Radiolab - Chasing Bugs

Episode Date: September 23, 2008

Remember the first time you ever saw an ant hill? That parade of black insects pouring in and out of a small sand mound...most of us stopped, looked and then moved on to other parts of the playground. E. O. Wilson is the kid who never took his eyes off the mound.

I should quite. You're listening to Radio Lab, the podcast. From New York Public Radio, WNYC, and NPR. Hello, Chad here, this is Radio Lab, the podcast. Coming to you now with not one of our big hour-long situations, but rather one of those in-betweens that we do between seasons. Our next season is about two months off. one of the programs that we're going to be presenting is about people who fall in love with science and then fall out of love with science.

And in that spirit, we thought we'd play a conversation for you now, which is more on the falling in love side. Robert Crulwich, my esteemed co-host, who you will hear in just a moment, recently interviewed maybe one of the greatest scientists alive, really, E.O. Wilson, he is a biologist, he is an entomologist, He is an entomologist, meaning he studies bugs. He's an author, a world-famous conservationist. He recently started the Encyclopedia of Life, which tries to make a list of every single species on the planet. He discovered so many things about how animals communicate,

which you'll hear in a moment, particularly ants. And if you heard our emergence show, you will recognize a bit from that show that repeats in this conversation, but it's really cool to hear the whole conversation without too many edits, which is what are going to play for you now. So here it is. Here's Robert Crowbridge speaking with E.O. Wilson

at the 90-second Street Y here in Manhattan. Let's see. For starters, I'm just curious. Did you know, do you remember the moment when you said the word scientist, comma, I want to be one? Not scientists, I guess entomologist.

You know, I just wanted to work on it. You said entomologist? Yeah. Oh, yes, when I was about eight or nine, I discovered that there were people who actually made their living chasing bugs. And, you know, every kid has a bug period. I was just set now never to grow out of mine. You were right of what you said. And down in Alabama, we had people who were driving around in green trucks for the Department of Agriculture,

and some of them were exterminating insects. and they were made their living by finding and studying bugs. And I said, well, that's what I want to do. Never mind being a fireman or anything like I don't want to do that. Kill bugs. I was, yeah, I was frozen in that ambition. At the age of seven, five, six, seven? Eight or nine when I really settled down with the...

Now, did science seize you or did science resees you, or did science rest, rescue you because you were you how many schools did you go to before you were the age of 14 or whatever it was uh yeah it was about uh 13 or 14 schools and 11 grades i skipped one grade so that made me always the runt of the class which didn't help see with the run social skills and a new kid every other new kid in the neighborhood yeah so that means what now do you have a choice here you could be the class clown or something or you could go off into the forest and make friends with a worm or something like that? Well, yeah, I guess that's a way of looking at it. I turned to nature and the woods and so on, and then I discovered that this eccentricity made me socially acceptable in an odd way. So I had the nickname Bugs when I was in my grammar school thing,

but then I had a snake period. A snake period. And this was in southern Alabama. I guess I was about 15 or 16 by that time. And there were about 40 species of snakes found down there. And in a period of time, about a year, I managed to find them all. I kept a lot of them in the backyard alive. And so I was now known as Snake Wilson.

It wasn't because in this intense football culture. I went out for football at this point at the Bruton High School in Alabama. And I weighed 112 pounds. That was the second lightest kid. There probably a couple of snakes have you than you. Wait, let me finish the story. I, I... You're a tough competitor.

Anyway, I, uh... So, uh, it turned out, you see, there was, uh, there were 23 people on the squad. And I was the entire third string. But anyway, I got respect in part because, uh, I was doing all these strange things. And, uh, Alabamaians are really, uh, they're really, very tolerant of eccentricity. They kind of like it, you know, the old, the odd ant that lives up in the attic, you know, that kind of thing. I got along very well, both as a naturalist, you know, fanatical collector and naturalist at the same, and then in high

school too. Any rate, so I, at the age of 16, I decided that the time had come to get serious about professional lithology. And so I decided to select the group of insects to study. And I said flies. They're marvelous. tremendous

diversity. And so I would start collecting flies. I wanted to become the world expert on flies. But the year was 1945. And in order to study flies, as many of you understand, you have to have insect pens, especially

special pins to put through the body of the specimens. It was steel. Yeah, insect pins were available at that time only from Czechoslovakia. And the supply had been cut off in the United States. Insect pins were unavailable. So I said, what's my favorite group of insects? You know, I don't have to stick pins through and that's the ants. So I got started my collection by going down to the drugstore and collecting these little pill

bottles and that with rubbing alcohol, which is isopropal alcohol, got massed in my collection started. So I built a large collection of ants that I took with me to the University of Alabama. Could you say that I was launched? But for the, for lack of pins and for the availability of rubbing alcohol, therefore ants, or was ants always going to be it and you would have gotten to it by whatever route? I think I eventually would have ended up with ants, but I would have been retarded there. I don't think I would have been able to do serious research until maybe I was 18. Now let's get on to the joy of, this may not be obvious to a lot of people, the joy of ants studies, because if you think about it, they do seem like somewhat indifferent to anyone who's observing them and so on.

And you might not wonder exactly why somebody would get the light out of looking at ants, but I want to take you back to one moment, which I think is one of my favorites ever. The question is how do these little ants communicate with one another? The year is 1953 and you're considering the problem. We know that at least for us, most of our communication goes because of things we hear or things we see. This does not seem to be the habit of ants. So you have some fire ants and the question is you notice that a scout will go find a piece of food and somehow tell the other ants, look what I found, come here and get the food. How do you figure out how the scout ant tells the other ants that, A, there is food and where it is?

We had the idea, even back then people did. There's biologists that the ants were somehow laying a trail down, and then they were telling the other ants, go out and follow that trail. But nobody knew where the trail came from, and they didn't know really how it worked, and they didn't know how ants communicated otherwise. And you're perfectly right. Human beings are really unusual, along with birds. we are audiovisual.

And that puts us in a tiny minority of all of the creatures on Earth, which are primarily chemical in their communication. It wasn't understood or appreciated at that time. Pheromones, many of you have heard the word pheromones. Pharomones are the key to understand the communication of the vast majority of animal species. They didn't know it then. And so one day I set out,

I was culturing fire ants then in the laboratory at Harvard. And I said, I'm going to get to the bottom of this. And the way I did it was to dissect these tiny, tiny ants. Very difficult to do, but I dissected them. Now, wait a second, wait a second. So you're watching the ant going along, and it's laying its abdomen or some part of its body. It's laying it on the ground. That's right.

I can see the ant running along, and under magnification, I can see that it's sticking out of sting and dragging the sting. Something's coming out of that sting. Like kind of like a fountain pin or something? A little bit like that, yeah. And so I proceed to, believe me, folks, this is the way science goes. I mean, it really is simple-minded. It's only later when you're doing the technical paper, you know,

and you're producing the mathematical models and you're describing the microanalysis and so on that it looks tough. It's really, this is the way you're thinking when you're doing science. So I said, I'm going to find out what the organs are inside this ant, and I'm going to track down where that stuff is coming from. So what I did was to do anatomy, and then, you know, just dissected. I knew approximately what the different glands were and so on. I mean, you snipped off the part where the glands were.

Well, you just dissect open. Oh, you opened it. Yeah, an ant. And just the way you would any animal. Although it's exceedingly difficult when it's about the size of, a great assault. That's the tough part. But anyway, aren't your hands going, well, yes, your hands is vibrating. And in fact, it was down at the limit. I didn't go to a micro manipulator, you know, which is when you're doing it with controls. And I did it

raw, manually, but it was right at the limit. So the way I did it was I got these very fine needles in, and because there was this inevitable vibration in your hand, you can see it when you in the microscope. Everybody has it. It's a little vibration. But highly magnified, it allowed me to use a needle like a jackhammer. Like a jackhammer? I could do it if I did

it just right, you know, and just open up the end. Anyway, I took out the various organs, one after the other, and I made a preparation, and I made an artificial trail. Wait a second, make sure I just follow this. You've now got like six organs, and you've got the little smushed each one of the

six organs, and then you're going to take, let me see if I remember this, you're going to take a, hmm, a sharpened birch wood applicator stick. Yes. And then I smear it out one organ after another. No effect. Wait, wait a second. Where are their ants? Are there ants? Yes. You have brought ants? Oh, I'm leading, I'm leading my artificial trails from the colony that I have in the lab. So there are ants over here. Yeah. You got your birch stick here and your drawing lines of gut stuff, I guess. It's basically what it is. Yeah, just different organs. I've watched. washed each one in turn and then smeared it out.

And finally I came to a little finger-shaped organ, which we didn't know the function of it. It's just a tiny little thing tucked down there, and I smeared that out. And it's incredible. It wasn't, I didn't have to tell them to follow that trail. They exploded out of the nest running along that thing.

Does that mean like if you take in the stick, could you go, do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. And all the other would go, do-do-do-do-do. Yeah, well, I, actually, I started playing around with this. it was so effective for demonstrations, I would write my name. And a column of 100, 200, 200, 100 ants would come pouring out back and forth, and they'd actually write my name and ant.

So, well, that was the beginning. You know, just to show that there is some seriousness to this. That was the beginning. We have an offended ant lover somewhere in the room. All right. Now I want to finish this little section because this is my favorite story of all. When you get bad, you get bad. Once you begin to figure out how these chemicals and the

and the smells that they give off become communicating devices, you discover that when an ant dies, this doesn't happen to be exactly in that category. When the ant dies, ants not being the smartest creatures around, it just sort of dies and it just sits there, and for the first day or two, all the other ants just don't even notice it. And then when it begins to decompose, it begins to give off a smell, and then the first time it gives off a smell,

I guess the next ant that passes by goes, whoo! And says, we have a dead ant here. That's right. And he takes the ant and puts it in the dead place. I guess the ant. Dead place. Yeah, I'll tell you about the experiment

because I had a lot of fun with it. But first, but let me say that my chemist colleagues and I quickly worked out the chemical code of the ants. We found somewhere, or a good part of it, we found that the ants were communicating somewhere between 10 and with 10 to 20 chemical signals. They have glands all over their bodies, the function of which were unknown.

And many of these glands produce pheromones, some to alarm, some to recruit, some to identify themselves as a member of a cast and so on. And one of them says, I am dead. Oh, I'm coming to that, yeah. Well, how does an ant, when it dies, how is it identified? Do you say, you know, how do the others know?

When an ant dies, then for a while it just lies there. You know, if we saw one of us just lying on the ground like this, we'd probably do something. Maybe not in New York, but I mean, well, but usually we do something, because, you know, we're audio-visual. But in the case of the ants, there has to be... So an interesting idea is New York, most ant-like city in America. Anyway, go ahead. Great. So the ant begins to decompose.

And I was really going crazy with this. We were so successful. I mean, we were making one discovery after another. It was wonderful. And I was going crazy with this. So I said, how does an ant identify a corpse? It's got to be in the substances that are being produced by decomposition. It's got to be.

And in those days, we had just hit the part. just hit upon animal behaviors generally, it just hit upon the idea of assigned stimuli, that animals don't grasp a whole lot of stimuli the way we do, you know, and assess the gestalt in a variety of signals. They usually work out of one substance or a very small number of substances or a site, and then that releases their complex behavior. So I was going to find that what's the the corpse substance. It turns out, well, this is how science works across. It turned out that for some reason I never found out

the chemist had already identified a large number of decomposition substances in rotting insects. And so with that as my guide, I gathered in pure form on my laboratory shelf a whole variety of them. And the place for a while smelled like a, a combination between an outhouse

and a churnal house. I'll list you some of the smells. You have rotten fish smell, fecese smell, rancid body smell. Yeah, that's the fatty acids that you have in body water. So when people were walking up the corridor

in your building, what did they like stay? I never tried to explain to them. But there was it was a very strange smell place. You know, skate hole was one of the economy. That's the essence of feces. Yes. Well, at any rate, I then started with my, you know, typical experiments. I started

daubing dummy ants with tiny, tiny amounts of these different substances and observing, and nothing happened until finally I came to one of the substances, oleic acid. Oleic acid. Yes, a fatty acid of a particular kind. bingo, the ants then picked it up and the dummy with nothing but the only signal they had was oleic acid and they took it and dropped that dummy on the refuse pile. And so I had it. I essentially had it. Now here's where you get bad.

Ah, yeah, that's right. Okay. Well, you know, you get to play around at this point. So I said, what would happen if I put oleic acid on a live ant? What happens is that nothing this ant says, if they said anything, you know, nothing the ant does does any good because now it is a corpse. And the other ant picked this live kicking ant up and out it goes and it's dropped on the refuse pile.

So it's a wiggly, obviously alive and perfectly healthy. And the other ants thinking, you're dead, you're dead, you're dead, all the way to the grade. Goodbye. What happened then was that the ant would proceed to clean itself. are always cleaning themselves. And finally, but if it didn't clean itself enough when it got back, picked up and brought out, so finally it's clean enough, and then it can reenter the realm of the living.

You have once sometimes described the process of science as you do it as a form of storytelling. What did you mean by that? Well, I mean, I think as everyone here understands that human beings are the storytelling species. The way we think is in narrative. You know, we build scenarios forward, and we're making a decision, we're running one scenario after another forward. We're telling a story to ourselves.

I'm going to do this, then that will follow, and so-and-so will probably do this and so on, and I will lose that or gain this, or I will finish that. And they tell stories of real past, what happened to me, and then, of course, this allows them to make fictional stories. The scientist tells stories, and he hopes they will be true stories. He's thinking, oh, there's this, there's that, this creature is doing this, that creature

must be detecting this or have evolved in such a way, and then you make a series of stories. And these are called hypotheses. And the fancy term then for doing science by storytelling is the method of multiple competing hypotheses and then you figure or you do the experiments to find out which of the two which of the stories is true. That was a conversation between E.O. Wilson and Robert Krulwich, my co-host. And let us know what you thought. Radio Lab at WNYC.org is our email address. I want to thank the 90 seconds to read Y for making that available to us. Also, want to thank, as always, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public

Broadcasting and the National Science Foundation for making all of the as possible. I'm Chad Aboumrod. Thanks for listening to this podcast from Radio Lab. Hope you enjoyed it. See in a couple of weeks.