Building a digital ant gallery, from the ground up

How a particle accelerator, a robot, highspeed cameras, and 2,000 ants came together to paint a picture of biological diversity.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ira Flatow?

  Science Friday is supported by MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design. MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  WNYC is supported by Bear. Science is about asking questions, testing, trying again. It's not easy, but it's relentless. It evolves, and that's why science delivers. Learn more at sciencedelivers.com.

• 0:33Flora Lichtman?

  Hi, I'm Flora Lichtman, and you're listening to Science Friday. In this seminal insect film, A Bug's Life, we're given a bug's eye view of the world.

• 0:44Speaker 03

  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.

• 0:55Flora Lichtman?

  We come face to mandible with ants. Their antenna, their spindly legs, everything. And they're delightful, but perhaps the accuracy left a little something to be desired. Enter the AntScan Project, which has generated high-resolution X-ray images of over 2,000 real ants from over 700 species. And I gotta say, the results really are stunning. This is ants in all of their beautiful and frightening glory. Joining me now to dig into this mound of ant data is Dr. Julian Katska. He worked on this project while a PhD student at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. Hi, Julian.

• 1:40Speaker 04

  Hi, Flora. Thanks for having me.

• 1:42Flora Lichtman?

  Thanks for being here. Okay, so you came into this work comparing the mouthparts of dozens of ant species.

• 1:52Flora Lichtman?

  Why mouthparts?

• 1:54Speaker 04

  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 ant species is enormous. And that also extends into their forms and shapes, particularly in the mouthparts, because they are the first tool that ants use in their daily lives. So mascot model is this South American army ant. They have small ant workers, but then also large soldiers. And these large soldiers have these fishhook-like mandibles that you could even use to staple a wound.

• 2:39Speaker 04

  Their bite is so fierce that they would never let go. And I think the theory here is that these mandibles 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 mouthparts was motivating my PhD research.

• 2:56Flora Lichtman?

  Describe for people who can't see it, and we'll put some on our website at sciencefriday.com/ants. What do the images look like?

• 3:06Speaker 04

  So the images, they are derived from x-ray images. So if you've ever taken an x-ray image at a hospital, you have this see-through x-ray image. And then if you would turn yourself around while taking these x-ray images enough times, you could mathematically reconstruct the 3D volume. So that is the technology behind computer tomography. And that's exactly what we did with AntScan. The data that we end up with are slices of images that are grayscale. And so they contain the anatomy of the ants.

• 3:41Flora Lichtman?

  And then you put them together, and you can color them and make them beautiful, too.

• 3:45Speaker 04

  Yes, so yeah, so the tomography data is like the raw data and there's like plenty of methods that you can use to generate something out of it. So like 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.

• 4:05Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah, I mean, that's what that's what caught my eye. They were just amazing. They're sort of they're like 3D, but in this extreme detail and they're they look like aliens.

• 4:16Speaker 04

  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 to really take it all in at once. And that's, I think, is like one of the basic aspects why digital library of animal shapes and forms can be very important is because so much of like the world out there is just so tiny. And for us to to engage with it more, we need them at like the same scale or even at like larger scales than ourselves.

• 4:50Flora Lichtman?

  Tell me about the tool that you used. I mean, is this something that that you could do in your local lab or like with a CT scanner in a hospital or do you need something special?

• 5:01Speaker 04

  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 samples for us. And then the last thing is that we need a high-speed camera to like cope with all that speed.

• 5:46Flora Lichtman?

  When you say it's really fast, how fast are we talking? For one ant?

• 5:50Speaker 04

  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.

• 6:02Flora Lichtman?

  Oh, wow. So very fast.

• 6:04Speaker 04

  Very fast, like especially compared to like what we do in laboratory micro CTs for insects. So there we talk about like more like eight to 12 hours for one ant.

• 6:14Flora Lichtman?

  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 2,000 ants and just press play?

• 6:22Speaker 04

  At that time, it was a little bit more limited, so we did 50 at a time. And we still had to churn through a few night shifts to make it work within a week.

• 6:32Flora Lichtman?

  What resolution can you get to?

• 6:35Speaker 04

  So just in terms of numbers, the absolute resolution of like a voxel, which is a 3D pixel, is 1.22 micrometers. That's the highest resolution that we have. But in terms of like outer shape anatomy, you can resolve the delicate hairs that you find on ant bodies. And then on the internal side, you can resolve up to like individual muscle fibers.

• 7:00Flora Lichtman?

  So you're getting like all the squishy stuff inside the ants, not just the shell?

• 7:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it's really important, especially for scientific application, that we have a technology where we cannot only look at like the the outer appearance of the ants. Right? There's so much inside that's going on. And that used to be really very difficult to study. And that like is the the brain, all the guts and the musculature 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.

• 7:39Flora Lichtman?

  You made the data freely accessible. How do you want people to use it?

• 7:43Speaker 04

  The way it's 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 ant biodiversity. But we're 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.

• 8:07Flora Lichtman?

  That's us, by the way. That were your use case for that. Yeah.

• 8:11Speaker 04

  Nice. I think the 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 that's like people that want to engage with like 3D data of things that they don't like normally see in their in their daily 3D lives.

• 8:30Flora Lichtman?

  These images are arresting. Would you describe them as beautiful?

• 8:36Speaker 04

  I think, yes. I would say it's beautiful and it's an acquired taste.

• 8:42Speaker 04

  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 it, the more you come to appreciate it.

• 8:57Flora Lichtman?

  Is there a world where you're going to try to train AI on this data so that, you know, we can learn more about ant biology or ant evolution using those tools?

• 9:07Speaker 04

  Yes, for sure. I think as soon as, as we're done here, I will have to sit down and do a bunch of like annotations to train these models. No one's going on Instagram and is like posting a picture of an ant and saying like, oh, this particularly is like the left hind leg of the ant. And then we would have to do this like a million times over to really be able to, 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.

• 9:36Flora Lichtman?

  I mean, how would you use an ant AI model? Like, why would that be useful?

• 9:41Speaker 04

  So for science, I would just use an AI model that might be able to like distinguish in the 3D data, what is the exoskeleton 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 2,000 of them and then bring in a 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 a 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.

• 10:18Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah, for a Bug's Life, you know, two or three.

• 10:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like a Bug's Life 2 and Boogaloo.

• 10:26Flora Lichtman?

  Are you hoping to do this with other creatures?

• 10:29Speaker 04

  Yes, so that's really like why we're calling it a pilot study is that really like by using this like key technology that that breaks the bottleneck of like scanning time and then arranging around it, the like the collaboration effort, but then also the processing efforts. We're really trying to show that it's that it's possible to scale this up even further. And like, I mean, 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 invertebrate groups, so like other insect groups to be scanned like this.

• 11:02Flora Lichtman?

  Was there anything that made you as, you know, as an ant person?

• 11:06Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 11:07Flora Lichtman?

  Just go, what?

• 11:13Speaker 04

  That's a really, um.

• 11:18Speaker 04

  Let me just think, I, that that is a question like that, that has never come up.

• 11:24Speaker 04

  No, I think, um, I think as an ant person, right, I, I speak a lot about like the diversity of ants and sometimes it just becomes like an automatic response, right, that 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 2,000 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, I don't really fully encompass it, but when I open one of these scans, that really hits me immediately.

• 12:07Flora Lichtman?

  Right, and it's easy to overlook, as you say, because we can't resolve those details with our eyes. So to really appreciate that diversity, you need a tool like this.

• 12:17Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 12:18Flora Lichtman?

  Dr. Julian Katska, 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.

• 12:30Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 12:31Flora Lichtman?

  And you can see some of this ant glam on our website, sciencefriday.com/ants. Seriously, it is worth a look. I promise you will not regret it. This episode was produced by Charles Berquist, 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 Flora Ligtman.