To track the ants in the colony shown here, University of Lausanne biologist Danielle Mersch glued tiny QR codes to the insects' backs - then filmed them for 41 days. The resulting 2.4 billion data points revealed three types of workers: cleaners, foragers and nurses for the queen and her brood.
Their activity is visualised by James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti in their new book Where the Animals Go. The pair previously examined urban humans in London: The Information Capital (Particular Books): "Once we began working with tracking data," says Cheshire, "it all felt oddly familiar."
How did you get the idea for the book?
Oliver Uberti: The idea for Where the Animals Go began with an elephant named Annie. Ten years ago, while I was on the design staff at National Geographic, I worked on a map of Annie’s movements in and around Zakouma National Park in southeastern Chad. Researchers had equipped her with a GPS tracking collar to see where she went and how vulnerable Zakouma’s elephants were to poaching outside the park. Annie travelled 1,015 miles over 86 days. Then the signal went dead. By the time the researchers reached her last known position, all that was left were bones and skin and the tattered bodies of eight of her companions. There was no doubt they had been poached.
Working on that story was the first time a map had ever engaged me in the life of an individual animal, and the shift in consciousness it provoked was irreversible. I began to see more stories like Annie’s coming across my desk: radio tracking a wolverine in Glacier National Park, satellite tracking tuna across the Atlantic, the light logger data of albatrosses circling Antarctica.
Years later, I teamed up with James to produce our first book, London: The Information Capital, a collection of maps and graphics that visualized a variety of open data available in London. We considered a follow-up on data from other cities. Then I remembered those tracking stories from my days at Geographic. We asked our publisher, ‘What about animals?’
At first, it might not seem like a logical fit. James and I are not biologists. He’s a geographer; I’m a designer. But that’s the beauty of the animal-tracking revolution. The convergence of ecology and technology invites more people from more disciplines into the conservation conversation, in part because scientists are now gathering more data than they could ever process alone. Some tracking devices sample multiple times a second. After a week-long study, you’re already talking millions of data points. Longer studies leave scientists inundated. They need help. They need engineers, coders, statisticians, geographers and designers.
How are animal systems similar to the ones you tracked in the book about London?
James Cheshire: Once we began working with tracking data, it all felt oddly familiar to the datasets we had visualized for London. This is because in order to fully understand why something happens we often need to know where it happens. Location is everything. And the way we study this is the same whether it relates to an ant, a diving whale or a person with a smartphone packed full of its own tracking tech.
For example, in The Information Capital we mapped human traces from data collected by fitness apps. We can ask exactly the same questions of these traces as we can of those logged by animal-tracking devices. We want to know where the flows coalesce and come apart, when they’re strongest and what environments they are passing through. The technology and analytics required to answer these questions are exactly the same.
For the ant study, how did you find it?
OU: Many academic journals now insist that researchers share the data behind their published findings. This is important for others to test the results but also to build on the research. We found the ants data by browsing a digital data repository called Dryad (datadryad.org). It and another site called Movebank (movebank.org) host data from many tracking studies. We thought it was incredible that researchers were now tracking animals as small as ants, bumblebees and plankton – all of which we feature in the book.
What do you think it shows about city living?
JC: The lives of urban planners and city authorities would become much easier if we all behaved a little more like ants, each with clear jobs and all of us sticking to the rules. We could all be given a set of very simple instructions that we could follow to the letter that could be optimised to allow the streets to run freely with traffic and obstacles to be quickly routed around. Of course life isn’t that regimented – nor should it be – but we can be inspired by the collective behaviour of ants to design software that solves complex routing problems to make deliveries more efficient or to offer quicker diversions around blockages on busy transport systems.
How did you go about doing the visualisation?
OU & JC: The data came as grids of numbers that stated how long each cell in the artificial nest was occupied by an individual ant. In her paper, Danielle Mersch showed the data for nurses, cleaners and foragers separately. We wanted to combine them into a single image, so we layered the exports in Photoshop. This colour-coded approach only worked because the ants’ three job types took them to three different areas of the nest. If the nurses, cleaners and foragers mixed together most of the time, this graphic would be a muddy mess of pixels with no discernable patterns.
Where the Animals Go is out now on Particular Books
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
