Insatiable interest in insects led to "bloody" efforts and discoveries

What sparked the interest of the audience at the Kanto meeting was the study of "insects," which followed the Kyushu and Kansai meetings. Ants and mosquitoes togetherThe tempo of the project is to notice the strange phenomenon that mosquitoes die when they are exposed to water, and to hypothesize the causes and verify them one by one, starting with the physical sample collection.The audience must have felt as if they were watching a short movie, with good presentations of the ShiHowever, subsequent interviews revealed a deep love for insects and an unimaginable amount of experimentation that belied the smart presentation.

My first "research" born out of a genuine interest in insects

Mr. Namiki has been raising insects since childhood, including praying mantis, stag beetles, beetles, grasshoppers, and eventually ants, ant parasites, and cockroaches. As the eggs of the praying mantis he was raising hatched, he noticed the strange fact that "only mosquitoes die when they are in the same space" while watching ants and mosquitoes he was collecting as food for the baby mantis, and he decided to do "research" for the first time. As a result, in a period of only one and a half years, he discovered that "a mixture of citronellal and formic acid" possessed by the black carp ants had a strong insecticidal effect. At first, I thought it was the prickly smell (=citronellal) produced by the ants that was the cause. But when I ran into an unexpected fact, I was puzzled and excited at the same time. I was puzzled, but at the same time I felt a strange sense of excitement," he says. He continued his research and discovered that a gas mixture of citronellal and formic acid has a synergistic effect on insecticides, which made him think, "This is interesting! and found the research fascinating.

Astonishing amount of experimentation and ingenuity, difficult to see from the smart presentation

Later interviews revealed the difficulty of insect experiments and the astonishing volume of experiments. For example, the first thing to do was to secure samples for the experiments. The first step was to collect mosquitoes in the bush, but when summer ended, there were no mosquitoes, and in winter, there were no ants. In the first year, I did not realize this and lost a lot of time in the experiment. Now, we put the extra mosquitoes from the experiment in mosquito nets and feed them with their own blood to make them lay eggs. Since the number of mosquitoes increases about 10-fold in a month, they keep about 50 mosquitoes at any given time. Even more difficult is the experiment of handling the gas emitted by the ants. Because the ants immediately emit gas when stimulated to collect, the experiment must be conducted quickly and on the spot. In addition, the experimental apparatus must be a closed system and must have a certain amount of gas flowing through it in order to verify the insecticidal effect. That is why we developed almost all of our own equipment, from collection to rearing. They even checked with experts on how to identify the ants, and identified them one by one. The amount of data is huge," he says, "because different species reduce the reliability of the data. Nakajima laughs, "This girl does it like it's nothing, but it's impossible for anyone else to do the same thing. I am most familiar with insects," he says. I want to study insects at university, too. This year's Grand Prize winner was a pure high school student who may have the potential to go beyond mosquito repellents and play a role in "building an optimal relationship between insects and humankind.