The Insect Eavesdropper is a revolutionary sensor that identifies pests by listening to them eat. Emily Bick is an entomologist with the University of Wisconsin, who says microphones turn plant vibrations into vital data for farmers and researchers across the globe.
We’re essentially putting a microphone — in this case, it’s not like the typical on-air microphone — we’re putting in a contact microphone. It’s a piezoelectric microphone, and we’re either clipping it on or strapping it onto the plant. That microphone is made up of a little brass disc that, when the surface or the substrate or the plant vibrates, we’re able to get that set of vibrations and kinds of electrical signals. So, really critically, we’re trying to make this as cost-effective as possible, and we get it tested on things like asking some really critical questions for growers, things like, ‘Is my corn rootworm trait actually working in the middle of the season?’”
The Insect Eavesdropper has made a lot of progress in the last 17 years.
“We’ve actually ended up labeling 27 pest species, and some of those actually have multiple life stages, like our corn rootworms. Northern, southern, and western, we actually have the adults and the juveniles labeled separately. We’ve also tested it on 17 different cropping systems, so we’re getting the data. This past summer, we had these sensors out in 30 different sites across the U.S. This past year, we had them in four different countries across the world. We essentially collected so much data that we had to change our database structure to accommodate this. I think it was 17.4 years of data that we collected this past summer.”
Her team is still in the research and development stage of the project, although they’ve already had commercial interest. They’ve handed out the sensor to people across the U.S. and the world to see what works and what doesn’t.