Even in Kyoto

Monsoon rainfall patterns have been interesting this year. First, there was the rain in June; unusually early for a monsoon rain. We managed to collect 60 leafcutter queens from that rain, from a small swarm: enough to feel like the early morning trip down to Tucson was worthwhile, but not enough for all of the projects we want to do.

The more recent storm system has dropped a whole bunch of rain, but the prevailing winds have caused it to travel and drop that rain basically everywhere else except over our usual main collecting area, on the south side of the Catalina Mountains.

Even so, given all the rain elsewhere, I have been getting concerned that we'd missed out on opportunities to collect leafcutter queens from other places. So that justified a trip down. Looking at my schedule for the next couple of days, I determined that yesterday afternoon was the best time to go. We left at around 4:30, in order to get there while there was still enough daylight left to look around and see what areas might pan out.

Our usual destinations were dry, showing very little signs of activity, so then I suggested we head due east, towards the Seven Falls Trailhead area, where the nearby rain gauge had indicated higher rainfall amounts.

I was able to do some ant-spotting while sitting in the passenger seat as we drove around at dusk with the windows down. When leafcutter queens mate and then find places to dig and start new colonies, they leave distinct craters of soil tailings around their excavation sites, and these are reasonably obvious to someone with an experienced eye. The vegetation and soil near the Seven Falls Trailhead looked like the right kind, and soon enough I also spotted some of the distinctive craters that mature Acromyrmex colonies make. Shortly after that, we found a few patches of ground in a road median that looked promising.

That was enough to justify the entrance price to park at the trailhead, where we continued to walk around through an incredible sunset and the onset of dusk.

From here, I mostly want to note the other awesome wildlife that we saw while queen-hunting, although I'll also note that we managed to come back with 74 queens, which made the whole trip worthwhile. I very randomly caught the first one just after nightfall, in a non-obvious spot, which was an encouraging sign.

First, the tarantula hawks: big ones, at least 2 inches long, actively traveling around and searching at night for tarantulas. They are so beautiful, with their dark blue, shiny bodies, and shiny, red-orange wings. Also slightly terrifying, when you figure that they may fly towards the light from flashlights at night. Then, the tarantulas themselves - we saw at least 3 of them. Tons more mature leafcutter colonies, which will be really useful for some of N's dissertation projects. At least 6 banded geckos. A small Sonoran desert toad, and then a bigger 'un, the size of a softball, that scared me a little with its loud rustling. Lots of kangaroo mice. And then, late into the evening, 4 javelinas trotted close by, following a trail to get from somewhere to somewhere else. My first Arizona javelinas. Also a good number of millipedes, and at least one centipede, and a small snake that tried very hard to be inconspicuous, hiding in its hole.

It was a good collecting trip, and I'm keen to go back and visit that area again sometime. It was beautiful. We got back to Tempe by around 1:00 am, dropped the queens into nests, and so I got to sleep by 2 am.

It's definitely monsoon season now.

Saturday morning, pre-monsoon, scrottie and I got up early and biked over to the Phoenix Farmer's Market. They had their mister system running at full blast, such that it felt like a tropical rainforest. On the return ride, the wind blew hot in our faces. Applying water to the top of my head felt refreshing.

Later in the afternoon, I went out again to run a couple of errands. Before I left, I soaked my linen shirt in water. Putting it on felt like donning a wet bathing suit - clammy, cold. The second I started bicycling, I felt fantastic. That feeling lasted for the entire 5 minutes while the shirt was still wet.

We're now at the point where the "cold" water coming out of the faucet is warm. No need to use hot water while showering.

Last night there were some good showers just north of Tucson, north of the Catalina Mountains, in a part of the state where we were once caught out in a microburst at the very end of a 400k brevet. There are leafcutter ants out there, but I don't know at what sort of density, so we didn't go down.

When the sun came up this morning, the sky was brown-orange. Cars are covered in a fine layer of dust: dust storm. The bike ride in to campus was humid, but at least temperatures were cooler than they have been.

I am hoping I won't have to do too much data collection this week.

Three Fridays ago, scrottie and I did a 45-mile Friday night ride we refer to as "Around the World", which loops north through Scottsdale up to Fountain Hills, then back again. Last weekend, we rode up to Paradise Valley, and on the ride there, had a disagreement about proper cadences and cycling methodology. As a result, this past Friday, I wound up going out to ride the 75-mile "Around the Universe" variant on my own.

This won't matter much to most readers who don't know the area, but the 75-mile version was WAY more pleasant than the 45-mile version. The 45-mile version involves an uphill climb on Shea Blvd, which is a major arterial and lacks bicycling amenities along a key uphill segment. As we were riding along, some dude in a convertible saw fit to try and deliver a lecture on cycling safety to us from the next lane over, which didn't help matters ("Do you have ANY idea of what you're doing?!" Um, yes, dude, yes, we do.). To top that off, the 45-mile version put us back onto Highway 87 at around 10 pm, a time of night when there is still a lot of traffic.

In contrast, the Around the World route avoids Shea by going up and over Dynamite Blvd instead. Sure, it's more climbing, but I just shifted down and worked my way up at a moderate pace. After the descent down Dynamite, the whole section along McDowell Mountain Park was quiet and wonderful, and there were some sections with refreshing pockets of cool air. And by the time I got all the way back down to Highway 87, it was late enough that traffic had really quieted down.

I don't know if I'll wind up building all the way back up to the full Midnight Century or not, because the full thing takes that much more time, late at night, and I'd like to hold on to some semblance of a normal sleep schedule. But the Around the Universe was really nice and it felt good to lay down some miles.

I saw a palo verde beetle on the bike path towards the beginning of the ride. They are so cool.


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Both ceramics sessions this week were fairly uneventful. Mud therapy.

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The people in the lab who work with the seed-harvester ants are currently running an "Ant Farm" experiment, which involves putting ants into hundreds of nests like this one and then observing their behavior and social interactions:


The two queens in this photo are excavating: digging up soil, carrying it to the surface in their chin-whisker beards, and depositing it there. Okay, only ~150 nests at the moment. I went in to help for 2 hours on Saturday, but am trying to avoid getting sucked in too much. Not my project.

Afterwords, I ate lunch in the breakroom. I hardly ever eat lunch in there, but the view is phenomenal if you enjoy an industrial aesthetic:



You can just barely see the tops of the palm trees along Palm Walk. The tallest building in the background is the Life Sciences E wing. The stuff in the foreground is the top of some engineering buildings.

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I originally thought I'd be spending most of today hanging out with my cousin A, but then she had a change of plans. Unexpected free day got devoted to: baking pumpkin scones, lemon-ricotta muffins, and bread; vacuuming like woah*; a whole series of minor bike tweaks**; and various other odds and ends. Then S and I booked the moving truck for the Great Crazy American Cross-Country Junk-Hauling Expedition. By the dubs - it cost $50 for S to join AAA, and that knocked $500 off the truck rental price (=net $450 savings).



*I don't think I've mentioned too recently that I hate carpeting. I hate carpeting. Also, Arizona is so dusty that I had to empty out the (bagless) vacuum like 12 times while vacuuming this 800-square-foot place. Yes, literally, 12 times.

**Froinlavin got 2 new hot pink bottle cages and is now all matchy-matchy with the black and hot pink aesthetic. The Jolly Roger got a 1.5" rear tire to replace the 1.75" one, a swapped bottle cage to replace one I decided I didn't like (annoying design), some much-needed basket repair work, and new festive basket lights for night riding.

So I managed to get this first bowl finished during the first ceramics session, as you might recall:



But I have several more bowls to go. Painting the dragonfly with black iron oxide took a while. Here's how that bowl looked before the glazing and firing:



At the moment I have a bunch of other projects in the works, too, so I didn't want to spend Saturday's studio time entirely on painting. I do, however, want to continue making these kinds of pieces. So I worked on two more bowls at home on Saturday morning. I'm hesitant to show the outcome of the painting effort for the new bowls before things get fired again, because as you can see from the work above, glaze firing is a dynamic process and things almost never turn out exactly as you expect them to. So we shall see. Then I managed to spend the entire afternoon in the studio making headway on the other projects. A full day of ceramics - not bad. I strategically sat at the wheel that was furthest away from the noisiest classmates, and that made things much more tolerable for the afternoon.

When I first arrived at the studio, another new student had appeared. We took one look at each other and went, "I know you." It was J, someone else who was a regular back when I did ceramics during grad school. It was comforting to see him there. He's kind of funny in that his specialty is cylindrical vases with textural decorations - that's basically the only thing he makes, as far as I can tell. He made two of them during Saturday's class. How many vases does a person need? He says he gives away pretty much all of them. His approach reflects the personal tactile comfort/engagement aspect of ceramics. Clay speaks to different people in different ways.

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Grad student N and I have been keeping a close eye on the weather over the past week, ever since we'd heard that there would probably be an unusually early monsoon storm coming up. Ant-hunting season has begun. And storm it did, although as with most monsoon rain the amount of rain a given location receives can vary tremendously. We only got a few light sprinkles in Dogtown, but the neighborhoods north of the Phoenix Mountains were more thoroughly drenched. The bulk of the rain fell from Friday night through Saturday morning, which meant that we wouldn't need to go down to Tucson until Sunday morning. This was a small relief, given the ambitious ceramics agenda you can see outlined above.

There was just one slight hitch, in that scrottie and I had made plans to have dinner with friends who live in Paradise Valley on Saturday night. I enjoy bicycling up there because then I get the combination of decent exercise AND quality time with good friends. But all told, it takes about 1.5 hours to ride up there, and another 1.5 hours to ride home. So we didn't get home and into bed until 1:30 am.

I don't think I really slept, because I then had to get up by 3:30 am so N and I could drive down to Tucson in time to catch the leafcutter mating swarms, shortly after sunrise.

We made good time on the drive, arriving by 5:45 am. The total rainfall accumulation in our key collecting area was just borderline for what we think it takes to trigger mating swarms, but if we didn't go down there we would never know whether we'd wind up missing our only opportunity to get queens.

Typically, during a good swarming event, we will drive past multiple mating aggregations on our way out to our main collecting area. Yesterday morning, we saw next to no signs of activity as we drove along. It occurred to me that we could roll down the car windows, and when we did so we discovered that it was unusually cool out (almost chilly!), so I figured the cooler temperatures could be postponing any ant activity.

In all, as morning temperatures started to rise we wound up getting to watch a small swarm form at one of the better collecting spots, and managed to collect 59 queens in the end. We didn't see signs of any other swarming activity elsewhere, so I think this rain wasn't quite sufficient to really get things going. This past winter was extremely dry, so I'm hoping that overall this rainfall event will encourage plant growth and facilitate future flights, so long as future storms roll through. Monsoon rains are always a gamble.

Two photos:

The dark spots on the upper left are the leafcutter ant queens and males in midair. The ants fly towards an aggregation, where the males grab onto the queens while in flight, and then they fall to the ground and mate.


Ants mating beneath the swarm:


In this species, the queens mate multiple times, so after they've finished with one male, they pause for a millisecond and then take off again, back into the swarm. Quite a frenzy. We wanted to wait until we were sure the queens had mated as many times as they desire, so that meant waiting until it looked like the queens could no longer fly and were starting to shed/tear off their wings. Altogether we used those 59 queens to set up 20 nests of 3 queens per nest:



That isn't enough nests for everything we'd like to get done this year, so we'll continue to keep an eye on the weather. Ideally we'll manage to start up around 85 nests total, so that's 255 queens, at least. A fraction of the nests will inevitably die; over 95% of the queens in the wild die during the colony initiation phase. We tend to have better success in the lab, but some extra collecting never hurts. We shall see.

On Friday and today, I've been working on that leafcutter manuscript I mentioned. I've gotten all the way to the Discussion, but have been feeling stuck on the Discussion. What to talk about, at what length? How to structure the damn thing? My PhD advisor offered one clue, in the form of "talk about your results first, THEN the other literature," based on the material that's currently there under the label of Discussion, but I have still been hung up on something. How to structure it so it all hangs together as a coherent story? What's the most efficient way to bang out a Discussion for an academic paper? In writing about the subject, I tend to wander off into the forest, admiring all the different trees and flowers, reading all the papers that are only remotely related to what I'm working on, and then reading all the interesting papers that are cited in those remote papers. Basically.

Just now, I had a flash of insight, based on something clever I learned from my first postdoc advisor. His strategy is to sketch out the main talking points based around the figures. Bring it back to the data, the heart of the story.

Duh.

I think I can do this now.

Short one first, a time-lapse video of a leafcutter ant colony at the Houston Zoo demolishing a bouquet of roses:

https://youtu.be/AQ8-H8PZ3X8

Second, one of my colleagues from graduate school created a video to document the process used to make a cast of an ant nest. It's on the long side (15 minutes) but is thorough and cool.

https://youtu.be/6DXORV4ZflI

I've wanted to make this graphic for several years by now:



First, I had to draw pictures of individual worker ants - there are five different ant poses in this image. Then, I had to figure out how to extract the colors from the original Very Hungry Caterpillar: hand-position ants, one by one, on top of the caterpillar drawing, then merge them into a single image. Select all of the ants via a color threshold, then put the ant layer underneath the caterpillar layer, flatten the image, invert the selection, and press the 'delete' key.

Popular search engine searching-fu really didn't help at all for this one.

Noted here in case I or anyone else wants to employ this trick again.

Kind of a boring day, but for a good cause. I got a request to review a highly pertinent manuscript on Sunday night, but I have a lot on my plate at the moment, so this morning I decided to bite the bullet and got the review turned in.

I'm also giving a lot of talks in the next couple of weeks, beginning on Friday. Friday's talk is mostly done - it's an introduction to the software program R for an emerging technologies engineering grad student group on campus. It will be interesting to see the engineers' first impressions. Giving what amounts to an hour-long marketing pitch can be kind of tough, but it should be enough time to leave the graduate students with a good idea as to whether or not R will be useful for them.

Next week, it's an hour-long departmental seminar at my brother's university (ahh, sweet, sweet nepotism). Leafcutter-focused. Hopefully I will wow them all with my beautiful photos, excellent fieldwork and lab experiments, and superb graphs.

After that, a talk at a Bio-Math meeting, where the audience will be mostly mathematicians, and where I won't be talking about much math. My main goal is to get some behavioral datasets in sufficiently good condition that I can explain how they're generated and the opportunities they present so as to give the mathematicians more ideas for mathematical models of leafcutter ant colonies and behavior.

I might also be giving a talk to people in my grad research group the Monday after the Bio-Math meeting, which may or may not be the same as the departmental seminar. And a week or two after that, I'll go up to Taylor, Texas, for another department seminar. Theoretically these two department seminars will be good practice for any job talks I get to give, although I think it's going to be a while (if ever) before I have any such opportunity. More than anything, I hope I can manage to be articulate and not make a complete fool of myself. I hope my audiences come away inspired.

Oh, and there's a conference in November. That talk with be cricket-focused.

I want to be working on manuscript revisions of the respirometry manuscript, and on the draft of the Discussion for the next leafcutter manuscript, and on the cricket longevity manuscript. Sometimes the writing is a real slog.

I think I might finally be getting a handle on the statistics for this next leafcutter manuscript. Maybe. It's been a hard one to navigate because I've had to think things through without much feedback from anyone else. But that makes it a good self-test for my confidence in my abilities as a scientist. I just really don't want to embarrass myself when submitting this paper for publication. Oh, and I think I can potentially get it published somewhere spiffy.

The figures are beautiful, and the data tell an interesting story, especially with the addition of more contextual information on the protein and carbohydrate content of some plants that the ants collect in the wild. It's easier to justify the dietary treatments in the context of the protein-carbohydrate data than in the context of the elemental composition of a single leaf type we used to feed to the ants (how I'd originally framed things), especially since I've pulled out the other elemental data that were originally in the paper (for the leafcutter waste material). Elemental data can be useful, except in the case of carbon, because (a) most of the carbon in plants is locked up in non-digestible structures like cellulose, and (b) the carbon content of different compounds (cellulose vs. sugars) is basically the same, but those different compounds function in radically different ways in consumers.

One of the greatest benefits of working with my current boss is that he's quite good at pinpointing ways to improve my academic writing, and we work well together as writers. Last week we met to discuss a current manuscript-in-progress, and he suggested spending a bit of time with two books while thinking about and working on revisions to the manuscript's introduction.

I had to spend the better part of last week working on two other manuscripts, so it wasn't until Friday afternoon that I cracked open one of the books, Physiological Ecology: How Animals Process Energy, Nutrients, and Toxins, by William Karasov and Carlos Martinez del Rio, and promptly found myself nodding to sleep. It's a well-written textbook, but I just couldn't focus, so I decided to cut my losses and work on sorting out the materials collected in Arizona instead.

Here are two examples:




Interesting stuff - in the first example, there are a bunch of mistletoe flowering/fruiting stems on the left-hand side. After looking at everything for a while, I determined that the tiny, seed-like items are actually mistletoe flowers.

Flipping my to-do schedule meant that I could go home at a reasonable hour and try to work on reading Physiological Ecology on Friday evening, instead. Of course, I didn't get as far as I would have liked. Hopefully I will manage to get myself to focus more today, instead.

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Which brings me to the weekend. Saturday morning, the Aggies hosted the Lake Bryan Sprints. Originally, they'd hoped to rope in three teams, Baylor, St. Edwards, and UT-Austin, but Baylor and St. Ed's backed out at the last minute. It was great to have UT-Austin there, though, because the Aggies needed some good competition. UT won every event they entered, but A&M had some solid and very close (one-foot) second-place finishes, so there was a lot of good racing for everyone.

The A&M Open Women's 4+ had the same problem they always have - no one to race against - so I challenged them to a duel against me in the 1x at the very beginning of the regatta. They won, but not by a huge margin, and the race was good practice for all of us with keeping our heads in the game. After the 1x, I hopped in the launch and spent the rest of the morning aligning boats at the start and chasing after the boats as they raced.
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The rest of the weekend mostly consisted of chores: groceries from Brazos Natural, a recycling haul and several more groceries from Village Foods, then cooking up some aged vegetables on Saturday night (note to self: don't buy discount eggplant from Farm Patch ever again, it's just not worth it). I played Pancake Factory on Sunday morning, although it's kind of a depressing game when I'm the only one to eat them. Then the sink and bathroom got good scrubbings, things got vacuumed, stuff that migrated across the house got migrated back, and the worst of the weeds got pulled in the garden. I have a feeling that the snails are going to eat almost everything I'm planting, but I just can't seem to make the time to give the garden a proper going-over.

I tried to invite people over for crafts on Sunday afternoon, but nobody made it, so I sat out back and worked on painting an oar until I got too cold and it was time to stop, and then I knitted a bit on a vest I will most likely frog, while C worked on crocheting some blanket squares.