by Jason Smith

Kye Hedlund knows his ants. Get him going and he'll rattle off their scientific names. His feet are up on his desk, his hands are folded behind his head, and he's looking off into the distance.

"Formica schaufussi is the common lawn ant all throughout the eastern coast, and I have it in my front yard," he says. "People around here probably have the black carpenter ant, Camponotus pennsylvanicus. That one invades my house. Great big ant, so you're aware of it." And those tiny little guys you find in your kitchen? "That most likely is Monomorium minimum," he says. "I have that one in my house, too."

Hedlund can tell you that there are about 200 ant species in North Carolina, about 700 in North America, and about 10,000 worldwide. And what we know about many of them scientifically doesn't amount to, well, an anthill. His specific ant interest is in systematics — the classification of organisms and the evolutionary relationships among them (sometimes also called taxonomy). There are fewer than ten ant systematists in the United States, Hedlund says, mainly because the money isn't there. "Generally, with insects, if it doesn't attack corn or tobacco, it doesn't get any funding. Fire ants have been the best thing that ever happened to ant researchers," he laughs. "But ants are pretty much ignored, except for the small group of scientists compelled to study them."

Hedlund's compulsion? As a boy he found ants fascinating, as many do. Then, fifteen or so years ago, he took a course in plant identification in Carolina's biology department, just for fun. But the botanists, he says, already know too much.

"Botanists came through here in the eighteenth century and found what was here," Hedlund says. "Insects, on the other hand, are the majority of the world's species, but are just virtually unknown. We probably have described only one percent of the world's insects."

Kye Hedlund, associate professor of computer science, collects ants using tweezers. "Ants are pretty much ignored," he says. Photo by Jason Smith. Click to enlarge.

Hedlund got interested in biodiversity — the number of different species of plants and animals in a given environment. As biodiversity goes, things aren't exactly rosy — in some places species are rapidly disappearing before they're scientifically studied, and before we know much about the roles they played in their little corners of the world. "When we cut down the Brazilian rainforest, for example, we're losing a lot of species that we hadn't even known were there," Hedlund says.

Just ask E.O. Wilson, a Harvard entomologist who has been a tireless advocate for biodiversity and conservation — and who has always been passionate about ants. Wilson recently released a book detailing the 624 known Western-Hemisphere species of the ant genus Pheidole. Wilson says that over half of the species in his book — 337, to be exact — are new to science.

But calling Wilson an entomologist is a bit like calling Galileo a mathematician. Wilson is the father of sociobiology (the branch of biology that conducts comparative studies of the social organization of animals, including humans, with regard to evolutionary history) and biophilia (in Wilson's words, "the connections that human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life"). He suggests that you imagine yourself listening to an orchestra when, suddenly, the woodwinds leave the stage. Then the horns. The strings. Until all that's left is one bassoon. And finally it falls silent.

That possibility bothers Hedlund. So he decided to help. You might guess that he trooped out, found and identified some ant specimens, and placed them in a museum. He did, and does. He's a regular contributor to — and one of six honorary curators of — North Carolina State University's Insect Collection.

But Hedlund isn't your typical biologist. Or let me be more clear: he's not a biologist, period. There's no lab bench in his office. No zoology library down the hall. Not a microscope in sight. No, Hedlund is an associate professor of...computer science?

Yep. For years, Hedlund designed integrated circuits — chips such as those Intel Pentiums you always hear about on TV. But the work frustrated him.

"Chip technology changes so fast," he says. "You do something and it's relevant for two or three years, and the technology has moved beyond it. I was tired of writing papers that get read by people that go write more papers about your paper.

"I wanted to do something that related to the world's problems," Hedlund says. "I want to produce tools that other biologists can use."

Enter Hedlund's on-line catalog of North American ants. It is, Hedlund says, a first step toward making the world's knowledge about ants readily accessible via the World Wide Web. It's not a "Golden Guide" to ants, Hedlund cautions, but a resource intended for any ecologist who is interested in ants.

"It's dense, technical work," he explains. "If an ecologist has an ant before him, he has five questions to ask: what species is this; how do I recognize this species; where does it occur; what does it do in terms of its natural history; and where do I find out more? The on-line catalog aims to compile everything that is known about those five questions."

Members of the genus Formica — so named because they produce formic acid, which helps protect them from predators — are among the most common ants in North America. Photo by Jason Smith. Click to enlarge.

Hedlund is the first to admit that research in computer science this ain't. On the other hand, most other ecologists wouldn't be able to put together a MySQL database that automatically generates web pages via a UNIX server. So Hedlund has turned his experience in programming, databases, and web development into a reference work for other scientists.

But that's not enough for Hedlund. "As a computer scientist, I'm a tool smith," he says. "If you want to do the snakes of Panama, or the butterflies of Brazil, okay, import all of my tools — and then, of course, provide all of your own data — and you'll be up and running to do a web site similar to this, for other organisms.

"I want to be the patron saint of the Web for systematists," he laughs. "These people are overworked, they don't necessarily know anything about computers, and the real underlying goal in all this is to make it easy for them to make their work available on the Web. So this ant project, although it's pretty big even by itself, is more a demonstration project." Hedlund says that if researchers can think of questions that they couldn't even imagine without his web-based tools, then his work will have been a success.

He imagines a user querying his database to find out what species are in North Carolina.

"We just crank that right out, and that's produced on the web site," he says. "And then the user's question might become, 'Oh, okay, what's in South Carolina? Hmmm...What's in South Carolina that's not in North Carolina?' Then, 'Why? Is there some correlation with habitat? It's mostly those on the coastal plain and in sandy areas that are in South Carolina but not North Carolina. Hmmm...Are those also found farther south? Maybe they're southern species that come up from...'"

His voice trails off. It's hard to say whether he's more excited by the possibilities of the technology, or by the ants themselves. Or maybe it's the idea of helping to save a little sliver of our world. One ant at a time.

You can find Hedlund's ants web site at www.cs.unc.edu/~hedlund/ants/catalog/.