A focus on the process rather than product

A few weeks back, many of us read the rather stunning case of an ant in the genus Messor from Sicily that produced two kinds of male offspring, one of them apparently of a completely different species! Given the number of eyebrows that such a finding raises, it is clear that this research took a good while before it was finally published! The complicated genetics was however not entirely unexpected. This made me wonder about the teaching of genetics in classrooms, the kind of finality and perfection that textbook concepts are made to appear like is perhaps a myth that teachers could do well to dispel early in life. Unfortunately it seems that teaching and testing in education is as fascist and authoritarian as the rest of the social environment. 

Some years ago, on a trip to Nandi Hills, I had the good fortune of being able to browse an old guest book. One of the comments that caught my attention was this one.

A little digging revealed that this was Spencer Wharton Brown, a geneticist who at that point did not even have a Wikipedia entry (of course that gap was fixed). He actually was so prominent in his time that he had the nickname "Mr Chromosome". It would appear that he must have been a visitor to the Indian Institute of Science - considering that some years later he did publish a paper with an Indian coauthor - Chandra, H. Sharat; Brown, Spencer W. (1975). "Chromosome imprinting and the mammalian X chromosome". Nature. 253 (5488). My friend Karthik Ramaswamy, then at the Archives of the IISc (now no longer an extant function!), tried to examine this a bit more.

Now Brown apparently decided to use scale insects as his model for genetics studies and was it a good choice?! In scale insects, there appears to be such stuff as post zygotic deletion of the male genome!  Sadly, Spencer Brown was murdered somewhat mysteriously!

Anyway, the lesson here seems to be that the whole system of genetic control including the influence of peptides (maternal environment), silencing RNA, epigenetics, Lamarckism, etc. calls for a more cautious approach to the teaching of biology in general. But looking at these findings should make one appreciate gene-centric views of evolution.  

• Brown, S.W. (1963) The Comstockiella system of chromosome behavior in the armored scale insects (Coccoidea:Diaspididae). Chromosoma 14:360–406. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00326785 
• Brown, Spencer W., and Giovanni DeLotto. (1950) Cytology and sex ratios of an African species of armored scale insect (Coccoidea-Diaspididae). The American Naturalist 93.873: 369-379. 
• Brown, Spencer W. (1960) Spontaneous chromosome fragmentation in the armored scale insects (Coccoïdea‐Diaspididae). Journal of Morphology 106.2: 159-185. 
• Hartl, Daniel L., and Spencer W. Brown (1970) The origin of male haploid genetic systems and their expected sex ratio. Theoretical Population Biology 1.2:165-190. 
• Ross, Laura, Ido Pen, and David M. Shuker (2010) Genomic conflict in scale insects: the causes and consequences of bizarre genetic systems. Biological Reviews 85.4:807-828. 

Swarming springtails

 

Podurid(?) springtail swarms on the forest floor

Snow fleas is a name used for collembola in the temperate zone for their swarming behavior over melting snows in spring. I do not think there is much literature on Western Ghat forest springtails and their swarming - presumably following the first summer rains (these were seen in March 2025 in Wayanad). These swarms form bluish grey dust on the ground that begins to bristle when disturbed. The swarm moves slowly on foot with some members making leaps and whole cloud like formations drift along the forest floor, presumably following the slope of the land. Remarkably little has been written about forest little organisms in the Western Ghats, even less so about such seasonal spectacles. Presumably the first rains flood the soil and leaf litter layer and flush the organisms, although it is possible that these are newly emerged and following weather cues too. 

Here are some videos of the springtails swarms in action. 

• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Collembola_swarming_2.webm
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Collembola_swarming_3.webm
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Collembola_swarming_4.webm

Postscript

June 2025 - the rains flush out some springtails out of the soil in Bangalore too. 

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/288700709

An authorship puzzle

I posted this a long time back on Facebook with no response. The author "D.R." wrote a column on birds in the The Bombay Chronicle. Any information on the identity of the author is welcome.
 

This one is from 26 April 1949. p 6.

And another

 

The author apparently died in 1950 as mentioned in a comment to the editor.

 

Reflections on gadget-birding

A few weeks ago I was invited to join a survey for birds in the Maley Madeshwara betta region, a vast savannah and forest region around the Kaveri river valley that was once the legendary home of Veerappan and his band. It is hard to find a balanced version of what factors led to his lifestyle but if one could live for that long in this area, it would be a good indicator of the water, wood, and wild foods to live on. The region was recently consolidated into a wildlife sanctuary and this was apparently the first time that there was an attempt to find out what birds lived within the boundaries. A very large number of young bird observers had been recruited for the exercise, apparently based on their contributions to ebird. Many sported fashionable hairstyles and some toted hard trolley bags that would have been more at home at an airport than in a forest. Most of the participants were less than thirty years of age and the kind of personal connection that some of us knew from the much smaller birding networks of the pre-internet past was not apparent. I was randomly assigned to a location that was 70 km away from the Kollegal forest headquarters and we stayed at an anti-poaching camp (APC). The camp itself was a far cry from my past experiences of roughing out in APCs in Bandipur. Here was a solid building with several rooms with a perfectly functional toilet and bathroom.  It had solar powered lighting and power systems that could even run a borewell pump in the daytime to fetch water. The well-head was carefully covered in a heap of stones and decorated with the best selections of thorns to keep away elephants from doing what they do best in these parts - rewilding - by removing the debris of civilization.

Along with another volunteer, we spent a full day and a half  walking two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening to collect data on bird detections in 15 minute sampling intervals. As usual more birds are heard than seen and my fellow volunteer was equipped with the Merlin app and recorded data on ebird. The Merlin app runs continuously and detects bird calls based on the ML model that it has and comparisons are assisted by a shortlist of birds of the area. While it took a while for the app to pick up many calls, I was quite impressed with the accuracy of the commoner birds that it detected. It did make serious mistakes - such as identifying a Yellow-throated Sparrow as a Eurasian Tree Sparrow, but I think it was far better than what I had expected! More importantly it was able to keep up the monitoring process without fatigue. Now one can see how a system like this could actually be incorporated into an automated monitoring setup and entirely do away with human labor and expertise. There is a certainly place for that kind of monitoring, meant for long-term institutional work. There is however a lot of scope for nuanced observation that continues to remain for those of us who are not in institutions!

Apart from gadgets that seemingly compete with humans are those that enhance humans. Many years ago, one of our friends obtained a night-vision scope. We made a trip one evening to the place of Krishna Narain (KN) on the outskirts of Bannerghatta to see what might be revealed. KN was impressed and he shortly afterwards got himself another of these gizmos. The next time we met, he mentioned that he observed a courtship display of the Common Indian Nightjar and declared that it was similar to and as exciting and amazing as a Bengal Florican in display. Unfortunately he did not give sufficient details and he never published his observations. He died in an unfortunate accident. Years later, on this recent trip, I remembered KN's observation since I observed something that might take years before someone gets to observe it again and perhaps takes a video as evidence. Fortunately for those of us trained on pen and paper, free form descriptions still work, the kinds that does not fit squarely into online databases with drop-down options and pre-made lists of exclusive options to select. 

The camp where we stayed in the MM Hills was wonderfully dark. February was getting warm and the evening quickly saw the dusk calls of birds going to roost and the crepuscular shift getting into action. There were three species of nightjar that were all calling in full strength as the sky darkened. There was the constant chucko-chucko of the Jungle Nightjar, there were more distant Ch-whoo calls with a vibrato to the second part of the Jerdon's Nightjar and then there was the more widespread and familiar stone-skipped-on-ice call of the Indian Nightjar. At one point a Jungle Nightjar landed close to the boundary post of the camp and I was able to shine a torch beam onto it and observe it through my binoculars. It was perched on a low tree along the length of the branch and facing away from the trunk of the tree. It emitted a long series of rapid chucko calls and then it stopped calling, raised its outstretched wings above its body (about 60 degrees between the left and right wings, ie a dihedral of 60 degrees) and facing into what appeared to be a headwind, it rose slowly, almost vertically, and effortlessly, apparently without making any downstrokes, above the branch and then it lowered its wings to a more normal flight position and glided down the valley. As it glided down it produced a low "ghostly" ho-po-po-po call that I don't think has ever been described! I imagine it is some kind of territorial display. 

I wonder however when this display might be seen again and described in better detail or supported by video footage. With the lack of encouragement for nuanced observation and an excessive emphasis for adding data points to structured databases, we can be sure that even if observed, the motivation for recording it in print is not nurtured or encouraged by most online or even straight-jacketed offline systems of journals with their presumptions of exactitude. 

PS: I discovered that I had a recording of the calls of the Jungle nightjar mentioned in the display above and have posted it to https://xeno-canto.org/975662

The sketch should give some indication of the behaviour and calling sequence.

Wikipedia, social insects and super-organisms

I routinely point out in my outdoor naturalist explorations that one of the great innovations in evolutionary history is indirect communication - communication via the substrate - rather than one-to-one communication. What this does is to make the information more reliably transferable and the overall information on tasks to be done more permanent and the colony functioning less vulnerable to the death of a few individual organisms. It is the reason why you cannot destroy an ant colony by stomping on the workers walking on a trail. New individuals discover the trail and follow up on the chemical information present in it.

You might see that, to some extent, this is what internet forums do, or what books do, they pass on information even after the death of the originator. But books are not location specific, I cannot find out who has walked at a specific spot, the way a dog or tiger might find out by sniffing a tree. Books are not sensitive to temporality - the dog or tiger might find out by the scents left on a tree how recent the last passer by was.

Social insects like ants and termites have evolved indirect communication to coordinate the activities of individual organisms without the need for centralized command and control. The terms stigmergy and stigmergic collaboration have been used for this and here is an explanation I found online (slightly edited):

Stigmergy is a word used to describe a particular type of control: the control of the actions of a group of agents via a shared environment. Crucially, the agents do not directly communicate amongst themselves. Instead, each agent is caused (by its environment) to act upon and change the environment. These changes in turn alter the later actions of the agents.

The word stigmergy comes from the Greek stigma, meaning sign/mark, and ergon, meaning work, capturing the notion that the environment is a stimulus that causes particular work (behavior) to occur. It was originally coined by zoologist Pierre-Paul Grassé,who explained the mound-building behavior of termites by appealing to the stigmergic control of the mound itself.

So if a termite mound is breached - the workers passing by might use a chemical marker saying - there is a breach here - as more and more workers pass the point, the chemical scent becomes stronger and it recruits workers who specialize in fixing breaches to the specific breach location. Workers might also mark trails towards the breach for others to follow. Once the breach is sealed, the trail scents and breach indicators fade away, leaving workers to follow their other activities. Notice that there is no central control and that chemical markers of different kinds may be produced by agents who may not know how to deal with the specific situation. Agents that do know how to deal with the situation are guided to a specific location. 

Insect societies have task specialization - some workers specialize in foraging, some in nest care, some in defense and so on. Task specialization is sometimes based on the age of the insects, with older ones taking up risky activities.

I have tried to excite the developers of software systems such as MediaWiki - and among some in the Wikipedia community. Agents need to be able to indicate centrally about areas of Wikipedia that are undergoing disturbance. Other agents need to be able to find, act at the areas of disturbance. Currently Wikipedia does this through central bulletin boards where agents explicitly post their notices. Unfortunately this is too taxing for a naive or overwhelmed agent. WikiRage was a third party system that could detect increased editing activity and show articles that were currently "hot". There is no real-time system that shows articles that are currently highly visited. There is no system for identifying highly sought content that does not exist either - this might be something for a search engine company like Google/Bing to think of. Looking at this also from the point of view of an agent with specialization - I as an editor might only act if I know that I can help, so overwhelming an agent with too many stimuli might only push an agent like me into confusion and inaction. If I were a specialist editor working in a particular cluster of articles, I should therefore be able to filter out and help focus on a rise in activity within articles of interest. Ideally I shouldn't have to declare my own interest explicitly but article clusters should be determined from linkages or past editing history and so on. For a while now I have sought a rather simple means to detect traffic spikes in articles that I have on my watchlist. Now some software designers will immediately object that such as system could impinge on user privacy - although much of this information (other than mere reading) is already public in the MediaWiki system. I think many of these security concerns can be reduced by "aging" - the deletion of data over time - also in a way simulating the dispersal and weakening of scents in social insects. Further such a system could perhaps be designed as a browser plugin, keeping data entirely local and off from the center. For instance if I wanted to look at what is hot on my watchlist - I could easily do with some kind of coloring and sorting of entries on my watchlist with a factor  = yesterday's (or the last available) traffic / (average of the previous N days of traffic) [dealing of course with division by zero etc.] - that might help me narrow down my responsiveness to improve articles that I have an interest in. It would also make the system more responsive to user needs.

A super-organism - the term used for colonies of social insects - needs to have mechanisms for how its agents act as sensors, how those sensations are quantitatively expressed, how those quantitative expressions tip thresholds that drive actions or reaction.

Note: I have been bumbling with these ideas for a while and my knowledge of software development for implementing this particular idea has been rather limiting. I hope some talented software developer feels inspired to create something along these lines. I for one would be grateful for it! 

PS: WikiRage went defunct and there is now a site called WikiShark which gives trending pages globally (for the English Wikipedia) but there is still a role as mentioned above for what is trending in what one can contribute to - ie based on task specialization.