MS. REBECCA SHEIR
Welcome to "Metro Connection." I'm Rebecca Sheir and today we are winging it. I mean, Winging It, as in that's the theme of the show. It isn't like we don't know what's coming next, but for many of the people we'll meet over the next hour, more often than not, that's exactly the case. We'll hear from a longtime D.C.-based teacher of improvisation.
MR. SHAWN WESTFALL
Right. And as I've said before, if I start talking in crazy, silly, Scottish accent, what do you know about me immediately?
And we'll hang out with a musician who's all about experimentation and play.
We'll also take a more literal look at our Winging It theme, with stories about creatures and critters that take to the skies.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1
I think birders have this reputation for being these sort of nerdy people, but I don't think that that's really true.
But before we get to all that, we'll visit a place in Loudoun County, Va…
Are we like in the bowels of the place or this where you guys walk normally?
MR. ANTHONY LEONARDO
Yes. That's exactly where we are.
We're in the bowels of…
...where hundreds of people wing it every day.
So most of the lab space, where we do experimental work, is upstairs.
...sometimes in more ways than one.
Okay. So this is where we do these sort of indoor flight experiments on how dragonflies catch prey, basically.
And this guy is one of those people. His name is Anthony Leonardo. And the bespectacled, pony-tailed young scientist has led us to the window of the Dragonfly Flight Arena, deep within the main building of the Janelia Farm Research Campus.
Because this is radio, can you kind of describe what it is we're looking at here?
Describe the room? Yeah. So the room is 15 feet by 15 feet by 15 feet in size. So it's like a big cube. And at the top of the room we have a huge number of very bright lights, and so the room is sort of lit to look like noon on a summer day.
Leonardo has furthered the summer-day theme by keeping the room at a steady 82 degrees, installing artificial grass, and providing a heaping helping of fruit flies for his dragonflies to eat. He's also covered the walls with blown-up photographs of the trees, grass and flowers you'll find all over Janelia Farm's 689 acres.
So, you know, now it has enough appearance of an outdoor sort of realistic environment that dragonflies think, this is a good place for me to hang out and forage.
Leonardo and his team actually catch the dragonflies on the Janelia Campus, which the Howard Hughes Medical Institute built in 2006, so scientists could set up shop in a collaborative and flexible environment.
It's internally funded, so you don't apply for any grants; there's no teaching. So all you have to do is your work.
And if you head a particular lab, as Anthony Leonardo does, you're pretty much given free rein to study whatever you fancy for a renewable period of five years. A topic that's long fascinated Leonardo is this idea of prey capture.
Prey capture is essentially a problem of predicting where a moving target is going to be in the future. And so this is both a challenging problem, but also a deeply interesting one because prediction is sort of a fundamentally sort of interesting thing about what people and other animals do. You're trying to figure out what's going to happen in the future.
And while you're doing that, there is so much going on, and so much scientists don't yet understand. It's like this highly choreographed dance of senses sensing, neurons firing, muscles responding.
So this is sort of analogous to like a football player catching a ball. And so the objective of the football player is really to watch that motion and then alter its own sort of body movement to sort of reach it as some future time coordinate.
Not a bad metaphor, but when you're talking about motion, there's a major difference between footballs and fruit flies, the latter of which, by the way, Leonardo gets from some of his fruit-fly scientist buddies upstairs.
Before you go on, I just want to say, some fruit-flies have been sort of zigging and zagging around us as we've been talking. And they fly like crazy. I mean, like, they're not going in one direction in like that football player running after a ball. They are all over the place.
It's more complicated than the football player running after the ball, that's right. But the more complicated it gets, the harder it is, even for a dragonfly.
And that's saying a lot, since Leonardo considers dragonflies to be the most sophisticated hunting and flying machines in nature.
Outdoors, they catch maybe 95 percent of what they go after, which is sort of phenomenal. I mean, something like a lion does like 15 percent.
But here's the thing, compared with a lion, or that football player, dragonflies are tiny.
A half a gram would be a big dragonfly.
But not so tiny they can't carry a miniature wireless system that records and transmits their neural activity as they zoom around. Leonardo calls it a telemetry backpack.
The first two generations of this thing we also called a backpack, and we attached it on the other side of the body. And this caused great confusion for everybody because they're like, it's a front pack. So now it literally is a backpack, though. Right?
Right. I mean, it doesn't have padded, adjustable straps and a pocket for your cell phone, but it does have this little computer chip with electrodes that stick into the back of an anaesthetized dragonfly. And once the animal starts flying and foraging, the backpack detects and sends out signals from what Leonardo calls the steering neurons.
The animal's going to fly, catch things, and we're going to monitor the signals coming out of these neurons while the animal's doing it.
And they're going to shoot videos of the animal, at a whopping 1,000 frames per second, to get a more macroscopic view of what's going on.
Like, how does the body move through the air towards the prey? Like, what is the flight pattern look like? Just as you might look at the flight pattern of your United flight going from Los Angeles to New York.
Once Leonardo goes through all the videos, and analyzes all the signals from the backpack, his next job is to look at all that data and say…
Well, what the heck does it mean? And we have lots of, you know, ideas and models on how to do that, but at least you can kind of measure all of the relevant information. And then you have the greatest hope probably of actually understanding mechanistically how are the pieces are combined. I mean, otherwise, you're trying to assemble a 10,000-piece puzzle with 100 pieces.
Anthony Leonardo doesn't have all 10,000 pieces yet, but he's well on his way. And he'll soon find out if he'll be able to get even closer, since his Janelia Farm contract goes up for renewal in July 2014.
To see photographs of Anthony Leonardo's Dragonfly Flight Arena and to watch a close-up, slow-motion video of a dragonfly catching a fruit-fly, visit our website, metroconnection.org.
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