FYI Research:

Kye Hedlund has been fascinated by ants since he was a kid. But he didn't set out to become an ant researcher -- it just sort of happened. Fifteen or so years ago, he took a course in plant identification in Carolina's biology department. But the botanists, he says, already know too much. "Botanists came through here in the 18th century and found what was here," he says. So Hedlund turned back to bugs. "Insects, on the other hand, are not only the majority of the world's species, but are just virtually unknown. We probably have described only 1 percent of the world's insects."

Hedlund can tell you that there are about 200 ant species in North Carolina, about 700 in North America and about 10,000 worldwide. His specific ant interest is in systematics -- the classification of organisms and the evolutionary relationships between them (sometimes also called taxonomy). There are fewer than 10 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 that are compelled to study them."

Hedlund's own compulsion began when he 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.

So Hedlund decided he'd do something about it. 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 -- N. C. State University's Insect Collection.

But Hedlund isn't your typical biologist. Or let's be more clear: He's not a biologist, period. There's no lab bench in his Sitterson Hall 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 computer 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 wanted to do something that related to the world's problems. I want to produce tools that other biologists can use."

Enter Hedlund's online 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 online catalog aims to compile everything that is known about those five questions."

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. And then the user's question might become, `Oh, OK, 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.

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

Provided by Research and Graduate Studies.
Editor: Neil Caudle. Writer: Jason Smith.
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