This article was taken from the October 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Do you have big ambitions on a tiny scale? Ollie Palmer does: he wants to conduct an ant ballet. "I'm interested in ants' control systems," explains Palmer, a designer at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. By reproducing the pheromone trails ants use to communicate, he hopes to then direct them -- in the medium of dance. "A lot of research was involved in developing the technology to make ants dance," says Palmer, 26, whose research forms a part of his PhD. Scientific advisers, including Seirian Sumner of the Institute of Zoology (wired 06.10) and Jim Anderson of UCL's chemistry faculty, helped Palmer determine the type of ant most susceptible to control -- the Argentine ant -- and to synthesise Z9:16Ald, a pheromone compound developed using extracts from the ants' gasters. The next step is to choreograph their movements. "This is just the first of four phases," says Palmer. "We now want to work with choreographers to create balletic movements." Palmer's ants are booked to perform at
Pestival in Brazil next year, where thousands of ants <span class="s2">will, he hopes, form a superorganism corps de ballet.
The final phase will be an attempt to transpose one colony's trail network on to another's. With two conversations in sync, Palmer hopes to enable a kind of high-level communication, or "intercontinental ant telecommunication", between the groups. "They're passing messages with these chemicals," he says. "If we can monitor behaviour using density analysis to work out how much pheromone is in a given place, then we can print that information to a colony on the other side of the world."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
