Now, scientists at UTSA are attempting to clear up some of the mystery surrounding this pathogen, which is difficult to treat and resistant to many antibiotics.

“It’s everywhere,” explained UTSA microbiologist Tao Wei, Ph.D., M.D. “It’s in the soil, in the water, in the sewage and in hospital settings.”

Microbiologists led by Wei are searching for a novel way to combat A. baumannii infections. In just the last year, they’ve been able to isolate several important proteins. These proteins enable the bacteria to form a biofilm, a way for the organism to stick to wounds and infect human tissue.

By purifying the proteins and developing antibodies, these scientists hope to come up with an injectable therapy that could stop infection before it starts. That drug could be part of every footsoldier’s gear and every field hospital’s arsenal of drugs.

“The final product would be very protective against infections and the product could be carried by the military personnel to the battlefield,” Wei said.

Drug-resistant microbes are stubborn enemies, and these San Antonio scientists are on the front line of the battle to keep them from causing misery and claiming lives.

Wei is hopeful that his work will attract future funding from the Department of Defense, since the issue is so crucial to the men and women fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“They must have what for all we know amounts to a language,” Renthal said. “They have a division of labor. In some species of ant, the complexity of what they do is just astonishing.”

Take the weaver ant, for example — a species found in parts of Africa, Asia and Australia. The ants work together to build their nests from tree leaves. But how they weave them takes some elaborate choreography, Renthal said.

“They form a chain of ants. One ant grabs a leaf over here and another ant grabs one there, and between them there's a whole chain of ants holding onto each other, and then they shorten the chain to bring the leaves together. Then other ants go around and glue the leaves together with little aerosol cans of glue. Those aerosol cans of glue are larvae that they're holding in their mandibles. They squeeze on the larvae and out shoots a jet of silk.”

Most creatures communicate in some fashion using pheromones. But the number of chemical messages recognized by ants seems to be a lot greater — probably in the hundreds.

There are pheromones used to signal to others the presence of food or danger. Pheromones that allow one ant to recognize another from the same nest or mound. Pheromones that signal the ant equivalent of romantic desire.

There's even a pheromone that ants produce shortly after they drop dead. Another ant, sensing this, will carry it to the dead ant pile. Scientists have dabbed a little of this grim reaper pheromone on perfectly healthy, still-breathing ants. They get carried to the dead ant pile too.

The question is how to isolate more of those chemicals and figure out what they mean. Lots of scientists have been working on this for many years, and a few pheromones have been identified. But it's a slow and laborious process.

Renthal — who began his research studying the anatomy of ant antennae — is working backward. Rather than trying to pick out one meaningful chemical from hundreds, he's starting on the receiving end. He's identified odor-binding proteins and chemosensory proteins that grab specific chemical compounds and carry them to nerve cell receptors in the antenna. He can analyze the substances that attach to those binding proteins, and then squirt them on ants in his lab to see what effect they have.

It's a novel and still-unproven method, one that may or may not pay off. But he's been steadily awarded competitive grants to pursue it, most recently UTSA's first grant under the federal stimulus program — $390,000 to study various parts of an insect's pheromone receptor structure.

And if he could somehow figure out what they're saying, what might Renthal tell them?

“It would be nice to be able to say to the fire ants: ‘You can be here, but not over here.' A lot of farmers actually like them because they attack and kill cotton boll worms. So you might attract them to places where they could be of some value, and keep them away from the fields where they are damaging crops or people's houses.”

Of zebra finches, only the males sing; it’s an essential vocal behavior that identifies them to potential mates. If raised without adult males nearby, the youngster never learns a melody; it develops only an instinctive, innate squawking that is not quite a song. Without a male role model, he will never learn the song that is essential for attracting females for breeding.

The tiny orange-beaked finches are commonly found in the laboratories of neurobiologists, who use the birds in experiments aimed at unraveling the hidden brain circuits involved in learning and memory. Troyer is approaching the problem from a different angle.

Sequestered in a quiet room of his laboratory, a baby finch and adult male live in adjoining cages for the first few months of the baby’s life, as microphones record all the vocalizations. Hours and hours of tape capture how the youngster’s song matures, from harsh squawking to a rich and complex mating call.

Troyer, who started as a mathematician and worked his way into brain research, analyzes the songs and breaks them into their most minute elements.

The calculations become the basis of computer models that suggest what areas of the brain are involved as the song first is learned, and later reproduced by the youngster. “I am trying to get at what they are really learning,” Troyer said. “They start off really bad, but they get better. There’s lots of things going on and I am trying to really characterize that in a detailed quantitative way.”

Troyer’s work is proving valuable to other scientists who are trying to discover the pathways of learning and motor movement inside the brain, said Marc Schmidt, an associate professor of biology at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Prior to Todd’s work, we imagined that one area did everything,” Schmidt said. “Now he is forcing us to look more carefully and suggesting there are multiple areas that contribute to these behaviors.”

Birds’ brains are very different from those of humans, and the leap from the biology lab to human disease is a long one, Troyer and Schmidt said. But scientists hope the growing knowledge of how bird brains work will contribute to the understanding of what happens when human brains malfunction, they said. “

For song, you have complex motor movement and it is learned,” Schmidt said. “You want to know what parts of the brain contribute to the motor movement; clearly, in some human diseases, these parts of the brain malfunction.”

Is this a demonstration on the evolution of politeness?

Ratnam has recorded hours of frog chorusing at the nature center near Boerne, and hopes the croaks and clicks of these amphibians will shed light on the biology and ecology of these species, as well as become a bridge to understanding how humans hear.

"Yes, they are much lower vertebrates than humans, but there are some commonalities in the way the auditory systems have evolved," said Ratnam, who studies the way the brain perceives and processes sounds. "There are certain basic circuits that are preserved across species. It doesn't matter if you're an amphibian. It doesn't matter if you're a primate."

Frog vocabulary is pretty simple. The amphibians use calls to define territory and to communicate their availability to potential mates. They also have a distress call when they are, for example, in the grasp of a predator. But some frogs at least appear to deliberately avoid calling out at the same moment as nearby frogs of the same species. Since this chorusing happens at night in the dark, Ratnam said, this shows that they are able to use sound to perceive the location and distance of nearby animals, even in a noisy pond filled with dozens of croaking frogs and toads.

"We don't understand how these problems are being solved in the brain," Ratnam said.

It is, he said, the same "cocktail party question" that has dogged auditory specialists for years. How do brains - of both human and lower species - filter sound in a noisy environment, focusing on the sounds that interest them?

Ratnam and a colleague from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign spent weeks traipsing through the spring-fed pond at the nature center outside Boerne last summer. They mounted sophisticated electronics on poles around the pond and were able to capture both the sounds and the locations of the creatures as they sang.

For Doug Jones, an engineering professor at the Illinois campus, the project offers a way to test and refine new electronic equipment that does a better job of filtering out background noise. That could lead both to improved methods for recording sound in remote locations and to more sensitive hearing aids for hearing-impaired people, Jones said.

"What we have had to learn is how to adjust to the differences in the environment and learn from the signals themselves," he said. "Now we will be able to take that back to hearing aids and make hearing aids that work in a reverberant room."

Next spring, after seasonal rains refill the ponds, Ratnam and Jones will take their electronics to the nature center again, and also to Mitchell Lake on San Antonio's South Side, where a larger variety of species make their homes. Ratnam said he is eager to get back outdoors to the natural lullaby of a pond full of singing frogs.

"It is very pleasant to listen to. I feel like I get paid to have fun," Ratnam said. "It's very, very peaceful."