Along the Colonnade
Hot Fun in the Summertime B y am y bal f o ur ’ 8 9 , ’ 9 3 L
During the long, leisurely days of June and July, Robert E. Lee Summer Scholars and their professors have a great time collaborating with microscopes, computers and . . . butterfly nets.
Surveillance Software In a war zone, an abandoned building may be filled with hidden hazards. Bombs. Booby traps. Snipers. Thanks to software designed by Simon Levy, associate professor of
From left, W&L computer science professor Simon Levy, Olivier Mahame ’14, Bipeen Acharya ’15 and Suraj Bajracharya ’14 fly their drone.
computer science, and Suraj Bajracharya ’14, Bipeen Acharya ’15 and Olivier Mahame ’14, American soldiers may soon be detecting these dangers using miniature surveillance drones. The team worked with Advanced Aerials, a Navy contractor, to develop the software, which will be embedded on a wrist-mounted controller. Their program would allow soldiers to tap out simple commands on the controller’s touchscreen. “Imagine a scenario where they’re trying to figure out what’s in a particular building, and they don’t want to run in there. There may be explosive ordnance, or they may be under attack,” explained Levy. “So the idea is, you can take this [drone] out of a pack and toss it in the building and have it flying around looking for things, with cameras on it.” The cameras would record a live feed of the building’s interior. Levy and Advanced Aerials will demo the software for the Navy this fall. The project offers Levy’s students a special research opportunity because they are building a commercially viable product. “There’s actually a customer who wants this technology,” he said.
Stalking the Praying Mantis The praying mantis is an arthropod and a predator, a skinny tough guy (or gal) with jointed feet and an exoskeleton. It’s willing to attack larger prey, from mice to snakes to hummingbirds. Thrilling YouTube videos of the creatures aside, we know little about their lifetime dietary habits. Larry Hurd, Herwick Professor of Biology, Megan Shearer ’15 and Joseph Taylor ’15 added to that bank of knowledge this summer by analyzing the stable isotopes of wild mantids and their prey, a procedure never before used on mantids. “Are they eating other predators mainly? Are they eating phloem-feeding herbivores? Or are they eating things that eat vegetation?” asked Hurd, who has studied the praying mantis for more than 35 years. He thinks that mantids are frequency-dependent predators, eating whatever is most abundant in their habitat. 4
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The project is a collaboration with Maj. Pieter deHart, a biology professor at Virginia Military Institute and the team expert on stable isotope analysis, which parses and weighs the basic chemical elements of an organism to determine its chemical signature. The team compared the isotopes of wild mantids against the isotopes of other organisms within their habitat and within their probable food chain. They examined lab-fed mantids as a control group. Stable isotope analysis is groundbreaking when it comes to mantids because scientists have never observed their long-term eating habits in the field. Recording what mantids eat, over an extended period of time, may lead to a better understanding of how predators control biological diversity and species