Mothbox 4.5

The Mothbox is a low-cost, high-performance insect monitor. It features a power efficient and lightweight design that helps field biologists deploy it in the depths of the jungle. Its low cost means you can build one to study the biodiversity at your home!

All the physical designs, electronics schematics, Pi Scripts, and insect-IDing Artificial Intelligence are provided free and open source, so you can build, share, and improve on these designs yourself!

See the full specifications of what it can do here. Watch a video presentation of our talk at the Smithsonian all about the Mothbox and its design.

Why Study Insects for Conservation?

Insect populations can be used as an ultra high resolution sensor for changes in environments.

Insects (Especially Moths and Beetles) are Hyperdiverse

Of all life on earth (including bacteria), there are about 2 million species scientists have described, and half of all those species are insects! What’s more, if you look at just moths, there are about 144,000 species, meaning about 1 in every 14 known species in the world is a moth! For reference, there are only about 11,000 bird species, and only 6,500 species of mammals (and half are bats and rodents).

Using creatures with a super diverse gene pool allows us to make sophisticated insights into the health of different areas. Combining the activity of thousands of species of insects with other data like climate, acoustic, or soil analysis, can provide deep analysis into how damaged environments can be repaired.

Offer Highly Localized Insights

Because they tend to have short lives and often limited ranges, insects can provide super localized data. Moths, in particular, are great indicators of overall biodiversity, because they are often host-specific as caterpillars. This means they only feed on one or a limited number of plant species. So, by monitoring moths, you are getting proxy information about the local plant community.

For comparison, think about something like a jaguar. Jaguars are rarely spotted and scientifically valuable to see on a wildlife camera, but they have large ranges and long lives. The presence of a jaguar does not necessarily tell us much about the health of the specific environment where it was spotted. It could simply be travelling across disturbed farmland to escape from a destroyed habitat elsewhere, but this would not be an indicator that the disturbed farmland is healthy and safe for jaguars.

Having an insect sensor (like a Mothbox) that compares the activity of thousands of different species of insects can highlight differences in environmental health in areas just a couple kilometers apart.

They are Easy to Attract

Humans long ago discovered that many nocturnal insects like moths seem to be attracted to lights. We now know this is because bright lights disorient their natural steering mechanism. Scientists have used bright artificial lights for over a century to take censuses of insect populations. The problem with this type of “mothlighting” is that it can be incredibly time consuming, as a scientist has to hang out with the mothlight all night and note which insects are visiting. Instead we have an automated device that does all this work for you! You just deploy the Mothbox in the field, it runs while you’re in the comfort of your own home, and you can collect it and analyze the data with AI when you’re ready.

What it Does

The Mothbox stays in an ultra low-power state until your schedule tells it which nights to wake up. Then it triggers an insect lure (usually a bright UV light) and takes ultra-high resolution photos of the visitors it attracts.

Next we created some open-source AI scripts that process the insect data for you. First, a trained YOLO v8 detects where all the insects are in the images and crops them out. This means that you can view just the cropped photos of insects instead of having to look through all the raw photo data.

Then we use a special version of BioCLIP with a user interface to help you automatically group and ID the insects to different taxonomic levels!

Build it Yourself!

This Mothbox documentation will provide you with information on how to source, build, program, and use your Mothbox!

Get started building your mothbox!

After following these guides, you should be able to make your own set of Mothboxes to conduct your own biodiversity studies!

Mothbeam

We are also building an open-source, portable, low-cost light for mothlighting, the Mothbeam! Some early documentation for making your own Mothbeam is here.