- Depending on which science fiction you want to reference,
the researchers here at the University of Konstanz in Germany
have either built a holodeck from "Star Trek,"
or "The Matrix,"
or something kind of like the old alien abductions
from "The X-Files."
It's just that they've built it for locusts.
- One of the great challenges in studying collective behavior
is that there's this intricate network of interactions
among the individuals that we can't see, we can't control.
And so, it's really difficult to understand
how these locusts, with their local interactions,
can scale up to swarms
that can extend across hundreds of square kilometers.
We thought, "What if we could have individuals
"moving and interacting with virtual swarms?"
And so, that's why we've designed this setup.
What we do is we put the animal
on this large, motion-compensating sphere.
As the animal moves,
the sphere always moves to keep it on top
and so, it can move in a never-ending desert environment.
And by tracking that movement,
we know where the animal's gone.
The locusts believe these virtual individuals
to be other locusts.
They will tend to align their direction of travel
with near individuals.
They will think of themselves as being within a real swarm.
- Locusts don't have depth perception in the way that humans do.
Prey animals generally have eyes on each side of their head,
trading off 3D vision for a much wider field of view.
So there's no need for sci-fi holographic systems
or tiny little 3D glasses here.
As long as they keep an exact track on the locust's eye position
and update the screen fast enough,
it seems to fool them.
I'll be honest, I do find this a little bit unsettling...
...and it's only going to get more unsettling from here.
- Ultimately, decision-making is made in the brain of the animal.
So if we're to understand these vast swarms,
we actually need to go in
and look at how the brain processes this information.
So in this VR,
we're basically plugging into the spinal cord.
The animal here is tethered.
It has to be held in place but can still walk freely
on a ball that's elevated by air, so it doesn't have friction,
allowing the locust, again,
to move and interact with a virtual swarm.
So, we know what the animal's responding to
but now we can also decode the neural signals
that are underlying the decisions it's making.
So, locusts impact the livelihood
of 1 in 10 people on the planet through food shortage.
They contribute to humanitarian crises across the globe,
yet no one understood why they form swarms.
- So, the researchers here have also commissioned
this massive imaging hangar
and they're going to track thousands of locusts individually
by attaching tiny retroreflective tags to each one
and using a motion-capture system with more than 30 cameras.
Sub-millimeter precision, 100 frames a second.
Again, I had questions,
starting with: where do you order thousands of locusts from?
- Well, luckily for us,
it turns out that entomophagy or eating insects
is becoming an important aspect for humans
and also for agriculture, for farm animals,
so there are actually huge locust breeding centers.
We collaborate with them and so, they bred the insects for us.
We have a whole team of experienced individuals(!)
from senior professors to undergraduate students,
all working together,
gluing these little tags on the individuals.
And this allows us to see the three-dimensional information
much, much more easily
than we could using many video cameras.
The imaging hangar is 15 by 15 by 8 meters.
It's designed to mimic the environment in which locusts have evolved.
We have extremely bright lights
that capture the natural wavelength of light that they experience.
We have the correct temperature of around 27, 28°C within this large space.
So first, we're looking at the locusts in different densities
to see which different structures and patterns form,
but then, we also want to understand
how these voracious insects eat their way through crops.
And also, how they avoid predators when doing so,
so we're also startling the individuals
to see how social behavior
also influences their response to predators.
When the insects hatch, they're flightless.
In fact, they're flightless for the first two months of their lives.
It's only in the final adult stage that they take to the wing.
And so, the critical stage
for understanding the swarms and also controlling them
is these flightless juveniles.
- And this is about 10,000 locusts.
There are questions about testing on insects, of course,
but the consensus right now is that...
they're insects.
And as long as there's no unnecessary harm caused,
the trade-off is well worth it.
These would've been ground up for animal feed, after all,
and the world doesn't have a problem with that.
And locust swarms aren't cooperative.
Researchers have discovered that locusts march in formation
because traveling in the same direction at the same speed
is the easiest way for each individual to avoid being eaten by other locusts.
If humans can understand this swarm's behavior,
maybe we can start to understand the gigantic, devastating swarms
with billions or even trillions of locusts,
the ones that destroy food supplies.
Or maybe we can start to improve the forecasting tools,
because right now, the only methods the world has
to deal with devastating locust plagues
are vast amounts of industrial pesticides...
and hope.
- I find it astonishing that there are pest insects
that impact so many people on the planet,
and yet there's so little research into this.
And one of the main reasons
is that the people that really are impacted by locusts,
they're subsistence farmers.
They can't afford agrochemicals.
You also have countries
where they've got other problems to deal with,
such as internal strife and conflicts.
The last experiments we did with locusts,
when I was based in Oxford,
we had, I think, the most was 110 individuals.
To approximate what they're doing in nature,
we need to start looking at tens of thousands of individuals.
The key here
is that we need these very large-scale experiments
to be that bridge between the lab and the wild.
One of the amazing things about locusts
is that the swarms just suddenly appear out of nowhere.
And so, what we're trying to mimic here is: as population density increases,
we think that these swarms will suddenly emerge.
They'll suddenly start marching together in unison.
We're just beginning to understand the wonders of collectives,
how groups of neurons communicate with each other
to allow animals to make decisions,
and then, how social interactions connect brains together
such as in locust swarms.
So, we think locusts can sense the environment
through this communication within the swarm.
This gives them a swarm intelligence
that's beyond the brain of any individual.
We can use this to begin to understand
how and why these swarms form and therefore,
how we can best minimize the impact on humans.
- It's a couple of hours later.
The imaging hangar has been blocked off
from all humans for a while,
and the researchers here are now seeing marching behavior
that has never been observed in the lab before.
It's only ever been in the wild.
It's working,
and they've come up with like a dozen ideas
for new experiments in the last 10 minutes.
This is brilliant.