Ant Socialization, Smoky Skies, Dust Storm, Mars Lake. July 27, 2018, Part 2

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🗓️ 27 July 2018

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

Many ant species have a queen, the member of the colony that lays eggs. The rest of the ants are divided into different roles that support the queen and the colony. So what ants become queens versus workers? Scientists found that the gene ilp2 that regulates insulin played a role in determining what ant becomes the queen. Biologist Ingrid Fetter-Pruneda talks to John Dankosky about how this gene works in determining a queen. The Rocky Fire and the Jerusalem Fire scorched nearly 100,000 acres in northern California in July and August of 2015… and when the prevailing winds were right, smoke drifted all the way down into the San Francisco Bay Area. That’s when locals began tweeting their observations. Now, scientists at the U.S. Forest Service have analyzed 39,000 tweets like these from the 2015 wildfire season, and found that social media data can be a reliable way to augment existing air quality monitoring data in predicting the extent—and the public health effects—of wildfire smoke. Sonya Sachdeva joins Science Friday to talk about how tweets can be a useful tool in tracking wildfires. Plus: Earlier this month, a cloud of dust rolled into the atmosphere above Texas and the Gulf Coast. It was a remnant of a storm blown over from the Saharan desert. But, according to a new study, that Saharan dust also brings with it a silver lining—it suppresses the formation of major storms. Bowen Pan joins John Dankosky to explain why a dusty atmosphere could mean a less severe hurricane season. Researchers have been scouring Mars for water since the early 1970s. Since then, they’ve found frozen water in the poles of Mars as well as trace amounts locked up in Martian soil, but nothing liquid—until this past week. A team of scientists from Italy’s National Institute of Astrophysics announced in Science they found liquid water underneath the glaciers of the planet’s south pole. Angel Abbud-Madrid joins John to talk about how the researchers found the liquid water and what this discovery means for future Martian water research, and Bonnie Meinke tells SciFri the best ways to see Mars as it will be the closest it’s been to Earth in 15 years.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. Iraflato is away. Living in a social group is complicated.
0:08.0	You have to consider others, not just what you want and your own needs. Everyone needs to cooperate to
0:12.7	organize all that needs to get done. And there are certain roles that need to be divided up to make
0:16.9	the structure run. There are workers in the higher-ups. This might sound like your office, but this also happens in the animal kingdom too. A group of researchers looked at how this occurs in ants, especially the division of roles in the colony. They wanted to know how does an ant become a queen or a worker. They found out that it's based on genetics, but not the way you might think, not in terms of who is related to whom, but they
0:37.7	were able to pinpoint a certain gene that played a role in determining which ant becomes
0:41.8	the queen. These results were published this week in the journal Science. My next guest is one of
0:45.9	the authors, and she's here to tell us what this means about the evolution of social organization
0:50.4	in the natural world. Ingrid Fetterpraneda is a postdoc research associate at
0:55.1	Rockefeller University here in New York, and she joins me in our CUNY studios in Midtown Manhattan.
1:00.5	Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much. Our number is 844-724-8255. That's 844
1:07.2	side talk if you have questions about ant behavior. So before we get directly into your study,
1:11.5	I'm wondering if you can just take us inside the typical ant colony. There's a queen and what other
1:17.0	kinds of ants? Well, you have a queen and the workers, and the workers normally do the foraging
1:23.9	tasks and the nursing tasks. And then depending on the ant species, you can also
1:28.7	have other types of workers, like the soldiers. And these typically have like huge mandibles.
1:33.3	I don't know if you have seen them. Oh, the huge mandibles, they're just the pinchers on the front.
1:36.7	Yeah. And that's in another kind of ant colonies. And there's thousands of types of ants, right? And they all behave slightly differently, or are they all more or less organized the same?
1:48.0	They are, there is a lot of diversity, but they are more or less organized the same.
1:54.0	They all have, well, most of them have queens that are the ones that reproduce and make eggs,
1:59.0	and then the worker class. So ants weren't always as social as they are now.
2:04.6	They evolved from an ancestor that was a bit more solitary.
2:07.6	What can you tell us about that?
	...

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