To the extent that one has strong feelings about insects, they tend toward the extremes of a spectrum that runs from a complete fascination with their diversity and the specializations they’ve evolved to exploit unique and ultra-narrow ecological niches, and “Eww, ick! Kill it!” It’s pretty clear that [Dr. Andy Quitmeyer] and his team tend toward the former, and while they love their bugs, spending all night watching them is a tough enough gig that they came up with Mothbox, the automated insect monitor.
Insect censuses are valuable tools for assessing the state of an ecosystem, especially insects’ vast numbers, short lifespan, and proximity to the base of the food chain. Mothbox is designed to be deployed in insect-rich environments and automatically recognize and tally the moths it sees. It uses an Arducam and Raspberry Pi for image capture, plus an array of UV and visible LEDs, all in a weatherproof enclosure. The moths are attracted to the light and fly between the camera and a plain white background, where an image is captured. YOLO v8 locates all the moths in the image, crops them out, and sends them to BioCLIP, a vision model for organismal biology that appears similar to something we’ve seen before. The model automatically sorts the moths by taxonomic features and keeps a running tally of which species it sees.
Mothbox is open source and the site has a ton of build information if you’re keen to start bug hunting, plus plenty of pictures of actual deployments, which should serve as nightmare fuel to the insectophobes out there.
What does it mean to be at the base of the food chain?
As a human we see ourselves as being at the top right? Except for maybe some poisonous species what don’t we eat? And even those we have ways to get around that and eat some of them.
But… if one of us dies… and doesn’t get immediately sealed into some sort of air-tight container or burned…
There’s going to be insects having a buffet.
haha
what the Lion King told his son:
“It’s a circle of life – nobody’s at the top!”
If you happen to be around Atlanta Georgia October 28th through 29th, We are actually doing a free Workshop for how to build your own mothbox! Can sign up here! https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfycuNiROEomtF7fLsYZx7p2PB9zQPaBqeoTLyVmkh7a6NlXw/viewform
If you manage to pull Stockton in a Rush and dive 3 km below the surface then within miliseconds you could easily transform from biology to physics. That’s one way to avoid being worm food.
Booo. poor taste mr puffer
that guy died
let him alone and move on please
Design one for stinkbugs that can disarm them. Green, brown, or marmorated. Another wave is on.
There is also a (I think) Berlin based version of this called KInsecta. Very interesting, especially since its open source and can be set up by anyone including schools for science classes and so on.
Thanks for the pointer to the kinsecta project!