Expedition: Cerro Hoya

A crowning achievement of our past year of development was the Mothbox’s ultimate test: a massive expedition to Cerro Hoya, a remote national park in Panama. We wanted to showcase the Mothbox as a tool like no other by demonstrating that it can simultaneously sample an elevation gradient from a near sea level to above 1500m. We hiked up a mountain ridge, deploying Mothboxes every 100 meters, as the ecosystem shifted from dry agricultural land, to secondary forest, mature premontane forest, and through bands of elevation and precipitation until we reached the soaking wet, moss-covered cloud forest.

Our team of seven deployed a total of nineteen Mothboxes, which were programmed to simultaneously collect data on insect communities across this remote forest gradient for three nights. No other tool or traditional sampling method would have been able to achieve this feat. For the first time, scientists have the chance to see an ultra-high-precision snapshot of the subtle differences in insect communities across difficult, diverse terrain.

You can get a glimpse of what we have accomplished by watching a teaser of the Mothbox documentary that will come out about our expedition:

This is also some early quick data visualizations at some of the insects collected at different elevations along our route. It starts with mothboxes at 150 meters at the left and up to 1530m at the summit!

some fun close-ups of data