How A Woodpecker Pecks Wood, And How Ants Crown A Queen

If you’ve heard the hammering of a woodpecker in the woods, you might have wondered how the birds can be so forceful. What does it take to whack your head against a tree repeatedly, hard enough to drill a hole? A team of researchers wondered that too and set out to investigate, by putting tiny muscle monitors on eight downy woodpeckers and recording them with high-speed video as they pecked away in the lab.

Integrative organismal biologist Nick Antonson, co-author of a report on the work, joins Host Flora Lichtmen to peck away at the mystery.

Plus, you can take two ant eggs with the exact same genes, and one can grow up to be a queen, the other a worker. Neuroscientist and evolutionary biologist Daniel Kronauer joins Flora to share recent research into how an ant becomes a queen.

Guests: Dr. Nick Antonson is an NSF postdoctoral research fellow in the department of ecology, evolution, and organismal biology at Brown University.
Dr. Daniel Kronauer is the Stanley S. and Sydney R. Shuman Professor in the Laboratory of Social Evolution and Behavior at The Rockefeller University in New York.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.