  We have weird ants already.  The suicidal exploding Camponotus is plenty weird.  So are the gliding ants, and the ants that swim.  The real story here is the evolutionary position of Martialis.  Among the first things that happened after the emergence of ants was speciation into two lineages: one leading to Martialis, the other leading to all the other ants.

What’s the point? The important scientific findings are those with implications that reach beyond the immediate discovery.  Having this new lineage attached to the ant evolutionary tree is all fine and good in its own right, but this new branch will allow for all sorts of new evolutionary studies.  Biologists use evolutionary trees to measure rates of changes in key traits, and to test hypotheses about the sequence of evolutionary events and the processes behind them.  For students of evolution, the significance of Martialis is akin to the launch of a new space telescope for astronomers. We’re in a better position to test some of these ideas we have about how insects evolve.

I don’t mean to tar the journalists here.  Some news outlets get it.  Nature news, for instance, draws an appropriate analogy by calling Martialis the myrmecologists’ platypus, and Discover’s headline reads “Ant from Mars Offers Clues to Insect Evolution.”

Instead, the fundamental problem is that most non-biologists don’t understand what evolutionary scientists do.  Journalists may or may not understand evolution, but they have to write for the untrained public.  So the main point is too often dumbed-down to a simple, yet irrelevant, “Darn, that’s strange”.

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