How tiny wasps cope with being smaller than amoebas

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/11/30/how-fairy-wasps-cope-with-being-smaller-than-amoebas/

by mike_esspe • 14 years ago

234 66 14 years ago

blogs.discovermagazine.com

patdennis• 14 years ago

The wings are amazing. I'd really like to see a video of one of these in flight, although I imagine that would be a difficult thing to capture.

riffraff• 14 years ago

this is rather cool but just to nitpick "one single cell" does not always imply "small" there are a few which are visible to the naked eye (think eggs)

tocomment3• 14 years ago

Do you have any references for the egg thing? I have a hard time picturing that? Aren't there individual cells inside a chicken egg (before it starts developing?)

aidenn0• 14 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immature_ovum#Size

Even bigger:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valonia_ventricosa

wazoox• 14 years ago

No, an ostrich cell really is a single cell.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_yolk

nemo1618• 14 years ago

Wow, these little guys are incredible! I had no idea such complexity could evolve at that scale. I think these species deserve a mention in science classrooms.

excuse-me2• 14 years ago

Well as long as you make it clear that they were created that size because God likes a challenge - rather than any sort of adaptation to their environment - that should be OK

raganwald• 14 years ago

Hmmm, downvotes. Hey Fred! Get in here, and bring the spare sensor filaments. I think we have some sarcasm detectors on the fritz.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poes_law

username3• 14 years ago

Once science shows how they evolved, they will be more than welcome.

einhverfr2• 14 years ago

Maybe they were brought here on micro-comets ;-)

(reference to "Evolution from Space: A Theory of Cosmic Creationism" by Fred Hoyle)

raldi• 14 years ago

What are the major technical barriers before we can identify the input and output channels to this insect's brain and start iterating through all possible input values, recording the corresponding output values? And once we can do that, could we use that data to fly a virtual insect around a virtual world?

pygy_3• 14 years ago

I think we've yet to match the (information processing ability)/(energy consumption x size) ratio of wetware.

Dylan16807• 14 years ago

Sure, but we can fire up a room full of servers instead.

awt• 14 years ago

This was one of my first thoughts as well, sort of. Alternatively, is it possible to model each neuron when there are only around 8k? Maybe estimate the visual, audio, and tactile bandwidth of the wasp and feed the simulated neurons a stream of simulated environmental data and just let the connections evolve.

tomp• 14 years ago

There are not many neurons, but there are many (too many) possible connections. To find the right ones, nature took several billion years. Even with the fastest computers, it would take a considerable amount of time (note that the lifetime of these wasps is a few weeks at most, so evolution happens very fast).

mike_esspe• 14 years ago

I was interested in this too. Shallow googling found, that there are problems with emulating even more simple organisms: http://lesswrong.com/lw/88g/whole_brain_emulation_looking_at...

tocomment3• 14 years ago

I wonder why the Blue Brain guys don't work on c. elegans? They claim they can simulate full neocortical columns, a c. elegans should be no problem and they could compare the behavior.

zb• 14 years ago

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/science/21brain.html?pagew...

This article suggests that it's computationally infeasible even for an organism with only 302 neurons, all of which have already been completely mapped.

Splines• 14 years ago

Oddly enough, there's another story on the front page that address this guy:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4208454

pcrh• 14 years ago

You might find this project at Caltech interesting. They are trying to model a worm:

http://caltech.wormbase.org/virtualworm/

I imagine one can eventully extend it from simply representing anatomy to "activating it".

vibrunazo• 14 years ago

Honest newbie question: Why would we even want to do that? Exclusively for academic medical purposes? (ie learning how our body works)

It seems to me, that since evolution is highly imperfect, that trying to mimic living beings, might not be the best idea. While we do mimic them a lot, mostly it seems to be for learning until we can do better. But in this case. Since it's so expensive and not viable to mimic them properly. Shouldn't we just try to come up with our own algorithms instead of trying to copy nature's historically bloated algorithms?

That seems to be a lesson we learned from machine learning. I remember when neural networks were first being talked about seriously a decades or so ago. The goal seemed to be to try to mimic neurons just for mimicing neurons sake. Many critics would say we should probably try other learning algorithms that were obviously more efficient. And nowadays we barely see actual neural networks being used seriously in commercial production simply because we have better algorithms that are not trying to emulate nature, just because.

Wouldn't trying to emulate a virtual insect be repeating the same mistake? If all we want is to design a virtual robot that can look for food and control its wings. I sure as hell don't need thousand something emulated neurons to build that.

Bjartr• 14 years ago

>Shouldn't we just try to come up with our own algorithms instead of trying to copy nature's historically bloated algorithms?

People are working on this problem from both sides. AI on one and biological simulation on the other. We don't know which will realize its goals first.

kwekly• 14 years ago

Because Science, man.

You don't do things in science because they are practical (you just write that on the grant applications), in fact you do many things largely because they are impractical.

It's about wonder and lust for knowledge and all that. It just so happens that the theoretical ground work for all technology piggy backed on this motivation.

6ren• 14 years ago

That's assuming they are stateless (i.e. that they can't learn), so that the ordering of input triggering has no effect on outputs.

BTW: some small spiders press their brains not only into their abdomens, but into their legs. e.g. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/12/111219-spide... Spiders gotta spin.

CamperBob2• 14 years ago

Arguably, even human brains work that way. You can't really draw a line across part of the CNS and say "This is where the brain stops." The retina, for instance, is almost as much a part of your brain as it is your eye.

By the same token, it's not always easy to classify complex movements as reflexes or thought-guided actions. Cut a chicken's head off while it's walking, and it will keep going for a while. My understanding (IANABiologist) is that the same is true for a human.

robrenaud• 14 years ago

Does anyone know how the nucleus destruction happens? Is there any analogy to regularization/sparsification in machine learning? Is there some kind of process that destroys the nucleus of the least useful neurons?

pygy_3• 14 years ago

The hypothesis advanced by the article is that there is no loss of function. The neurons are packed with enough proteins to function for five days. The nuclei are just dead weight.

In mammals, red blood cells don't have nuclei either and can live up to 90 days in physiologic conditions.

Educated guess resp. nuclei destruction mechanism: probably through partial apoptosis (nucleus fragmentation), autophagia, and/or expulsion and phagocytosis by other cells.

colanderman• 14 years ago

On the opposite side of things, here are some of the largest single-celled organisms:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophyophore http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caulerpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valonia_ventricosa

knowtheory• 14 years ago

So, this is really just an allegory about Minimum Viable Products, right?

dllthomas2• 14 years ago

The headline is a bit misleading, though. Amoebas seem to be just used as a reference point, where I kept expecting more salience - some adaptation of the wasp to deal specifically with the fact that it was smaller than an amoeba in particular, rather than just with the fact that it was small. Nevertheless, confusion aside, it's fascinating stuff!

cs702• 14 years ago

Wow: with only 7,400 neurons (compared to 340,000 for the common housefly and 850,000 for honeybees), this wasp can somehow fly, search for food, find the right places to lay its eggs, etc.

That ridiculously tiny neural network is one freakingly efficient computing device!

Xcelerate• 14 years ago

7,400 seems very capable of being simulated. In fact, that's a small enough number that I'll bet you could map those connections out by hand with some type of microscope.

To someone more knowledgeable in this subset of biology, is this possible?

masklinn2• 14 years ago

See this link posted by "zb": http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/science/21brain.html?pagew...

agravier3• 14 years ago

It is possible, but the neurons are actually complex computing units that take a plethora of signals into account: subtle temporal behavior (relative timings of post and pre-synaptic activations), complex chemistry in the cell as well as the in the synaptic cleft, and many more less understood things. Secondly, as you can imagine, the connectivity is far from random. Like in larger nervous systems (or even more than in large pools or neurons), these computing units take precise roles, part due to the developmental process, part due to later stage learning. But in the end, the machinery is precise, and simulating it requires understanding all of it.

I believe that this understanding should not come though imagery alone, but also through studies of the development of these organisms' brains. Like we are now forming artificial neural maps through "machine" learning techniques that are accelerated versions of their biological counterparts, I believe that we should develop developmental algorithms into large-scale simulations. The goals being to first understand how it works, second to see if the models are able to replicate the end result, a good indication that they are useful models.

(I do research in computational neuroscience.)

joeyo• 14 years ago

C. elegans (a type of nematode) is even simpler, with exactly 302 neurons and ~15k synapses. But despite having the complete connectome, there has to date been only limited success at simulating the whole worm. Although see: https://code.google.com/p/openworm/

Edit: Also see the NYT article below.

mbq• 14 years ago

The problem is that real neurons are way more complex than those simple functions AI guys build their networks of.

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

I was going to say the same thing, coding for such behaviors has to either be pretty simple, or there is more going on here than just neurons.

yoklov• 14 years ago

While I cannot say for certain that neurons are not the only thing responsible for these behaviors, I'm fairly confident in saying that we don't know nearly enough about neurons to assume that 7,400 equates to "pretty simple".

grannyg00se• 14 years ago

I'd love to see this flight in action. I would expect that at their size, they are pretty much limited to going where the primary air current brings them. With perhaps a tiny amount of individual influence.

Someone2• 14 years ago

"this wasp can somehow [...] find the right places to lay its eggs"

I bet this wasp is playing the "you do not need eyes to hit bullseye if you throw a million darts" game. It is sufficien t if some of these wasps, almost by accident, happen to lay their eggs in the right place.

VMG• 14 years ago

It costs resources to produce an egg. There has to be some processing going on.

kjhughes• 14 years ago

I find the implied range of cell sizes to be amazing. (Informally, it's tempting to view all microscopic biological entities as being similarly small; they're not.)

Here's a cool visual of relative cell sizes and scale:

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/

StavrosK• 14 years ago

The amoeba is as big as a grain of salt? It must be visible with the naked eye, then, no? I had no idea it was that big...

jacobolus• 14 years ago

Yes, many kinds of amoebas are visible to the naked eye. Some grow to several millimeters long.

Apocryphon• 14 years ago

Is that wasp truly really small? Or is that amoeba just really big?

How tiny wasps cope with being smaller than amoebas

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