Building a digital ant gallery, from the ground up

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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.

Oh, not since this is nothing compared to the twig of 93.

We come face to mandible with ants. They're antennae, they're spindly legs, everything.

And they're delightful, but perhaps the accuracy left a little something to be desired.

Enter the Ant Scan project, which has generated high-resolution x-ray images of over 2,000 real

ants from over 700 species. And I got to 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 Katzka. He worked on this project while a PhD student at the Okinawa

Institute of Science and Technology. Hi, Julian. Hi, Flora. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for being here. Okay, so you came into this work comparing the mouth parts of dozens of

ants species. Why mouth parts? 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 like all humans. And the total

diversity of ants species is enormous. And that also extends into their forms and shapes,

particularly in the mouth parts because they are sort of the first tool that ants use in their daily

lives. So like a mascot model is this South American army ant. They have small ant workers,

but they're also large soldiers. And these large soldiers have these fish hook like

mandibles that you could even use to like staple a wound. They're by the 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 mouth parts was motivating my PhD research.

Describe for people who can't see it. And we'll put some on our website at scienceready.com

slash ants. What do the images look like? So the images they are like derived from x-ray images,

right? So if you've ever taken like an x-ray image at a hospital, you have this c-through

x-ray image. And then if you would like turn yourself around while taking these x-ray images like

enough times, you could mathematically reconstruct the 3D volume. So that is like the technology

behind computer tomography. And that's exactly what we did with the ants scan.

The data that we end up with are like slices of images that are like gray scale. And so they

contain the anatomy of the ants. And then you put them together and you can color them and

make them beautiful too. Yes. 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. Yeah. I mean, that's what that's what caught my eye.

They were just amazing. They're sort of like 3D, but in this extreme detail. And they look like

aliens. 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 really take

it all in at once. And that's I think it's 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

that like larger scales than ourselves. 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? 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. When you say it's really fast,

how fast are we talking? For one ant. 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.

Oh wow. So very fast. Very fast like especially compared to like what we do in laboratory

micro CTs for insects. So there we talk about like more like 8 to 12 hours for one ant.

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 2000 ants and just press play? At that time it was a little bit more limited. So we did

50 at a time and we still had to like jump through a few night shifts to make it work within a week.

What resolution can you get to? 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 like

ant bodies. And then on the internal side, you can resolve up to like individual muscle fibers.

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

Yeah. And it's really important, like especially for scientific application, that we have a technology

where we can not 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

brain or 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.

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

The way 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

biodiversity. But we 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. That's us by the way. That's your use case for that.

Yeah. Nice. I think 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 daily 3d lives.

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

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

Is there a world where you're going to try to train AI on this data so that we can learn more about

anthropology or ant evolution using those tools? Yes, for sure. I think as soon as we're done here,

I would have to sit down and do a bunch of annotations to train these models. No one's going

on Instagram and it's like posting a picture of an ant and they're 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 generate a model like that. So we need to all start from scratch here and

make use the data that we're given now. I mean, how would you use an ant AI model? Why would that be

useful? So for science, I would just use an AI model that might be able to like distinguish

in the 3D data what is the access skeleton 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 two thousands 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. Yeah, for a bug's life, you know, two or three.

Yeah, it's like a bug's life too and boogaloo. Are you hoping to do this with other creatures?

Yeah, so that's really like why we're calling it a pilot study is that really like by

using this like key technology 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 is 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 invertible groups or like other insect groups to be scanned

like this. Was there anything that made you as you know as an ant person? Just go what?

That's so really, let me just think I that that is a question like that that has never come up.

No, I think I think as an ant person right 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 two

thousands 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.

So even to me as like a researcher I sometimes like rush over the fact that they are so diverse

and so different and like I don't really fully and compassionate but when I open one of these

guys that really hits me immediately. 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. Exactly. Dr. Julian Katzka 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. Thank you. And you can see some of this ant glim on our website science Friday.com

slash 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 Lichtman.

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