Maria is a Brazilian PhD student at the Universidade de São Paulo, currently in her final year. Her research focuses on the foraging strategies of ants. Alongside her work, she is also deeply interested in data analysis and scientific communication. Her latest work in Insectes Sociaux can be found here.

IS: Who are you and what do you do?

I’m a Brazilian PhD student studying ants’ behavioural characteristics at the Universidade de São Paulo. I’m specifically using solitary foraging ants to understand how internal, social, and environmental factors impact foraging execution and performance.

IS: How did you develop an interest in your research?

My interest emerged quite early, while I was in the first year of my biological sciences degree. During the entomology course, I was especially interested in the Hymenoptera group, but knowing their names and morphological characteristics did not seem enough for me. Shortly afterwards, I met Professor Arrilton and joined his laboratory, where I was able to access the ethological approach to ants’ biology. Since then, I have been working on and maintaining my passion for this topic.

IS: What is your favorite social insect, and why?

I have to choose the ants of the genus Dinoponera, and if I had to be more specific, the giant ant Dinoponera quadriceps. This is because it’s the first ant I’ve worked on, and it’s certainly an ant that causes a ‘wow factor’. I find them very pretty, and the ecological role they play is even more beautiful. Unfortunately, factors in their biology make them sensitive to anthropogenic activity, and I fear that future generations will not be able to experience the same enchantment to see one of these ants alive.

IS: What is the best moment/discovery in your research so far? What made it so memorable?

I always have my best time doing fieldwork with my lab colleagues or when I have the opportunity to speak about ants to the public. It’s a pleasure to attend scientific events, but also to visit schools and make science communication live to a younger audience. My most memorable discovery so far was the fact that D. quadriceps foragers don’t aggressively compete with their neighbours. I read some anecdotes about these ants being very territorial and aggressive, but over many months of observation during my master’s, I realised that they are ‘gentle giants’ and that this type of interaction was quite rare.

IS: Do you teach or do outreach/science communication? How do you incorporate your research into these areas?

I always tried to dedicate myself as much as possible to science communication. Passing on my knowledge has been one of my career goals. Since in Brazil we researchers are formed in public institutions, I think we must increase our contact with society. I’ve spoken to public school students about the importance of ants, and today I lead a podcast (unfortunately only available in Portuguese for now) called ‘Atiçando o formigueiro’. The podcast is an initiative that aims to inform people about the biology and importance of our country’s native ants and social insects. In addition, we also seek to increase the visibility of Brazilian myrmecologists working in different fields. In the next few years, increasing my teaching experience will be one of my priorities, and I hope to have the opportunity to work professionally in this area.

IS: What do you think are some of the important current questions in social insect research, and what is essential for future research?

Considering the climate crisis scenario in which we live, I believe that the least we researchers can do is to look into the current and imminent effects that irreversible climate change is having on social insects and, indirectly, on the rest of the planet. It is not possible to defend the preservation of species and habitats without first providing reliable data on what is happening and what will happen in the coming years to the insects we know.

IS: Outside of science, what are your favorite activities, hobbies, or sports?

My favourite hobby is playing video games, especially RPGs or simulation games on my PC, or board games. I also like going to the cinema and watching reality TV shows of dubious taste. Of course, I spend a good part of my day listening to podcasts from genres ranging from talk shows to true crime. I also walk and look after my dog, Nala. I don’t like playing or watching sports at all and I feel completely oblivious to the subject.

IS: What is the last book you read? Would you recommend it? Why or why not?

The last book I read was actually a comic book called Ordinary Victories by Manu Larcenet. Manu Larcenet is a well-known French cartoonist. I would recommend Ordinary Victories and his other works.

IS: How do you keep going when things get tough?

Unfortunately, this type of situation is not rare in academia. When this happens, I try to focus on other things (such as my family or hobbies) to then return with a clear mind. I always seek the support of the people around me and try to be kind to myself, set reasonable goals, and work within specific deadlines and expectations. For me, being open about going through a difficult time also helped make communication with my peers more accurate and honest.

IS: If you were to go live on an uninhabited island and could only bring three things, what would you bring? Why?

I’d bring a blanket, food supplies, and my dog. A blanket because I’m always cold, even when it is 25 ºC. Food supplies because even if the island contains animals to catch or fruit to collect, I’m not sure I have the ability to find them and survive on my own. Of course, I would bring my dog because I need some social interaction and a friend.

IS: Who do you think has had the most considerable influence on your science career?

It’s difficult to answer because I’ve always been surrounded by incredible people who taught me everything I know and believed in me at all times. I’d say Arrilton Araújo, Dina Azevedo and, of course, my PhD mentor Nicolas Châline. Arrilton and Dina, because they gave me a very solid foundation for being a social insect scientist, encouraged me to create interest and dedication to all stages of the research and always treat people with kindness. Nicolas for all his brilliant ideas and motivation to pursue and execute them even if the plan does not go as expected, thinking beyond and making hypotheses about everything around us. They are all great ethologists who are a reference for all the work I do and continue to be my greatest sources of inspiration.

IS: What advice would you give to someone hoping to be a social insect researcher in the future?

I’d say: Do it! It’s a brilliant area with many collaborative researchers and, most importantly, many interesting questions to be answered. I would recommend getting to know your insect, observing it ad libitum, spending some time getting familiar with it, and then starting to think about questions, especially more complex ones. I would recommend trying to find these missing pieces in the puzzle before trying to create a big picture to avoid broad generalizations and frustration.

IS: Has learning from a mistake ever led you to success?

It always does. I believe we learn a lot from our mistakes, and experimentation is all about trying and failing multiple times. Failing allows us to remain humble and realize that there is no such thing as perfection. It allows us to seek different opinions and guidance and also not give up. In this sense, my advice is to plan a pilot testing period and allow yourself to make mistakes. Also, expect that mistakes and simply unpredictable things can and will happen along the way.

IS: What is your favorite place science has taken you?

Science allowed me to live in Paris for 6 months and completely change my research environment to another country (and continent!) where I was able to learn a lot about research, but also about the local culture.

By Ran Dai

In this blog, Ran Dai, an environmental consultant and researcher, shares fascinating observations of gypsy ants in the forests near Kunming, China. From the interactions between different ant species to the behaviors of Aphaenogaster colonies, Ran provides an intimate look into the lives of these insects. Discover more about the adaptive strategies and behaviors of these ants in her latest work for Insectes Sociaux, here.

In early mornings, the forests on the outskirt of Kunming, mid-sized city surrounded by hills and small mountains in southwest China, are often soaked following an overnight shower. The ants were up, with only a few workers hauling their cold feet along the forest floor, trying to find food for the nests below. Their bodies are built for agile movements across a complicated world of forest understorey. The ant nests are sometimes big judged by the size of the mound, which might exceed two meters for the largest gypsy ants in the area, Aphaenogaster schurri. There are three Aphaenogaster species: A. schurri, A. japonica (slightly smaller than, and coexist with A. schurri), and A. famelica. The latter is also the smallest among all, building more closely located nests down an artificial plantation of Acacia dealbata, introduced plant that has become locally successful possibly due to its symbiotic relationship with A. famelica, which consumes the elaiosome and helps disperse the seeds.

The sun came in, and the rest of the forest woke up. The ants are now found in great numbers, actively pulling their prey – a dead caterpillar, a fat earthworm, some seeds, etc. – back into the nests. This was done through a small nest opening located on the soil surface. During the rainy days, a piece of curled leaf was sometimes found covering the opening hole, like an umbrella, and absent when the day was clear. The ants frequently exploited the environment near the nest openings, making it easy to observe their behaviors there. Later on, a question occurred to me, after seeing several Aphaenogaster nest openings with busy workers foraging nearby, that what would happen if I put foods between two nest openings?

After some observations on intra-specific and neighborhood competition in the gypsy ants, I found the ant workers simply increased movement speeds foraging under the pressure of competition. I put a Petri-dish to cover one of the ant nest openings in the neighborhood, and calculated the time spent on food discovery, removal and retrieval. I also assigned two different food items: one light and one heavy, in a food patch put at various distances. When an ant nest opening was blocked, ants from the rival nest opening appeared sluggish with an increased time spent on food removal and retrieval. Now that the neighbors are being suppressed by some strange human being using glassware to do stuff, what’s the hurry? There was also no apparent selectivity shown over the light/heavy foods. Therefore, to “grab and run” was the rule in the neighborhood relationships.

Life wasn’t all about work, though. Once, two Aphaenogaster workers found their way on the writing board I was holding. That must feel strange, that the world around suddenly became plain and white, which somehow became an opportunity for temporary escapement from the busy work scene down there. What the ants did was to sit down and groom self, rubbing head and neck with their long legs. They must have enjoyed the moment. When bathed under the afternoon sunlight, their heads were up with mandibles wide open. I’ve never seen a happy ant so closely.

Another time, I was honored to meet the queen which accompanied a group of workers pulling a tuna bait (used for the field experiment) back to their nest. The female had a distinct body structure with strong shoulders once boring a pair of wings bringing her here to establish the colony. She waggled along the team, occasionally making an eager grab at the food being carried, like someone who couldn’t wait for the dinner to begin a few hours later. Her colony was yet small, however was located near a much larger neighboring colony. Though the gypsy ants here seldom show real aggressions to each other, indirect competition through reducing common food sources can be lethal to the subdominant colonies. Life is challenging also because of other ant species living in the area, such as the big-headed ants (Pheidole spp.), which came in large numbers and give painful bites, and the arrow ants (Ectomomyrmex astutus), which steal without notice. In some rare cases, the yellow-footed hornet (Vespa velutina) took baits into the sky, and no one could do anything about it…

Lachlan Jones is an ecologist and entomologist working in England. He investigates bumblebee disease spread and the potential for natural chemicals in heather nectar to protect bees. His latest work in Insectes Sociaux can be found here.

IS: Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m an ecologist/entomologist from Australia, though currently working in England. At the moment my work is about bumblebee disease spread and the potential for natural chemicals found in heather nectar to act a preventative medicine protecting bees from infection by the gut parasite Crithidia bombi. My work has been varied and has previously involved polyethism in stingless bees in Australia, influence of climate on body size of solitary bees in the Rocky Mountains, USA, ecology and behaviour of host plant recognition in generalist pest moths, parental care and group size in jewel bugs, responses of thrips to weather conditions and the use of aquatic weevils as bio-control agents.

IS: How did you develop an interest in your research?

I was always fascinated by science and geography growing up, and had parents who took me on plenty of walks in national parks and various other outdoor activities. I also had several great teachers in high school who further contributed toward my enthusiasm for science. I didn’t fully decide until towards the end of my undergraduate studies that ecology, rather than chemistry or genetics say, was definitely the path for me, but I certainly think I made the right decision. I got into social insects specifically when finishing my PhD when I got involved in a side project about stingless bees with James Hereward, a postdoc in the Walter Lab where I did my PhD. This project eventually led to the paper that I’ve just published in Insectes Sociaux. I think the fact that I was willing to study stingless bees purely as a volunteer also helped when applying for a Fulbright to study bees and climate change in the US, which in turn led me to my current position studying bumblebee health.

IS: What is your favorite social insect, and why?

I think if I’m to pick one it would have to be Tetragonula carbonaria. These are one of the most familiar species of native bees in and around my home city of Brisbane, build their brood comb within the nest in a beautiful spiral structure, and (along with their congener T. hockingsi) perform a wide variety of interesting nest-maintenance behaviours I had the chance to study in one of the most fun projects I’ve worked on.

IS: What is the best moment/discovery in your research so far?

What made it so memorable? It was probably the time, about six weeks into my Honours, when there was a heavy downpour one morning like I’d been waiting for. I seized my insect traps and metal poles, ran out to the Malvaviscus bush I’d been using as a field site and threw the traps up. When I looked at the traps later, I counted more thrips on the traps than I’d captured on some previous sunny days. It showed immediately that thrips do indeed fly when it’s raining, even in a heavy downpour, which was certainly not what I or my supervisor had been expecting!

IS: Do you teach or do outreach/science communication?

How do you incorprate your research into these areas? I don’t currently teach, although I have previously given tutorials. As for outreach, I ran a couple of sessions on bees and pollination at a children’s nature camp last year which was fun. And, quite by accident, when collecting bumblebee queens in Windsor Great Park earlier this year to establish experimental colonies, I ended up having a lot of conversations with interested passers-by about bumblebee disease, threats and what I was trying to do about it.

IS: What do you think are some of the important current questions in social insect research, and what is essential for future research?

One significant and central question is how and why social insects evolved such a life cycle. While progress has been made, this question is complex to answer and is multifaceted, encompassing what selection pressures, novel adaptations and pre-adaptations led firstly to primitively social constructs like those commonly found among sweat bees (Halictidae) today, and then from there onto the fully eusocial colonies seen among honeybees, stingless bees, ants and termites. A related question is what leads social behavior to be lost, such as in the orchid bees.

Coming from the perspective of stingless bees, another important question is communication of foraging information within the colony. Experimental studies using placement of artificial feeders have shown that a stingless bee forager is capable of communicating to recruit other foragers to a nectar source, but how they do this, and whether it bears any similarities to the waggle dance of honey bees, is unknown.

A lot of great work is also being done on answering some fascinating questions relating to social immunity. Large insect colonies densely packed with genetically identical individuals provide ripe ground for rapid disease spread, and there are numerous surprisingly ‘clever’ strategies insects have evolved to isolate infected individuals and minimize contact between workers in different parts of the colony. While further innovations in genetics/genomics and neuroscience will likely make strides towards understanding many fundamental questions in social insect biology, I also think it is important to remember the value of patient observation and well-designed behavioral experiments that have allowed us to have such a detailed understanding of communication in honeybee colonies.

IS: Outside of science, what are your favorite activities, hobbies, or sports?

Reading novels, particularly fantasy, historical fiction and crime/legal thrillers; hiking (or bushwalking as we call it Down Under) and playing guitar are my biggest hobbies.

IS: What is the last book you read? Would you recommend it? Why or why not?

It was a novel called The Glovemaker’s Daughter – set in 17^th century Yorkshire and the American colonies and about Quakers. I thought it was an interesting story that told me a lot I didn’t know about that period, a good read if you like history.

IS: How do you keep going when things get tough?

I try to remind myself that I am indeed lucky to be able to follow my interests and discover new things about the natural world as a job, and that my most successful projects had quite a few frustrating failures at the beginning.

IS: If you were to go live on an uninhabited island and could only bring three things, what would you bring? Why?

Probably a book on the local flora and fauna, both so I could make natural history observations to pass the time, but also have an idea of what might be edible; materials to make a fire, and a dinghy, both for exploring around the island’s perimeter and so I could escape if life there got too tough.

IS: Who do you think has had the most considerable influence on your science career?

I think that would have to be Professor Gimme Walter, who I initially had as a lecturer and later was my Honours and then PhD supervisor. I think he struck a good balance between guiding me in the right direction while still giving me freedom to try things, and I have many fond memories of afternoon lab discussions on his back deck about all sorts of broad concepts and ideas in ecology and evolution and the assumptions behind them.

IS: What advice would you give to someone hoping to be a social insect researcher in the future?

I think I would simply say to go ahead with what questions interest you the most, though also remind them that recent discoveries have revealed social insects are scattered widely across the insect orders, with species of beetles, true bugs, thrips, cockroaches and shrimp now been shown to have social colonies, and that galling species in particular can have quite complex levels of sociality. So there is a lot of untapped potential for work beyond the organisms we usually think of as social insects such as ants, termites, bees and wasps.

IS: Has learning from a mistake ever led you to success?

About eight months into my PhD I decided I no longer wanted to continue with the initial plan looking at chemical ecology of host plant attraction, and instead focus on behaviour. While my supervisor was fine with me making the switch, and gave me the freedom to come up with my own ideas about what to do instead, I initially made the mistake of latching on to several unrelated experimental ideas I thought were interesting without thinking about what broader question the thesis as a whole should answer. At my PhD confirmation meeting, I was not initially confirmed as a PhD candidate but instead given 3 months to plan out what a cohesive thesis plan should look like. While it was tough going back to square one a year into my PhD, it meant I had a year of experience working, reading about and thinking about my study species to draw on when thinking about what the most important questions were that I wanted to answer. And consequently, the ideas I came back with and developed into a thesis were I think much better ideas than I could have come up with at the beginning.

IS: What is your favorite place science has taken you?

That would be the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. An amazing place, it’s a research station at 3000m elevation in a stunning part of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. I had the good fortune of being able to work there last summer as a Fulbright scholar in Rebecca Irwin’s lab (North Carolina State University), and the field work in picturesque wildflower meadows surrounded by snow-capped mountains, weekend hikes with the numerous friends I made there and the incredible range of social activities at the station made it a truly unforgettable experience. The xperience I gained netting and identifying bumblebees as well as performing pollination experiments on wildflowers probably gave me the necessary experience to land my current postdoc at Royal Holloway University.