New species

There's been a lot of buzz about new species of late. The most recent surprise was the ant that was found in IISc. Our campus is home to over 90 ants, whats a new one right? Well no, ants have been worked on for ages, they're probably among the better documented insect species.

Crickets on the other hand have definitely received less attention. The male you see singing in the photographs belongs to the species Prozvenella bangalorensis. It was also discovered on the IISc campus. You can see another picture here and also hear the call which is actually pretty nice, unlike many other stereotyped repetitive calls.

So how many campuses do you think can live up to that challenge? Two species discovered and described from it? My guess would be not too many, but other folks in India and in the tropics were looking in their backyards, particularly at neglected insects, my suspicion would be quite a few.

My 30 thousand and 91st..

It was a good weekend.

Bio-inspired

The most recent issue in Science, has an feature on arrays that mimic the hair cells in our ears! Hair cells, ears?

Ok A simple summary: when a pressure wave hits your eardrum, your eardrum transfers its oscillations via three bones (ossicles) to the inner ear. The inner ears roughly a long coiled up tube which is full of water and on the inside of which there are hair cells. When the compression waves are transferred to the water, this causes stereocilia on the hair cells to move. The movement dislocates the stereocilia, and the forces generated by this movement break thin single protein filaments that hold a channel closed, opening the channel. Its a way of transducing mechanical energy into a electrical signal. Ions rush about, various upstream things happen, the upshot - we hear.

The basic mechanism remains more or less the same, across ear types, even insect ears. Its also used by fish, to sense pressure changes in the water using whats called the lateral line. This helps them detect and avoid predators, etc, even stationary objects which would alter water flow patterns.

This multidisciplinary team has made a sensor for detecting flow using this basic idea. Their sensors are fabricated using photolithography, and are about a few hundred micrometers, a hundred times the size of the real thing. I suppose they could go use some new nano technique to make them smaller, (I know squat about any of this tech bit I should add).They are however, said to be 10 times as sensitive. But more noisy, and to combat the noise they're looking back to the biology.

The other recent bio-inspired thingey that I read about, also in a Science article, was the compound eye. They made a micro lens, a cone, rhabdomere and everything. Its scary to look at the SEM of the fabricated structure, it looks like it could actually be an eye! They've off course already begun working on a thin camera based on this eye. There are images in that link and all kinds of tech to describe lenses that gets used even for conventional lenses. I dont see any 90 deg FOV images and they still seem a bit noisy. But this is an innovation to keep an eye on!!!

What amazes me about these new technologies is how direct their inspiration is. They're taking biological solutions almost as is. To suggest a counter-example, look at neural nets, they're an old established method now. They were 'inspired' by neurons, but the actual analogies are only very broad and sketchy...I dont know enough but for just one the connectivities are too high, the neuron in real life has architechture which affects function, which a perceptron/cognitron doesn't. There are different kinds of neurons...etc, etc.

The point being they were sort of like, tried to capture essential features but not details. Both of the above examples seem to capture quite a few details. And I wonder why. I didnt really find the reasons in the original articles themselves. The answer lies somewhere in the mix of size, sensitivity, dynamic range, and structural solutions to computational problems I think. In these cases perhaps the answers are in size and sensitivity.

However structural solutions, I think are a very elegant feature of biological systems. I'll give you an example. Our ear is made in a strange way, the basilar membrane which line the inner canal has different a thickness and stiffness at each point, and this causes it to resonate to different frequencies. Therefore the hair cells on that portion of the basilar membrane respond best to a narrow range of frequencies. There are other processes that sharpen the tuning, but this remains to be seen as the principal source of frequency tuning in the ear. Voila, an Fourier transform using a structure.

Point being, bio-inspired stuff is way cool!

Grasslands

You've probably seen the other picture of the Streaked fantail warbler. But this one tells the story better. Now renamed the Zitting Cisticola, this warbler is small insectivore that forages among high grasses. The name comes from its courtship call which is accompanied by an aerial display. The only place you can see this bird in IISc is the Airfield. I would reccomend going down and having a look see, this is breeding season and you might get to see just how loud a bird merely 3 inches long can be. Try early morning and remember if you get rid of your grasslands you will never hear sweet sweet sweet again.

I love this image for all the sharp colourful verticals its got. The white fluff at the edges, breaking the sharp lines. And of course my miserable selective focus, the bird couldve been sharper and clearer. I guess its a ok animal in habitat pic. Check out the poor guys legs though, you think you can do that?

This superb habitat, the Airfield is possibly one of the least disturbed in IISc. (Except for labour from NIAS fertilising all over the place and the dumping of cut logs from the newly cleared area where faculty quarters were built). And it has a few species that are absolutely exclusive to it, the ZC, the two species of lapwing. And this lark I have trouble identifying.

Kamblipucchi

Or blanket worm is what the Kannadigas call one of these. I got one of these on my neck today and suffered some painful rashes as a result. I suppose that's the downside of so much diversity? All kinds of things can give you trouble?

The setae of some this caterpillar are called urticating hairs. Urticating refers to urticaria, a particular kind of allergic reaction. They are hollow and contain liquids secreted by trichogen cells at the base of the setae. The setae are meant to be defensive. The toxins they contain can apparently be quite diverse, ranging from protease like proteins, to histamine analogues, to anticoagulants. The result of having one of these dump its chemical load in your skin can range from rashes, to heart arrhythmia(!) to paralysis, seizures (!!) etc, depending on the species the caterpillar belonged to. There's a particular genus of south American saturnid moths called Lonomia that have caterpillars that are so bad they can kill you! The spines carry anticoagulants (same thing leeches use) that are very potent. They apparently have a fatality rate equivalent to rattlesnakes!!

Interestingly there are specific medical terms for these symptoms, Lepidopterism if it was a butterfly caterpillar, but moth caterpillars are usually worse, and that's called erucism.

On another completely other tangent, a long time ago Robert May, yes 'the' Robert May stopped by at our lab when he was visiting IISc. He told me about stridulating caterpillars when I was showing him my crickets. He didn't seem to know however why they do this. Some ants and caters are known to communicate, using vibration though. Maybe he was talking about these?

Yellow Pansies/Pansys?

Anyway, dont know whats going on here. Does anyone else?

Both butterflies look exactly the same on the inner wings. Don't think these are sexually dimorphic butterflies. The one thats flying did this for several minutes, occasionally landed next to the sitting butterfly. The flight was more 'fluttery' than usual. When the flying butterfly landed, it's head was usually pointed at the end of the abdomen of the other butterfly but I couldnt make out what was happening. I guess this is butterfly courtship.

But it didnt end in mating, so I amnt sure. I've heard of territoriality in butterflies, but the sitting butterfly didn't run, so I guess not.

Anyone surer than me?

Making waves

Ever noticed these black beetles in ponds when it rains, they seem to be calm and then suddenly as you approach them they go crazy. Skittering about swimming fast like madcaps? That behaviour has earned them the name Whirly-gig beetles.

They're aqautic for their entire life, eggs are laid on submerged plants. Larvae live underwater and predate on mosquito larvae making them great pest control agents. The adults are also predaceous and usually swim on the surface When required they can dive like many aquatic insects with air bubbles trapped between wings for respiration. What they seem to be most studied for is aggregation, signalling and predator response. They release chemicals when disturbed which alert the others in an aggregation.

The coolest thing about them in my opinion however is that they're eyes are split. The lower half of both eyes are adapted for underwater vision and the upper half for vision in the air!

Some of those fluid mech / engineering types have also done some work on their swimming patterns and the waves they generate. So maybe the above image is interesting to them?

Insect ears

I work on crickets and when i tell people about one of the things that always gets them is that crickets have ears on their legs. Look just under the leg joint in the bushcricket picture, can you see that slightly inflated region? Thats the ear (well sort of, it leads to the ear, thats a tympanal slit).

Insects have ears, literally, all over. They've evolved independantly among insects almost a dozen times over. They're on legs, abdomens, and they're on wings! In the neuropterans, ie lacewings, like the one in the picture, the ears are on the wings!


Well, mosquitoes and bees hear with their antennae. Actually, if I have it right, they hear in the near-field, so they detect particle motion not pressure, unlike the other ears I'm talking about. The resolution those systems manage is so great that they apparently can pick up even motion at even angstrom scales! Thats pretty impressive, and possibly almost on the absolute borderline of physical possibility.

The other weird ear in the insect world belongs to mantises, they have a single ear. Now if you remember your basic physics, sound is scalar and does not have directional cues. So to tell where sound comes from animals have evolved two ears and several physical and computational tricks. But this hinges on having more than a single ear, which the mantises dont have. Why is that?

The thing about ears in insects is that they seem to be easy to build. Ingredient one : you need an air space which insects have everywhere because of their tracheal breathing tubes.

Ingredient two and three: receptors and neurons. First you need something to sense the vibrations of the tympanic membrane you strung across this empty space. Then some neurons to carry these signals away to the 'brain'.

And those are everywhere in insects as well. See they (actually all of us) have these receptors called proprioceptors that detect mechanical stimuli. They're meant largely to figure out things like ok, legs bending now, and now the wings out, theres x amount of resistance on leg 2 and so on. To provide feedback to the brain on how well its commands to the motor system are being carried out. Now these have neurons connecting them up to some ganglion and then to a higher 'brain'. So if you can rearrange your proprioceptors to detect tympanal vibrations and your neurons to carry the signals, voila, you have a ear!

Actually why spend all that energy on making a ear though? Predator avoidance comes the pat reply, particularly, BATS!

You know this cool thing I read about this proprioception stuff, in one of the first insect walking robots they made, they didnt think about the interaction between the robot and the surface it was to walk on. And there was no feedback of the kind proprioceptors provide. If memory serves, that robot tore itself apart as it walked!

Oh look

That would be us! Considering the prices I guess I would do this to me gear seller?

Spot billed pelicans

Most of the pictures on my website and on my blog here are from IISc. But I do go out you know. Well ok only very rarely and then with some coaxing...I'm lazy ok? I spent some time last winter going to this lake on the outskirts of Bangalore in a village called Medhalli. A few hundred Spot billed Pelicans were over-wintering there. Neato birds which by the way are endangered according to the Red list.



There were, off course, also fisherman on the same lake. And they didnt like the Pelicans since the birds ate up a lot of fish. They would try all kinds of tricks to keep the birds away, firework rockets, noise etc. With limited success. The birds stayed there all winter long, didnt fish too close to the banks and the fishing hut except early in the morning.

Here are some pictures, the first in the mid-afternoon, extremely contrasty and stopped down to get that nice blue of the water. The pictures of the fishermen in their coracles, the circular cane boat was shot before dawn.

And the Pelican picture next was shot after dawn early in the day when the light was overcast and soft. (which for some reason reminds me of this Stieglitz shot of his wife, the painter Georgia O'Keefe. I guess just the upraised 'arms'.)

The last one off course was at day's end, I love those warm colours mixing up with a blue mixed in into the ripples. The pelicans are there just for weight yeah? :)

Is it?

No I dont think so. And I havent moved to Canada either...But what it does mean is it's finally raining here.

Backlit mongy

How did I miss this one? I fell in love with a family of mongooses and obsessed over them for almost 2 months. This is one of a few hundred shots. After I tore myself from them, apparently mommy had some more kids. The last they were seen, (unfortunately a long time ago), mom had 6(!) teeny ones in tow!

Spiderman

Here's a little visual puzzle to keep you busy. How did I take that picture. Hint: I'm a wicked witch!

And yes thats a spider, not an ant. Its an ant mimicking spider. I think that the ant below may be the model, I'm not sure though. They looked similar, but when I look closely the ant has an orange head the spidey a black one....so dunno.

Dying for someone else's cause?

The one thing that every organism is expected to do is try and reproduce. When you see an organism give its life up so someone else might, it begs the question, why? Social animals, particularly the uber-social ones like bees and ants, have been the subject of the much research for this reason.

There is yet another organism that drawn attention for this reason. Soil myxamoebae are not too charismatic. The fruiting bodies (that you see in the pictures) that they form in one phase of their life-cycle look much like fungal sporangia. But they're quite different. A single fruiting body is made of many individual soil myxamoebae which have aggregated together. The stalk is made of dead amoebae and the 'fruit' on the top are living ones. The living ones will become spores and be dispersed and so the dead have died for anothers cause. A recent paper suggests that in some slime moulds there might be some interesting kin selection going on. Carl Zimmer the author of At the water's edges blogs here and has written a very nice post about them.

The other interesting angle to Dictyostelium discoidieum is that the individuals here are single celled organisms. And they come together to form multicellular super-organisms! Some believe that they may hold some of the clues to the evolution of multicellularity.

The pictures were taken in this lab which works on them in IISc.

Days end

The birds that roost in IISc come back to bed at the end of a day. Most of the birds that bless us at night are common mynas and crows. They forage elsewhere in the day and leave their post-digestion remains all over our road, vehicles and occasionally heads.

I think I will stick to natural history/biology from now on?

http://mama.indstate.edu/users/bones/WhyIHateWebLogs.html

Largely because I think he's right, despite the repeated use of the f-word.

Animals

I've been reading about groups of animals recently and about socials animals and the distinctions that can be drawn between them. The definition is loose and while its clear that a family group does not make a social animal, its not clear really on other things. For instance are giant fruit bats roosting together social animals? I guess not, there isn't much 'cooperation' going on there....

Which isnt to say social animals are all cooperation and no conflict. Read this by a professor at my dept. which explores both aspects among social animals. Lee Dugatkin wrote another book, its a readable book even a good one. But his repetition of his religious beliefs in it and reasonably open admission of his political positions sorta bugged me. Theres no need for it to be in the book, or none that I could see. I believescience is incompatible with religion, I can see how people can do it and do do it, see how we often compartmentalize our lives. But I don't have to like it and don't think it entirely consistent.

But it did get me thinking about somethings. One thing that often slips my mind sometimes: that humans are social animals (I always wonder why people cant just keep to themselves!). To get back to the point: One of the most dismissed ideas in evolutionary biology is perhaps group selection. And yet, according to Dugatkin, there is some theoretical evidence that suggests under very very special conditions it might well be a significant driving force in the evolution of cooperation. One of the necessary (but not sufficient) conditions is great between group selection and low within group selection.

Thinking out loud here, I wonder if human groups are coming to this now. Not necessarily at an evolutionary time scale, but socially, we're so tribal. Look at all the fights between religious groups today, intense cooperation within groups and intense conflict between. Its a bit like ants biting the heads off each other if they come from different nests.

countdown to sociality?

Common mynas

A lot of folks saw me shooting this nest of common mynas this friday. Hope they find their way to this page. Click on the images for larger versions.The rest of the weekend was spent not getting very good pictures, and picking oh maybe a hundred of the guys in the last picture off my pants.

Scale

And why I ask 'reality'? Whats that?

Off course you know how this was made. Homework.

Aesthetics

The Main quadrangle in IISc is fashioned like the Union Jack, a bit of a throwback to our colonial legacy. I must admit to a tingle of satisfaction whenever I walk over it.

One of the lanes of the Jack is lined with Ficus benjamina trees. These are beautiful trees with interesting architechture. They branch very low on the stem, have large and widespread canopies with drooping leaves. The branches often extend long distances parallel to the ground before turning up towards the sun into a canopy break.

I think it was during the last monsoon that two of these trees tipped over. The soil around their roots had washed away with the rains and softened. The weight of the trees and wind brought them down. They lay on their sides for many a month, and since some of their roots were still in the ground continued to grow. Some branches were torn off the main stem and they died, others continued thriving. There was a huge canopy gap where the trees had stood.

After all this time, the folks in the nursery decided they had to do something about the trees. the branches were pared to make the trees more manageable. The help of two cranes, many prop branches, ropes and humans was enlisted to make these trees stand up again. It was hard work and a little risky.

The wisdom of it, as always, questionable. I can't but think that the primary motivation in actions like these is a sense of aesthetic that is uniquely and exclusively anthropic. Functionally these trees would have gone on living and growing as they were. Branches would have grown upward and eventually filled the gap they had left. They were providing interesting undergrowth like space for crits close to the ground, which is now gone. Things live in dead trees, under the bark, in the gaps and the spaces.

Now they're standing again and they might find it easier to fill the gap, it remains to be seen. I hope the props and the ropes and whats left of their damaged root system will be enough for them to remain standing. Because the monsoon (if it ever comes) is upon us. And it will carry away all the soil thats been loosened in this process. I'm not sure if the roots will survive this time, if the trees fall again. The branches on the tree had prevented the angle of the fallen tree to the ground being from too acute and helped its roots stay in the ground. Not too many branches anymore.

Lets see yeah?

Photograph as witness

The title of this phrase is modified from a chapter title from a book called "Reading pictures". One of things that the author argues in that chapter is that people often have to be convinced that an image, even if its a photograph is not merely a recording of a scene. He argues that what is 'out there' filters through many layers of perception and interpretation as the photographer clicks it and you see it. He also talks about how this is something the average viewer finds hard to grasp and spends quite a bit of time convincing you of his proposition. I've been convinced.

Interestingly, others, scientists, apparently always were. Its an interesting contrast and the reasons for why are also interesting. I hope you can access the science url.

What is also interesting is that while the photograph gained acceptability at one stage as acceptable 'data'. It has now to an extent lost its credibility and journals are now beginning to look at ways of catching fraudsters. The doctored stem cell images from Dr Hwang Woo-suk being one of the more recent high profile scandals.

Some like to blame Digital imaging and photoshop for this. I'm not so sure; as many have pointed out before, manipulation is not new. Digital imaging makes it easier, it wasn't impossible before and people did it. Summerlin and his felt tip markers are a famous example . But having done some darkroom work myself (not in science, in photography), I can certainly tell you, dodging and burning ain't hard baby! Heck that would be enough to make gel bands appear and disappear.

The other area where a viewer tends to see the photograph as witness is journalism. Now I really can't say this about India, but elsewhere, the notion of journalists as seekers of truth has always been popular. And by extension the photojournalist. Yet Migrant mother, Dorothea Lange's arguably most famous photograph, has its own elements of deception. It is believed that she directed the photograph and perhaps lied about their stories in an attempt to make them sound worse than they were. OJ Simpsons pictures in TIME were much talked about, images of Iraq were doctored.

Even when images aren't doctored, leaving in or leaving out context can make the interpretation of their content controversial. (If you're thinking about more recent obviously emotional pictures, the emotion is precisely why I decided to leave it out.). Even which photographs get published and which left out are profound indicators of the degree of deception that goes on in public discourse.

The motivation behind such 'manipulation', post or pre-exposure, of course, is that photographers want to tell a story. That every image has an intentionality behind it. Sometimes the details before them do not fit that vision. If you ask me, Langes image isn't a lie. Some migrant families did face the situations that she talked about and the image had the effects that she wished it to. Off course she gained from it as well, but there can be no doubt that the intent was not to merely to cement her reputation as a photographer, but to help. I think her life attests to that.

So when is a photograph a lie? I believe it is no more a lie than a truth. Unless of course it asserts its literal veracity and isn't true. This can also be hard to judge, whether its asserts any such thing.

What are the standards to which a photograph is to be held? The same that you hold any representational art to, all that was 'out there' is now boxed in a small space through the filters of many peoples perceptions, the photographers, the editors and yours.

Are we to read it as 'literal truth'? Unless you enjoy self deception, I suggest you dont.

So far, this is advice to people looking at pictures, how they might interpret them. But I also take pictures, so how do i approach that? (And btw I do manipulate, I've added moons, I've removed a branch and dust spots, created composites and the usual levels, curves, etc. )

So the other direction I personally come to this debate is the idea in nature photography that images should not be manipulated (especially after the advent of digital tech). Guy Tal makes an impassioned appeal for why he thinks its bollicks. I personally think its impossible, for reasons stated before, and stated again i.e. everythings manipulated.

Is it then a question of degree? But I remember my Logical fallacy 101 lessons, truth isn't heirarchical. There isn't a 'higher' or 'truer' truth, theres just one consistent truth. So no, we cant take recourse to that.

I believe, theres only one thing in any image, a realisation of an intention, the photographers or if its part of a larger piece, that of whoever put that together. The realisation maybe good or poor thats another issue. But the image can depending on your purposes contravene any rule of reality.

From a photographers point of view, if I present my images in the context of representing nature, biology, I don't want them contravening biological reality. But that doesn't mean not manipulating, it means not contravening biological reality, so thats my brief.

If I present them as art, I don't have too many rules, I just try and keep from killing my own intention. Like the intention of posting short!

Antx Anty Antz

IISc is home to over 90 species of ants!!!
Some of these are actually different castes of the same species. Try and see if you can guess which. Don't cheat and look at the jpg names :)