"What We Know" Climate Report From Leading Science Organization Seeks to Persuade Citizens. #FAIL.

The “What We Know” report about climate change issued today by the august American Association for the Advancement of Science is intended to persuade ordinary people that our climate really is changing, we’re largely responsible, and we need to do something about it. Soon.

The report features clear, straight-forward language without overly complex and opaque scientific jargon.

And as the black non-image at the top of this ImaGeo post symbolizes, there is another thing that the report lacks as well: imagery.

In fact, there is not a single image in the report — not one visualization to help us understand what’s happening to our world, not a single photograph to dramatize the impact of climate change on people, not even one little graphic to show a trend in, oh, I don’t know, temperature maybe.

Okay, I exaggerate just a little. The title page does have one ambiguous photograph of someone using a surveying instrument on some ice sheet somewhere, for what reason God only knows.

And true, the “What We Know” web site includes, in addition to the report, a number of videos. One is actually mildly entertaining and effective. It features a mountain biker racing down a trail to symbolize the perilous path ahead and the need to slow down. (Our carbon emissions, of course.)

But the rest consist of talking heads (scientists telling us what they know) intercut with what broadcast journalists call “B-roll” — time lapse video of cars, smoke pouring out of stacks, a little snippet of water pouring into the New York City subway system during Hurricane Sandy —  you get the idea.

So here’s some unsolicited advice to the creators of “What We Know” from someone who thinks visual communication is actually an incredibly powerful way to communicate complex information and also connect with the heart as well as the mind: Cliché B-roll can’t change the fact that a talking head is still a talking head. Nor will people necessarily listen, let alone understand or care, simply because those talking heads happen to be scientists.

I’ve never written a post like this here at ImaGeo. I felt compelled to do it because I’m simply dumbfounded that one of the leading scientific organizations in the world decided to launch a public persuasion campaign that lacks one of the most important ways that humans beings can be persuaded: through visual communication.

Is the AAAS not aware that imagery can convey emotion far more powerfully than the written or spoken word, no matter how clear, concise, and free of jargon those words may be? Do they not know that visuals provide an incredible capacity to tell compelling, persuasive stories? Can it possibly be that they haven’t heard about the synergy made possible by the use of words and images together?

And did they not bother to read the literature on visual communication and persuasion?

To offer just one example: “Visual Persuasion,” which appeared in the journal Communication Research Trends in 1999. Here’s a relevant snippet:

…visual images in persuasive messages reduce the information processing burden, make a message more attention-getting, and reinforce message arguments. Also, it is believed that visual images have the superiority in memory over words.

If any of the people responsible for the “What We Know” report read this post, I have a suggestion for you: Try “Google.” It can be really helpful. With the search terms “visual communication and persuasion” you’ll find a lot of helpful tips there for your next campaign.

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Scientists Ask Why There Are So Many Freaking Huge Ants

An ant is not exactly the picture you see in the dictionary next to “rule-breaker.” Colonial ants work together to collect food and generally act in the best interest of the group. Yet certain enormous ants in South America break a basic rule in biology: as you move up the food chain, you should find a smaller group of organisms at each step. These ants are top predators that take up far more than their fair share of space. To find out what their secret is, scientists staked out the forest floor.

“We’re all ant nerds,” says Chad Tillberg, a biologist at Linfield College in Oregon, of himself and his coauthors. So when they started visiting a park in northeastern Argentina and noticed what seemed like a whole lot of Dinoponera australis ants, they thought it might be an illusion created by their excitement. Plus, Tillberg points out, “Dinoponera are huge.” The seven species in this genus, which can be more than an inch long, are some of the largest ants in the world.

There are many plentiful bugs in the rainforest, of course. But an abundance of this particular ant—which locals call hormiga tigre, the “tiger ant”—demands an explanation. That’s because the species is known as a top predator of the soil. Other champion carnivores—like, say, an actual tiger—are rare, compared to the things they eat.

To see why, imagine that in a given area, you could gather every individual plant or animal of one species and pile it onto a huge scale. Usually, as you moved up a food chain, each group of living things would tip the scales less. It takes a large mass of plants to feed a moderate mass of herbivores, which can satisfy a smaller mass of carnivores. If the animals are bulky, it will take fewer of them to make up their species’ allotted weight on the scale. Dinoponera australis ants are both hefty and high up on the food chain—so something about them must be out of the ordinary.

Maybe, for a start, they’re not as abundant as they seem. To find out, “we started mapping and digging up colonies,” Tillberg says. First the researchers found ant nests by spotting ants on the park trail and following them home. (He notes that this type of research would be harder if the ants weren’t “so enormous.”) Within three plots of land, they marked the location of each nest and calculated how close the ants lived to their neighbors. They also left “pitfall” traps—like buckets for bugs to stumble into—along other trails in the area.

They found that D. australis ants aren’t equally dense everywhere in the rainforest. But within the study plots, there were lots and lots of them—about 180 underground nests per hectare (a hectare is about two and a half acres), holding almost 8,000 ants. Each ant weighs about 320 milligrams. That means the “biomass” of these animals (their total on that huge imaginary scale) is more than 2,500 grams, or 5.5 pounds, per hectare. That’s at least four times the biomass of other predatory rainforest ants.

The ants were as abundant as they’d seemed. But could they be lower on the food chain than scientists thought—not truly the tigers of the soil? To find out, the researchers stole the food from the jaws of worker ants returning to their nests. Almost all of it was the bodies of other insects they’d hunted. “They weren’t secretly collecting lots of nectar or honeydew,” Tillberg says.

Another way to find out where an animal sits on a food chain is to chemically analyze its body. Heavy nitrogen isotopes start out in plants at the bottom of the food chain, then accumulate in the bodies of animals that eat them, and build up even more in animals that eat those animals, and so on. The researchers measured nitrogen isotopes in the ants’ bodies and compared them to other insects and food items around them. This confirmed the status of la hormiga tigre: not only were these ants top predators, but they probably ate other predatory insects as well.

D. australis is just what it seems—a huge, predatory ant that roams the rainforest in huge numbers. How does it break the biomass rule? Taking one more stab at solving the mystery, Tillberg and his coauthors used paint to make distinguishing marks on the backs of ants. Then they staked out the ants’ nests. “We were marking workers and watching nest entrances for hours and hours every day,” Tillberg says. Each time an ant left the nest, the researchers recorded where it went.

They saw that most ants stuck to a single hunting route. Rather than roaming freely, each ant set out on the same path whenever it looked for food.

This behavior may make the whole ant colony more efficient. “Different individuals head in different directions from each other,” Tillberg says, “so on the whole, the entire surrounding habitat of a nest gets searched.”

There may be other factors that let D. australis ants take up so much room in the forest—a lack of competition from other predators, for example, maybe because other species can’t thrive in this disturbed habitat. But Tillberg says he thinks their hunting efficiency is “at least part of the story explaining their abundance.” It seems that if you want to take over the forest floor, it pays to be efficient as well as ruthless.

Image: by Alex Wild (via Wikimedia Commons)

Tillberg, C., Edmonds, B., Freauff, A., Hanisch, P., Paris, C., Smith, C., Tsutsui, N., Wills, B., Wittman, S., & Suarez, A. (2014). Foraging Ecology of the Tropical Giant Hunting Ant (Hymenoptera Formicidae)-Evaluating Mechanisms for High Abundance. Biotropica, 46 (2), 229-237 DOI: 10.1111/btp.12097

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