Academy scientist Brian Fisher looks at life on a different scale than most people. And his unique perspective has had a profound influence on his approach to species conservation in some of the world’s most critically endangered biodiversity hotspots.

Fisher, an entomologist who specializes in the study of ants, was recently appointed the Academy’s first Patterson Scholar in Science and Sustainability. The honor comes in recognition of his tireless work in Madagascar and other remote regions of the world, as well as the innovative methods he uses to find and study the creatures he calls “the glue that holds ecosystems together.”

“Ants are one of the most important members of ecosystems,” says Fisher. “They turn over more soil than earthworms.” But they’re also some of the most overlooked, he says. “If they were bigger, they would be the most studied type of organism, but people don’t see them.”

Fisher does see ants of course, lots of them. He and his team have identified more than 900 new species of ants in Madagascar alone. So obviously, he spends a lot of time looking closely at patches of ground where ants might live. Some of his other methods, however, are decidedly higher-tech and provide a much more detailed view of these organisms, their habitats, and what their presence or absence might indicate about ecosystem health.

Surprisingly, one of these detailed views comes from space. Fisher has teamed up with satellite companies and engineers from Google to deliver high-resolution satellite images of some of the least explored areas of Madagascar. Fisher can reference these images in the field, even when no network access is available.

The amount of information this places at his fingertips is not unlike what we’ve come to expect from our smartphones while we’re navigating city streets. But Fisher uses these technologies as he explores some of the world’s most remote regions. It’s an unprecedented view and it’s invaluable to his research. Equipped with a GPS-enabled tablet with customized software and high-res satellite images taken only weeks prior, he can not only see where to camp and find water, but he can also tell which patches of forest are most likely to contain new species of ants.

Fisher has learned from years of field experience in Madagascar to focus his search for ants on forests that are wet, situated at 800 meters (2,600 feet) of elevation or below, and isolated from other such patches. Those are the forests that tend to have the greatest species richness—of ants and many other arthropods. They’re also the types of forest that Fisher thinks should be our highest priority in terms of habitat conservation for these species.

Some habitat conservation analyses suggest that deforestation has stabilized in Madagascar, but the percentage of deforestation is not the important measure, Fisher says. “The important question is: Where are we losing the most species due to deforestation?” he says. “What patch of forest is under threat that should be our highest conservation priority right now?”

Of course, ants shouldn’t be our only focus, according to Fisher, but the perspective that research on these types of animals provides is helping to correct a bias in habitat conservation. “If you base conservation on vertebrates alone,” he says, “it leads you to conclude that only the largest forests are important. Ants and other insects provide a better map of true biodiversity.” It’s a more holistic approach.

Based on this approach, Fisher is developing new models that are helping him provide effective conservation recommendations as well as plan future research efforts. He’s currently working with conservation organizations like the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) to identify patches of forest that should be highest priority for protection. So far, he’s identified five areas that CEPF has under review, and he’s always in search of more. “Most of the forests in the lowlands are already gone, so we’re really focused on trying to find the remaining lowland patches of great conservation value,” Fisher says.

Of course, protecting biodiversity requires a solid understanding of the species that are actually out there. This is a huge job in places as species-rich as Madagascar—even if you’re focused only on ants. Fisher and his team of 20 Malagasy scientists and students, as well as five postdocs here in San Francisco, are busy trying to identify and describe the hundreds of new species of ants they’ve discovered in Madagascar. The thinking is that the more species they document, the stronger the efforts will be to save the habitats where these organisms live.

Gathering and sharing information about ants—not to mention generating an appreciation for these creatures—was the primary motivation behind AntWeb, the online database that Fisher created. The site contains records of more than 10,000 ant species collected from around the world, and the perspective it provides on these tiny creatures is unlike most scientific databases. In addition to the tremendous amount of data that AntWeb contains about each species, Fisher says the site’s high-resolution composite images are helping to put a face on these tiny creatures and getting people to appreciate ants and their significance to the health of our planet.

And yet there are so many more ants to find and document—and Fisher and his team feel like they’re in a race against time. Their methods, he says, are “too, too slow. We’re struggling to speed it up.”

Staring at a satellite image of rugged, roadless Malagasy terrain, Fisher says there’s one piece of technology he and his team need more than any other. “We could really use a helicopter,” he says, only half joking.

He’ll continue his exploration of the unexplored when he returns to Madagascar in January 2014—by helicopter or on foot… probably on foot.

Steven Bedard is editor of the Academy website. A recent Bay Area transplant, he now understands what all the fuss is about.

The period on our planet between 540 and 520 million years ago when most modern animal groups appeared is also known as evolution’s Big Bang. Prior to the Cambrian explosion, life was much simpler on Earth—single-celled organisms dominated the landscape.

But how did so many different organisms develop in such a short period of time? “The abrupt appearance of dozens of animal groups during this time is arguably the most important evolutionary event after the origin of life,” says Michael Lee of the University of Adelaide. “Darwin himself famously considered that this was at odds with the normal evolutionary processes.”

Lee and his colleagues decided to look into “Darwin’s dilemma,” focusing on arthropods (insects, crustaceans, arachnids and their relatives), the most diverse animal group in both the Cambrian period and present day.

“It was during this Cambrian period that many of the most familiar traits associated with this group of animals evolved, like a hard exoskeleton, jointed legs, and compound (multi-faceted) eyes that are shared by all arthropods,” explains team member Greg Edgecombe of the Natural History Museum of London. “We even find the first appearance in the fossil record of the antenna that insects, millipedes and lobsters all have, and the earliest biting jaws.”

The team quantified the anatomical and genetic differences between living animals, and established a timeframe over which those differences accumulated with the help of the fossil record and intricate mathematical models.

“In this study we’ve estimated that rates of both morphological and genetic evolution during the Cambrian explosion were five times faster than today—quite rapid, but perfectly consistent with Darwin’s theory of evolution,” Lee says.

ScienceNOW offers the numbers:

The creatures’ genetic codes were changing by about .117% every million years—approximately 5.5 times faster than modern estimates.

Unusual, perhaps, but in line with natural selection, the team indicates. The study appears in the recent edition of Current Biology.

Perhaps Darwin can get some rest now.

Image: Michael Lee

Shocking news? Perhaps… When capturing insects in their webs, spiders get a little help from electricity, according to a new study by UC Berkeley scientists.

Postdoc Victor Manuel Ortega-Jimenez, working in Berkeley’s Animal Flight Laboratory, usually studies hummingbird flight, but became interested in how spider webs attract insects while playing with his four year-old daughter. “I was playing with my daughter’s magic wand, a toy that produces an electrostatic charge, and I noticed that the positive charge attracted spider webs,” he says. “I then realized that if an insect is positively charged too, it could perhaps attract an oppositely charged spider web to affect the capture success of the spider web.”

As mentioned in our “Bee Positive” video, as insects fly through the air, they naturally become positively charged. Spider webs, on the other hand, are normally negatively or neutrally charged.

To test his spider web hypothesis, Ortega-Jimenez found cross-spider (Araneus diadematus) webs along streams in Berkeley and brought them into the lab. He then used an electrostatic generator to charge up dead insects—aphids, fruit flies, green-bottle flies and honeybees—and drop them into a neutral, grounded web.

“Using a high-speed camera, you can clearly see the spider web is deforming and touching the insect before it reaches the web,” he says. Insects without a charge did not do this. (Video is available here.)

Ortega-Jimenez also suspects that light, flexible spider silk, the kind used for making the spirals built on top of the stiffer silk that forms the spokes of a web, may have developed because it more easily deforms in the wind and the presence of electrostatic charges to aid prey capture.

“Electrostatic charges are everywhere, and we propose that this may have driven the evolution of specialized webs,” he says.

The findings were published last week in Scientific Reports.

Photo by Victor Manuel Ortega-Jimenez, UC Berkeley

At Science Today, we love stories that highlight bioinspiration—tales that reveal how close inspection of the natural world lead to problem-solving in the human realm. Engineering-wise, nature has had millions of years of trial and error to get things right, so why not learn from evolution and adaptation?

This week, the Academy will open Built for Speed, a new exhibit that explains the adaptations by fast fish and marine mammals that make them swift and speedy underwater and how boat designers use a similar process of adaptations to create ultrafast sailboats to compete in the America’s Cup race.

To get ready for Built for Speed, we’re featuring a few recent news stories about robots inspired and refined by the study of nature. Enjoy!

UC Berkeley

One of the leaders in bio-inspired robots is right across the Bay from the Academy. Biologists and engineers at UC Berkeley have been collaborating for several years on biological inspiration. And the researchers find inspiration from the most unlikely of sources. We’ve covered their gecko-inspired bot, but earlier this year news outlets featured Cal cockroach robots. Did you know that cockroaches are able to balance without using their brains? According to Discovery News, this is fabulous news for robot builders:

… One of the recurring challenges of designing a mobile robot is writing an algorithm that keeps it from falling over.

VELOCIRoACH, is a Berkeley roach bot and happens to be one of the fastest robots in the world. TAYLRoach uses its tail to make fast turns. New Scientist says that smaller is better for these robots:

Small-legged robots are being developed for search and rescue, for situations where a location is inaccessible or too dangerous for humans.

More Insect-bots

Berkeley isn’t the only academic biorobotic institution. Last week, Harvard scientists published their engineering breakthrough—the first flying insect-like robot. Ten to fifteen years in the making, this bug-bot was inspired by the biology of a fly. It has submillimeter-scale anatomy and two wafer-thin wings that flap almost invisibly, 120 times per second! Check out the video.

Do you feel like you’re being watched? Another publication last week describes a new camera, inspired by insect eyes. Made of 180 tiny lenses, the camera can take panoramic pictures that offer similar compound views to those of ants, bees and praying mantises. According to Ed Yong in National Geographic, this tiny biomimetic camera is “ideal for surveillance. Perhaps in the future, we’ll be watched by man-made flies on the walls.” Creepy!

Speaking of creepy, how about small robots that work together like a colony of ants? French and American scientists wanted to understand how individual ants, when part of a moving colony, orient themselves in the labyrinthine pathways that stretch from their nest to various food sources. They hope their robotic findings reveal “possible improvements for the design of man-made transportation networks,” according to an abstract in PLoS Computational Biology.

Snakes and Seahorses and Birds, Oh My

Want more? How about a soft snake robot that slithers? A robotic arm as flexible and protected as a seahorse’s tail? Airplane wings fashioned after the wings of a herring gull? What about a swimming and crawling robot as efficient as a salamander? All of the above? Help yourself—many of the links above have videos detailing the creations.

Speedy Virtual Robots

Finally, just because it’s super cool, check out this video on Discover’s site. Researchers at the University of Wyoming and Cornell created a computer program to design fast virtual robots. Each robot could be made out of four different materials, and only the fastest would “reproduce.”

Essentially, the researchers incentivized forward motion, so the faster the robot, the more successful it would be in the evolutionary race.

You have to see the simulations created in this “Evolution in Action.”

Image of insect-eye camera: John A. Rogers, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

10 years

102 researchers from 21 countries

129,000 specimens

25,000 species in a 6,000-hectare forest

…yielding an estimate of 6 million arthropod species on our planet.

Ready for the details behind the numbers?

In 2003 and 2004, a large team of scientists (see numbers above) led by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute on an endeavor called Project IBISCA-Panama, scoured Panama’s San Lorenzo rainforest for arthropods (which includes insects, spiders, and millipedes).

They sampled the forest from top to bottom from a construction crane, inflatable platforms, and balloons, climbing ropes through forest layers as well as crawling along the forest floor to sift soil and trap arthropods.

They then spent the next eight years identifying the 129,000 specimens collected within twelve 20-by-20 meter squares. They determined that within those specimens, there were over 6,000 species of arthropods. Using various models the team extrapolated the total number of arthropod species to 25,000 residing in the 6,000-hectare forest.

The research is published in the current edition of Science.

According to Science Now,

The study is the most extensive survey of insects, spiders, and their relatives ever undertaken and should help researchers get a better understanding of what factors influence biodiversity.

“This is a high number as it implies that for every species of vascular plant, bird or mammal in this forest, you will find 20, 83, and 312 species of arthropods, respectively,” explains lead author Yves Basset.

“If we are interested in conserving the diversity of life on Earth, we should start thinking about how best to conserve arthropods,” adds Tomas Roslin, one of 35 co-authors.

“Another exciting finding was that the diversity of both herbivorous and non-herbivorous arthropods could be accurately predicted from the diversity of plants,” says Basset.

“By focusing conservation efforts on floristically diverse sites, we may save a large fraction of arthropods under the same umbrella. Further, this strengthens past ideas that we should really be basing estimates of global species richness on the number of plant species,” stresses Roslin.

For some amazing images of these arthropods and the collection process, please visit National Geographic.

Image: Thomas Martin, Jean-Philippe Sobczak, and Hendrik Dietz, T.U. Munich

A leggy neighbor

The leggiest animal on the planet lives just south of San Francisco, according to a new report in ZooKeys. Illacme plenipes comes the closest to the description of a millipede than any of its relatives—females have as many as 750 legs!

Even millipede researcher Paul Marek thinks Illacme plenipes is special. Its plentiful legs have claws and National Geographic News lists more of its cool features:

…massive antennae (relative to the scale of its body), which the millipede uses to feel its way through the dark; a jagged and translucent exoskeleton; and body hairs that produce a sort of silk that may help Illacme plenipes adhere to the undersides of boulders. And unlike in other millipedes, the mouth of this species is specifically structured for piercing and sucking plant tissues.

Wanna get to know your neighbor? Movies and images are available for download here.

Insect hearing aids

A recent publication in Science explores how certain rainforest katydids are able to listen like mammals do, but much more efficiently. Katydids’ hearing organs are near the insects’ knees, and much like human ears, gather sounds from the air and transmit them to the brain in fluids.

For humans and other mammals, sounds are collected by the eardrums in vibrations, which are transferred by three ear bones to the cochlea. Fluid in the cochlea translates these sounds and sends them to the brain.

In katydids, the ear bones are missing, simplifying the process. (An excellent comparison illustration is available at Scientific American.) This simplification could lead to better hearing aids for humans, according to the lead author of the study, Fernando Montealegre-Z. “These findings change our views on insect hearing and open the way for designing ultrasensitive bio-inspired sensors.”

Insect-inspired water bottles

Finally, recent news reports describe a new company creating water-collecting bottles for “the most arid regions of the world.” Their inspiration? The Namib Desert beetle. Wired UK describes the insects’ process of water collection:

The beetle survives by collecting condensation from the ocean breeze on the hardened shell of its wings… The beetle extends and aims the wings at incoming sea breezes to catch humid air; tiny droplets 15 to 20 microns in diameter eventually accumulate on its back and run straight down towards its mouth.

Want more exciting entomology?

How about disease-fighting ladybirds? Learn more at ScienceShot. Insect movie stars? Watch their cameos at the New York Times.

Katydid image: Fernando Montealegre-Z and Daniel Robert

Searching through 70,000 teeny pieces of amber from the Italian Dolomite Alps, researchers discovered a treasure. Well, three treasures actually: two mites and a fly, fossilized 230 million years ago!

These ancient insects represent the oldest arthropods in amber ever discovered—by about 100 million years. While limestone and shale may hold older arthropod finds, amber is, well, kind of like a diamond in the rough. (Academy geologist Jean DeMouthe would kill me if she read that sentence.).

“Amber is an extremely valuable tool for paleontologists because it preserves specimens with microscopic fidelity, allowing uniquely accurate estimates of the amount of evolutionary change over millions of years,” says study co-author David Grimaldi of the American Museum of Natural History.

While the fly is difficult to identify because only its antennae were intact, the mites are described as a new species in a group called Eriophyoidea. This group has about 3,500 living species that sometimes form abnormal growth called “galls.”

The ancient gall mites are surprisingly similar to ones seen today, says Grimaldi. “Even 230 million years ago, all of the distinguishing features of this family were there—a long, segmented body; only two pairs of legs instead of the usual four found in mites; unique feather claws, and mouthparts.”

But unlike present-day gall mites that feed on flowering plants, these ancient mites subsisted on conifer-related trees.

“We now know that gall mites are very adaptable,” Grimaldi says. “When flowering plants entered the scene, these mites shifted their feeding habits, and today, only 3 percent of the species live on conifers. This shows how gall mites tracked plants in time and evolved with their hosts.”

The findings are published in the current edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Image: University of Göttingen/A. Schmidt

But here’s an interesting twist to the tale. A recently designed robot at the Biomimetic Millisystems Lab at UC Berkeley is now shedding light on flight evolution.

A research team, led by Ron Fearing—we highlighted some of his early biomimicry work a few years ago here—wanted their robotic cockroach, DASH, to move faster. DASH is a lightweight, speedy robot made of inexpensive, off-the-shelf materials first launched in 2009. Its small size makes it a candidate for deployment in areas too cramped or dangerous for humans to enter, such as collapsed buildings.

But compared with its biological inspiration, the cockroach, DASH had certain limitations as to where it could scamper. Remaining stable while going over obstacles is fairly tricky for small robots, so the researchers affixed DASH with lateral and tail wings borrowed from a store-bought toy to see if that would help.

The researchers ran tests on four different configurations of the robotic roach, now called DASH+Wings. The test robots included one with a tail only and another that just had the wing’s frames, to determine how the wings impacted locomotion.

With its motorized flapping wings, DASH+Wings’ running speed nearly doubled, going from from 0.68 meters per second with legs alone to 1.29 meters per second. The robot could also take on steeper hills, going from an incline angle of 5.6 degrees to 16.9 degrees.

“With wings, we saw improvements in performance almost immediately,” says Kevin Peterson, a Ph.D. student in Fearing’s lab. “Not only did the wings make the robot faster and better at steeper inclines, it could now keep itself upright when descending.

The engineering team’s work caught the attention of animal flight expert Robert Dudley, a UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology, who noted that the most dominant theories on flight evolution have been primarily derived from scant fossil records and theoretical modeling.

He referenced previous computer models suggesting that ground-dwellers, given the right conditions, would need only to triple their running speed in order to build up enough thrust for takeoff. The fact that DASH+Wings could maximally muster a doubling of its running speed suggests that wings do not provide enough of a boost to launch an animal from the ground. This finding is consistent with the theory that flight arose from animals that glided downwards from some height.

“The fossil evidence we do have suggests that the precursors to early birds had long feathers on all four limbs, and a long tail similarly endowed with a lot of feathers, which would mechanically be more beneficial for tree-dwelling gliders than for runners on the ground,” says Dudley.

Dudley said that the winged version of DASH is not a perfect model for proto-birds – it has six legs instead of two, and its wings use a sheet of plastic rather than feathers – and thus cannot provide a slam-dunk answer to the question of how flight evolved.

“It’s still notable that adding wings to DASH resulted in marked improvements in its ability to get around,” Fearing adds. “It shows that flapping wings may provide some advantages evolutionarily, even if it doesn’t enable flight.”

Their research was published online today in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics.

Image by Kevin Peterson, Biomimetic Millisystems Lab

Earth

The Gulf oil spill—the number of gallons spilled and the controversy surrounding the damage seems to top many lists this year. Nature even named Jane Lubchenco, head of NOAA, its newsmaker of the year for how she handled the crisis.

Natural disasters often took the front page in 2010 with the Haitian earthquake and the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull topping many lists. The hard-to-pronounce Icelandic volcano also made many of the best science images of the year lists.

DiscoveryNews ends the year on a positive note with “How Humans Helped the Earth in 2010,” a slide show with text concerning recent strides in alternative energy, species and habitat conservation efforts and individual efforts to go green (electric cars, white roofs and saving energy).

For more environmental news of the year, New Scientist’s Short Sharp Science has a great review and the Nature Conservancy has a best/worst list on its site.

Life

Teeny, modified life stole the spotlight this year—the J. Craig Venter Institute’s so-called “synthetic cell” and GFAJ-1—the bacteria that incorporates arsenic into its DNA—or so NASA scientists claimed.  Science writer Carl Zimmer discredited the arsenic bacteria paper on Slate; NASA author Felisa Wolfe-Simon defended herself in Science. Fun stuff!

The spread of pesky bedbugs was number six in Discover’s “Top 100 Science Stories of 2010.”

Nature’s great article this past summer on eradicating mosquitoes was among its readers’ top choices of the year.

Looking for something a little bigger and less controversial? New Scientist has “The coolest animals of 2010,” which includes a scorpion-eating bat and a fly thought to be extinct for over 160 years!

NPR found it was a very good year for Neanderthals—their genome was sequenced, brain examined and diet expanded.

Remarkably, the Census of Marine Life tops the BP oil spill in the Deep Type Flow blog’s biggest marine science stories of the year for its sheer numbers:

…over 500 research expeditions covering every ocean, over 2,500 scientists and the discovery of over 6,000 species new to science and published in over 2600 peer-reviewed papers.

Space

ScienceNow’s most popular story of all time, not just 2010, was “Does Our Universe Live Inside a Wormhole?” A wonderful theory that we also covered last spring.

Exoplanets, in part thanks to the Kepler mission, were all over the news this year—whether it had to do with size, atmosphere or number within a star system. Discover’s interview with local exoplanet hunter (and California Academy of Sciences Fellow) Geoff Marcy made number 11(!) on their 100 top stories list.

A little closer to home, Jupiter’s missing stripe and Neptune’s tale of cannibalism are included in New Scientist’s most popular space stories of 2010.

Our Moon and Saturn’s moons made news throughout the year and the top lists on Universe Today and Wired this week.

Universe Today also included SDO’s new views of the sun in their top stories list. Stunning!

Hubble celebrated its 20^th year in space this year by taking even more beautiful images. Several are included in Bad Astronomy’s “Top 14 Astronomy Pictures of 2010.”

Technology

Electric cars and NASA’s new foray into commercial spacecraft are included in Scientific American’s top ten stories of the year.

The Large Hadron Collider was very busy this year, and topped many lists. Another machine at CERN made news (and also topped Nature’s readers’ choice list) when it was able to capture antimatter for a sixth of a second!

Graphene not only garnered a Nobel Prize this year, the material (and it’s potential) also made news and top science lists of the year.

DiscoveryNews put plastics on their 2010 list—whether its finding new ways of removing plastic from the oceans or engineering smarter plastics.

What was your favorite science story of the year? Share with us by adding it to the comment section below!

Image by Les Stone, International Bird Rescue Research Center/Wikipedia