I extremely nerded out and pleased and squeeified to announce that I’ll be at w00tstock! At Comic Con. On stage.

I know.

w00tstock, for those helplessly normal of you out there, is the premier nerd event in the Orion arm of the Milky Way. Hosted by singers Paul and Storm, Mythbuster and My Close Personal Friend Adam Savage™, and my long-standing and partially-requited nerdcrush Wil Wheaton, w00tstock is billed as "Three hours of geeks and music", which is apt enough. Everyone I know who has gone has raved about it.

And cripes, the talent they get. Bill Corbett, Mike Nelson, and Kevin Murphy from Rifftrax, née Mystery Science Theater 3000. Chris Hardwick, aka The Nerdist. Len Peralta, about whom you’ll be hearing more on this blog pretty shortly. And oh my FSM, I’m really thrilled that my favorite fire-haired songstress Marian Call will be there as well. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who sent a note to TPTB to get her on stage.

One cool thing about w00tstock is that all the stuff done on stage is Creative Commons licensed, so it goes up immediately on Flickr and YouTube. In fact, there are a lot of videos from previous versions online you can check out. If you’re a bona fide nerd you’ll enjoy them.

To say I’m excited and honored is like saying a gamma-ray burst is kinda bright, or a neutron star is somewhat dense, or a Planck length is a tad minuscule.

I’m that excited.

And of course initially panicked over a topic. But then Mrs. BA inspired me, and suddenly, full blown like Minerva from the brow of Jupiter, an idea burst forth from my brain. So now all I have to do is put it together and keep it to ten minutes. Good thing I’m not long-winded.

Anyway, you can get tickets for this, but you’d better hurry because Comic Con is Geek Central and I’m sure they’ll sell out this week.

And as if that’s not enough, I’ll have even more Comic Con news soon. Mwuhahahaha!

In the Brazilian rainforest, a grasshopper lands on a leaf of the Cecropia obtusa tree, and seals its fate. It was after a quick meal but this tree is defended by hidden bodyguards. Underneath its leaves, thousands of Azteca andreae ants lie in ambush, poised at the edges with their jaws outstretched. As soon as the grasshopper lands, the ants rush out from their hiding places, seize it by the legs and pull it spread-eagled. The ambushers hold the victim while their nestmates bite, sting and dismember it. For the grasshopper, the leaf turns from a restaurant into a medieval torture rack.

This hunting strategy is all the more amazing when you consider that the ants weigh just over a milligram each while their prey – including grasshoppers and moths – can weigh up to 10 grams. Ants are famously strong and they obviously hunt in large numbers but even so, holding down a struggling insect that outweighs them by around 10,000 times can’t be easy. It’s the equivalent of a team of humans holding down three struggling blue whales.

The ants manage it because their host plant gives them hitching posts to anchor themselves to. The leaves of C.obtusa have a downy underside made up of tangles of fibres that the ants’ claws hook into. It’s the same principle used by Velcro straps, where a strip of small hooks latches onto a second strip of small loops. The ants and the tree combine forces to create a biological Velcro, and the ants are far stronger on their host plant than on any other.

The incredible tactics of the Azteca ants were discovered 16 years ago, but the secret behind their prodigious grip has only just been revealed by a team of French and Spanish scientists led by Alain Dejean. They watched the entire hunting sequence by luring large moths to the leaves using ultraviolet light, or by dropping grasshoppers onto them. At the slightest touch, the closest workers attacked the prey and drove it towards others lying in wait, which collectively flipped it underneath the leaf and stretched it out.

To test the workers’ strength, Dejean dangled threads with weights at the end of them in front of their open jaws. He found that each worker can hold onto 8 grams, around 5,700 times her own weight. And as a team, they can manage far more.

The workers also seemed to be particularly strong on the downy underside of the leaves than on the rough upper surface, or on a sheet of smooth plastic. And they were especially mighty on their host plant. When Dejean tested them on a closely related tree with a less downy underside they couldn’t hold onto as much weight.

These ants are one of the many hundreds of ant species that form lasting relationships with plants, defending them from plant-eaters in exchange for shelter and food. But all of them have a problem. Plant nectar is typically poor in proteins and nitrogen, and while some plants pay their bodyguards with special protein-rich food packages, most plant-defending ants must get these nutrients in other ways.

Some rely on thriftiness, by producing workers with very thin shells and venoms that don’t contain any protein. Some rely on bacteria and others farm sap-sucking bugs that they gently nip from time to time. And yet others solve the problem by hunting for fresh meat. Foraging in the forest canopy is difficult so these tree-top predators rely on ambush techniques that make the most of prey that approaches them.

Azteca andreae’s strategy of lying in wait is just one such technique. A related species Azteca bequaerti hides in special hollows produced by their host where it listens for the vibrations of a landing insect and swarms it en masse. Even more elaborately, Allomerus decemarticulatus creates elaborate traps by building layers over tree branches that look like parts of the tree but are actually hiding places for ant ambushers.

The layers are made out of the hairs of its host tree bound together with a fungus that the ants farm. They are pitted with tiny holes that the ants hide in. When a victim lands, the ants launch a grisly surprise attack, rushing out from their holes and grabbing the victim by the legs. As with A.andreae, the victims of A.decemarticulatus are stretched out and eaten. In the rainforest, even a harmless looking leaf or branch can hide a painful death inside or beneath it.

Reference: PLoS ONE http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0011331

More on ants:

Terminally ill ants choose to die alone

Leafcutter ants rely on bacteria to fertilise their fungus gardens

The rebellion of the ant slaves

Loss of big mammals breaks alliance between ants and trees

Foul-tasting ant parasitises the colonies of other species

Update: Just learned the American Academy paper will be available for download at this link tomorrow. But don't go now, it just gives an error message.... Well, the piece yesterday prompted a lot of commentary on the blogs, on Facebook, on the Post website (214 last time I checked), and through emails directly to me. I want to make some remarks on some of the more interesting--and less interesting--reactions that I received. First, though, a factual point: A lot of folks have asked when the American Academy of Arts and Sciences paper that all of this is based on will be available. The answer is Tuesday, and while this paper is being printed in hard copy--technically an "occasional paper" of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences--an online PDF will also be available. I will link as soon as that occurs. (Tuesday is also day the paper is being rolled out at the other AAAS--American Association for the Advancement of Science--and once again, details on the event are here.) So, on to the responses. First, the ones I don't find all that interesting:
1. I've gotten a lot of emails where there's special pleading being done either about climate change, or about vaccination. ...

In the post below on Bryan Caplan’s arguments for why one should have more children there was an “interesting” comment:

As if we’re harmless little creatures at one with our environment and put no toll on the balance of nature around us. Funny how we humans act like mindless rabbits and lemmings and put the sole unintelligent directive of our DNA as the mouth of god. Men most interestingly in power or self described intellectuals after sitting around picking belly lint and jerking off in praise of their penises find clever monkey justifications (patriarchal religions mostly) for more more more babies and women must be subservient to male sexual needs and demands of more babies. See a huge male god said so.

Funny how women mostly never jump on the soapbox bandwagon of wanting to pop out tons of kids, just male spermatozoa fed rants formed by the human male organism to insist his natural inclination is the word of gawd. If you can’t use holy massive penised Jehovah to instill this dreck then dream up socio-biological propaganda for the atheist hip guys needing a good shagging with their female cohorts.

Ignoring the weirdness of much the comment, is it true that men are more pro-natalist than women? I have shown that there seems to be a trend within the last 10 years of preference for larger families. What’s the sex breakdown for this?

The correlation between men and women is 0.65 year-to-year in their mean for ideal number of children. About 43% of the variance of the trend over the years can be predicted from one sex to the other. Is there is a systematic difference? Here’s a chart:

The period before 1998 is rather noisy overall. The correlation actually increases after ‘98 because of the concurrent upward trend. That being said, it looks like the pro-natalist bias is more accentuated among women than men. If I constrain the years to the 2000s, and age range to 18-30, the mean ideal number of children for men is 2.88 and for women it is 3.03.

These data indicate that in fact Bryan Caplan marches with the sisterhood on this issue.