November 11, 2018
When I get together with my family, the conversation always turns to science. Both of my parents spent their careers as public land managers and have an innate love for the environment and asking questions about the world. On long drives west from Wyoming, we’d talk about the salmon population declines, fire frequency, butterfly migrations, invasive plant species, and beaver architects. In all of these discussions, I always assumed that the “scientists” had it figured out. That they could easily resolve whatever issue we were talking about. That scientists could easily determine where sage grouse leks were, the number of individuals present, and the success of the breeding ritual in the coming spring. The lack was simply underfunding and under-empowerment of science. That’s why scientists relied on people like me to go out with my dad in the spring and sit at a lek site to count those birds and record evidence of their mating dances. Right? No. I now know that I was wrong. “Scientists” actually do not have “the answers”. The scientific method allows us to ask questions and then spend years figuring it out for a very particular instance of the problem. Every method employed for answering a question will have its flaws and assumptions have to be made that are always limiting. Often, scientists will ask a broad question and then reduce that question to its basic components, which can be manipulated and controlled in the laboratory environment. This process is crucial to getting at some sort of answer, but that answer may be very different when you expand back out of the laboratory. This is why a major component of my education has been learning to ask the right questions, learning how and when to spend the resources that are available, and being able to quantify the error in the answers that I produce. In Optical Imaging class this week, we discussed a paper on ant foraging behavior. The authors wanted to be able to measure trophallactic events, which is when forager ants feed non-forager ants by regurgitating food from their “social stomachs”, much like how mother birds feed their hatchlings. This paper on ants reminded me of videos I had seen where an artist poured liquid metal down an ant hill to preserve the intricate tunnels underground and then dug up the metal structure. It was fascinating to see the complex 3D mold of the ant’s home that exists entirely beneath the single hole that we can see from the surface. This video raised an interesting idea. If I wanted to study anything about the ants- their colony structure, diet, behavior, strategy for surviving winter, I’d have to either destroy their home (and them) or rely only on observations from the surface. This is an example of how current technology and current scientific strategies do not allow us to answer basic questions that seem so simple to address. To continue with the ant paper, these researchers brought the ants into the lab into an artificial home that was an enclosed platform. They used a recently developed technique for tracking individuals, which is called barcoding. Each ant is marked with a unique tag that can be visually identified by a human or by software and thus tracked as it moves about in its home. They also added fluorescent dye to sugar-water and were able to capture videos of forager ants feeding the non-forager ants (trophallactic events). What’s crazy though is that it was easier to manually count these events in the video (to have someone sit there and watch hours of video and click every time a feeding even occurred) than it was to develop a computer program that could identify these events automatically. This is a perfect example of something I would have assumed scientists could do, easily. That tracking individuals or identifying behaviors on a computer program would be a thing of the past. But they’re not. People are actively working on these problems. And we haven’t even attempted accurate measurement of these behaviors in a natural system. The implications of this are pretty big. I am reminded of the Science Marches of a year ago where people were in the streets demanding that science guide our policy making. “Science reveals reality”. “The good thing about science is that it’s true, whether you believe in it or not”. “Scientists speaking truth to power”. It is so hard to get behind the Science March knowing the limitations of science. Only certain questions get funded, only certain individuals ask the questions, only certain types of questions can be answered in the first place, and all of those answers have measurable and unmeasurable uncertainty. I do believe that science is a fantastic tool that should be guiding decision making, but science should not be taken as fact. And I do not think it helps to make people believe that science has the answers. Each scientist makes their own choices in study design and purpose. They decide whether to destroy the any colony or to observe from the surface. Each choice influences the answers they produce as well as our societal impressions and judgements of the world around us which can guide our political voices, economic choices, and passions. Sources: Greenwald, E., Segre, E., Feinerman, O. 2015. Ant trophallactic networks: Simultaneous measurement of interaction patterns and food dissemination. Scientific Reports. 5. 12496. DOI: 10.1038/srep12496. Casting a Fire Ant Colony with Molten Aluminum (Cast #043) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGJ2jMZ-gaI
1 Comment
|
AuthorSierra is a graduate student in the Barger Lab at CU Boulder studying microbial ecology for dryland restoration. Archives
August 2023
Categories |