Brian Fisher collecting ants in the Madagascar canopy

Entomologist Brian Fisher is no stranger to QUEST fans. His work at the California Academy of Sciences collecting and cataloging ant species from all around the world has been featured in a QUEST Radio story, a QUEST TV show, an interactive map called “Ants of the Bay Area”, and a QUEST Educator Guide for science teachers. We’ve also had Brian participate on several outreach and publicity events with QUEST. Frankly, I think he’s probably getting a little tired of us.

But we’re not done with him yet! Like the ants that he so passionately studies, we here at QUEST are great recyclers. Back in June 2010, when I produced the TV story about Brian, he let us use some great video footage that he shot during his field work in Madagascar earlier in the year.

A few months ago, I had the idea to use more of that footage to pilot a new type of segment for QUEST TV called “Field Notes” in which we’ll cut together raw video footage shot by scientists in the field to document their work along with an audio interview with the scientist explaining what they're doing. As with much of QUEST this season, it’s a grand experiment. But I think this first Field Notes segment with Brian Fisher successfully proves the concept.

Brian Fisher collecting ants in Trinidad

The thing that first inspired the idea for Field Notes was reading Brian’s New York Times blog “Scientist at Work”. He’s blogging for the New York Times from Madagascar! How’s that for bringing science to life for the everyday science geek? One memorable post was when he dropped his backpack from a helicopter with all of his ant specimens, notes, money and car keys. Other posts include tales of flash floods, coup attempts and all kinds of crazy insects.

Some of the other scientific activities that Fisher's been involved with recently include his continuing study of the origin of ants of Madagascar by visiting islands in the Mozambique Channel. In April 2011, he took a ship from Reunion to visit the islands Europa, Bassas da India, Juan de Nova and Mayotte.

In addition, he started a green energy project in Madagascar which includes converting the Biodiversity Center that he built there to a green building and taking green energy experts to visit a village in the southwest of Madagascar to, in his words, "study how Bay Area know-how can help reduce deforestation, which is really just energy extraction – the cutting of trees for making charcoal."

Here are a couple of recent blogs about the project:

Matter Network
Green Tech Media

As science journalists, we’d be hard pressed to find a scientist who is a better ambassador for the excitement and adventure of the scientific process. I guess that’s why we here on QUEST keep “bugging” entomologist Brian Fisher.

Watch the QUEST TV story: Field Notes: Brian Fisher in Madagascar

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Getting to interview Edward O. Wilson was the pinnacle of my career so far.

How do you fit your hero into 2 minutes? Very, very carefully…!

All kidding aside, getting to interview Edward O. Wilson was the pinnacle of my career so far.  How often do you get to meet your hero, sit down face-to-face, and ask him questions about his life?  I still get goosebumps just thinking about it!

It probably sounds kind of silly – calling someone you’ve never met your “hero.”  But I think it’s important to have someone in your field of work that you can look up to, be inspired by, and who can challenge you to be a greater person.

The first time I heard E. O. Wilson speak, I was at the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival.  He gave the keynote speech for the festival, in which he discussed the role of science and socio-biology in the future of western civilization.  This, of course, was many years ago, before the term “climate change” replaced “global warming;” before we really understood the impact modern man was creating on the globe; before the hopeless pessimists decided there was no turning back.  And yet, in EO Wilson, the eternal optimist had already been born.

I think it was his optimism that drew me in – I am constantly amazed at human nature, wondering WHY we do the things we do.  Throughout history, the studies of science and sociology were hopelessly at odds.  For hundreds of years, the pursuit of knowledge for these topics were on separate paths, since combining the two would essentially negate them both.  Enter Edward O Wilson, eager to learn, and unafraid to say “Nature AND Nuture.”  Needless to say, Wilson spent many years under attack by his colleagues, yet he managed to remain steadfast and optimistic, both about his own research, and about the future of science and biology.

Today, scientists generally agree that nature and nurture are not mutually exclusive.  In fact, E.O. Wilson continues to contribute valuable ideas, creating new ventures and collaborations that continue push the boundaries of modern science. His list of accolades is long: he has won the Pulitzer Prize (twice!); he created the Biodiversity Foundation; he has served on the Boards of Directors of The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, and the American Museum of Natural History; and he conceived the idea of the Encyclopedia of Life – one of QUEST’s National Partners.  Recently, QUEST has been collaborating with local 5^th graders for the EOL Education and Learning group’s East Bay Regional Park District Bay Lab Project.

Perhaps the easiest way for me to show you how the world looks to someone like E.O. Wilson is to share this excerpt (which I absolutely LOVE, but unfortunately couldn’t squeeze it into a mere 2 minutes.

“The most common question I’m asked about ants is what do I do about the ones in my kitchen? And my answer is always to be the same – it is to feed them bits of honey and tuna, canned tuna fish. They love those particularly. Then watch where you step. Be careful of little lives. Get down and watch them closely, and you will see as they behave and communicate with one another, to come out and get those little bits of food, you will see behavior that is so strange to human beings, and so complex, that it might be what you would expect to see in life on another planet.”

Watch Why I Do Science: E.O. Wilson television story online.

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Image Credit: Alex Wild.

For those of us fighting losing battles against them in our kitchens, ants are just ants. But the species responsible for the majority of those invasions has a name: the Argentine ant.

Argentine ants have had amazing success as an invasive species in the US. Their West Coast super colony numbers in the billions and spans from Mexico to Oregon. But aside from invading homes, they've had a dramatic effect on native ants and local ecosystems.

While many of us may not think ants are particularly important, ants hold a number of key ecological jobs, as I learned in this week's story. They disperse seeds, aerate soil just like earthworms, and recycle nutrients just like nature's garbage men (well, garbage women. Worker ants are actually female). For more on ants throughout the world, check out this QUEST TV story.

Listen to the QUEST radio story Bay Area Ant Invasion

Argentine ants are certainly tiny, but thanks to their numbers, they've out-competed native ants for resources and attacked their colonies. So, many of the ecological jobs that native ants do are disappearing. Scientist have also documented the decline of coastal horned lizards, which depend on native ants a food source.Check out an interactive map of native ants.

Citizens are helping track Argentine ants and their impact on native ants through a citizen science project, the Bay Area Ant Survey, run by the California Academy of Sciences. You can find more information on how to submit ant specimens of your own here. And for a little more about how they're collected, check out this post by QUEST's Jessica Neely.

In their native range in Argentina, these ants aren't such a nuisance. They don't form the super colonies that we see in North America. It's almost a terrible ecological irony: since the ants in the US descended from a small group introduced by humans, they're genetically similar. So, colonies that would normally fight over resources now see each other as relatives. With no ant wars, they've put that energy into expanding.

So, what can we do when Argentine ants show up in our kitchens?

I asked the two scientists I interviewed for this story and their answers were pretty fascinating.

First, Cal Academy's Brian Fisher on the use of chemicals:

Second, UC Berkeley's Neil Tsutsui on what makes our homes look so good to ants:

Listen to the Bay Area Ant Invasion radio report online.

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Cal Academy scientist Kelly Herbinson
collects ants with a Bay Area science teacher

I was first introduced to the pooter, an insect catching device, last July at the California Academy of Sciences Nature Journaling workshop in the Trinity Alps and little did I know where it would lead.

The Nature Journaling workshop blended sketching and watercolor techniques with information about the natural area in which we camped. In addition to discovering I could actually be artistic (not one of my strong suits in the past) and falling in love with vegan cashew chili (I’m a big fan of meat), the highlight for me was learning how to catch small insects by sucking them into a vial at the end of a long rubber tube.

This contraption, which includes a small piece of gauze between the vial and the rubber tubing, so you don’t suck the insect all the way into your lungs, is the aforementioned pooter. By the end of the workshop, we had planned a joint educator workshop using QUEST media about invasive species with the hands-on ant collecting activities from the Bay Area Ant Survey and the California Academy of Sciences.

QUEST's Jessica Neely
collects ants with a pooterFast forward 4 months. In early December, 29 Bay Area science educators gathered at the California Academy of Sciences to learn about Bay Area invasive species. We started the day off with QUEST’s television story San Francisco Bay Invaders, moved to some discussion about how to help our students become “media savvy” in the 21st century, and then it was time for the pooters.

Educators paired up and we took a field trip to the alley behind the Cal Academy – not the most ideal location to find ants, but it was the best we could do with limited time. It was so cold that day that Kelly Herbinson, our ant expert, had to set out bait for the ants in the morning. We poked, prodded, searched high and low, and a few of us were able to capture the cagey little critters with our pooters. Kelly led us through the identification process (yes, I’m sorry but some ants were harmed) and introduced everyone to the Bay Area Ant Survey, an amazing citizen science project where just about anyone can contribute to scientists’ understanding of the distribution of ants in the Bay Area by capturing, labeling, and sending in their ants.

Teachers study ant samples to
help identify the ants they collectedA few post-workshop take-aways:

• Despite what you hear on the news, science teachers are doing wonderful work with students

• Students are getting their information from an increasing number of sources and teaching them how to be media-savvy is tricky (not something that is currently tested on standardized tests…)

• Most importantly, ants are AMAZING! Did you know that the trap-jaw ant can snap its mandibles shut so hard and fast on an object that it can propel itself backwards 2 feet to escape predators?

Want to participate in an upcoming QUEST Educator Training? Visit our list of upcoming workshops and register.

And please add a comment if you know of a great educational resource for teaching about Bay Area invasive species. And please share your story if you use QUEST with your students!

Jessica Neely is a Project Supervisor of Science Education.

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