Word by Matt de Neef, The Conversation
21.08.2023 - 11:51 / theunconventionalgardener.com / Emma Doughty
Earlier this month, the Met Office announced that its weather radar was picking up something other than rain clouds – swarms of flying ants.
In hot weather, winged ants emerge from their colonies to meet, mingle and mate with ants from other colonies nearby. Once they have achieved their goal, their wings fall off, and the females try and start new colonies. The males die.
Swarms of ants flying around tend to provoke strong reactions in humans. When it happens, people tend to refer to it as #FlyingAntDay, assuming that it’s happening everywhere. However, research shows that there will be ants flying somewhere in the UK on pretty much any warm day from June to September. The pattern we think we see isn’t there; ants aren’t that organised.
Despite their lack of central control, ants have to work collectively to explore their environment to find food, water and nest sites and detect threats. And most ants can’t see and can only smell things that are close by.
The most efficient way to search collectively depends on the size of the area to be explored and the number of explorers. It’s a balancing act between being thorough and covering enough ground.
Different ant species use various tactics to solve this problem. How they do so is of considerable interest to researchers because it can help us solve similar issues, such as programming autonomous robots and drones to search disaster scenes for survivors.
Ants have evolved different search strategies in different places, but those locations all have one thing in common – gravity. So how would being launched into microgravity affect an ant colony’s collective search capabilities?
To answer that question, researchers sent ants into space in January 2014. The experiment involved eight
Word by Matt de Neef, The Conversation
Buying plants
I’m not a chemist, but I do find plant chemistry (and the links and patterns between different plants) to be a fascinating topic. Fortunately there are chemists out there who can bring these to our attention, and Compound Interest includes some great plant-related infographics amongst a wider spread of chemical topics.
Move over, Mark Watney, there’s a new space botanist heading for Mars! Ryan and I have just finished watching the new Netflix series Away, which follows (over 10 episodes) the quest of five international astronauts to be the first people to set foot on the red planet.
While we’re waiting for Tim Peake to blast off to the International Space Station (ISS) to begin his Principia mission, I thought it might be fun to have a look at the first Briton in space – Helen Sharman, who was also the first woman to visit the Mir space station, in 1991.
“April showers bring May flowers.” English proverb
Over our heads, on the International Space Station, chilli peppers are blooming and being hand-pollinated by astronauts.
At 11 pm on Friday (BST, 18:01 EDT), SpaceX launched an uncrewed Dragon cargo spacecraft on its way to the International Space Station (ISS). This Dragon capsule has been to the ISS twice before, making it the first to fly in space for a third time. This is the 18th SpaceX Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract mission for NASA: CRS-18.
An ethnobotany superhero by night, my mild-mannered daytime alter ego is a science writer for the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), one of the UK’s research councils. It’s not often that those two worlds collide, although during the early summer the campus I work on is dotted with the blooms of hardy orchids.
In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars, Kate Greene talks about Shannon Lucid, the NASA astronaut who spent six months living on the Russian space station Mir. Shannon, it turns out, was a bookworm. During her stay, she read 50 books and improvised shelving from old food boxes, complete with straps to stop the books floating off. This was in 1996, a good decade before the invention of the Kindle, and so these were real books. She apparently chose titles with the highest word to mass ratio, since launch weight is a critical factor! Lucid left her library behind for future spacefarers, but it burned up when Mir was de-orbited in 2001.
Ryan’s dad likes mint sauce on pretty much anything. I grew up in a “mint sauce with roast lamb” household, so I found this slightly odd. In truth I have never cottoned on to the delights of mint sauce, so we don’t keep a jar in the house. It wasn’t until very recently that I discovered that Ryan really likes mint sauce, too.
In December 2015, as we were waiting for Tim Peake to launch to the ISS and start his Principia mission, I talked about Helen Sharman, the first Briton in space. In that blog post, I quoted David M. Harland, from his book The Mir Space Station: A Precursor to Space Colonization: