Wireless Sensor Networks for Killing Mosquitoes

aaditeshwar writes "It looks like sensor networks have some applications afterall, other than the usual stuff for defense and US military! AmBio has created a wireless mesh network of bugspraying "magnets" that report back data on the temperature, air conditions, and wind directions, and a central controller uses this data to turn ON or OFF the magnets in different areas. They plan to cover entire cities with such wireless meshes, and create an anti-mosquito shield around the city!"

Comments

And then

[Anonymous Coward]

When the bacteria eaten by the mosquitoes begin hurting us, everybody will realize that -after all- they were not just "bad".

Typical biological intervention which reverts against us.

Re:And then

[Anonymous Coward]

The physical injury you get from a mosquito bite is a teeny tiny little pinprick of a puncture wound. The bit that actually annoys is the body's reaction to the chemicals in the mosquito's saliva, which causes the redness, the swelling, the itching. This is something which your body does adapt to the more you're exposed to it. Native people in mosquito-ridden parts have greatly reduced reactions to mosquito bites than hapless foreigners.

Re:And then

[inf0rmer]

I'm recovering from Dengue Fever, and I can think of nothing better than sending them into oblivion.

Fighting malaria

[pieterh]

This would be great in tropical countries. Mosquito-borne malaria is one of those diseases that affects a huge number of people (a majority in many countries), which is non-fatal but debilitating. It makes you sick every few months, and you spend a week or so in a terrible fever. Sometimes it's fatal but mostly it just makes people very weak, unable to concentrate on useful work, and so on.

Of course there are hundreds of other diseases that weigh down people living in tropical countries but malaria is one of the big ones. Keeping mosquitos away from places where people live would be a great thing. I just hope the technology will become cheap enough to work in rural Africa.

Re:Fighting malaria

[moro_666]

I think there must be better ways to fight malaria.

from tfa

"The way to control mosquitoes is to go to these ponds and float a harmless oil," that will suffocate the larvae when they come up for air, he said. "It seems like an awful lot of trouble and expense to do otherwise."

wtg dudes, seems like they have too much of fresh and not spoiled water over there. from the chemical point of view, there are as many harmless oils as there are nature friendly suv's. and you are forgetting the fact that in the very same lakes are breeding places for other breeds that save our butt from lots of trouble through eating other insects and having a competitive race for the food with really nasty insects ?

i think they will figure out this much later.

Can't people really create some kind of protection against malaria ? Here we are sitting behind multimillion megahertzed machines chatting over network that has been dragged with cables and satellites all over the world, and we can't find 1 civilized way to fight a diseasy without killing entire other species by it ? Give the medical institutions some proper budget and let them invent a malaria that is harmless to people but that does push out the malaria that we have right now, this should work, no ?

and does malaria have some kind of balancing effect on the rest of the mammals ? like regulating the count of animals so the planet wouldn't be overpopulated there by them and eaten "clean" ? no reason to stab ourselves in the back because it looked like a good idea in the first place.

Great !!

[amodm]

As if interference from nearby wireless networks was not enough !! They're using 802.11b network. Do they realize that a 802.11g network gets very badly affected if there's a 11b network nearby ?

Couldn't it have been done through wires, or bluetooth, or custom radio, or whatever....

And the effects on other species?

[Chris Bradshaw]

Great, we'll rid the city of mosquitos... What about natural predation and balance in areas where these systems are deployed? There are species that depend on the these "pests" for survival?

http://www.mosquito-netting.com/predators.html

I know that there are concerns with insect born illness, but that these problems can and in my opinion be solved without wiping out an entire species from an ecosystem, no matter how annoying they are.

Is it just me, or does this seem a little extreme...?

Re:And the effects on other species?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's you. First, consider the ecosystem you're crying about. Cities. If you think there's an ecosystem in cities that humans can take care not to change, you're neglecting the tiny little technicality that any ecosystem that grows in a city grows entirely according to human activities. There is not some delicate balance of alley cats and feral children to protect in cities, but there are mosquitos that carry disease. To eliminate one species from this completely artificial human-centric ecosystem is trivial, and as long as I don't hear about plans to blanket the Everglades with these devices, I'm not worried. Nobody is talking about making mosquitos extinct, and nobody is even talking about trying to control them anywhere but in cities. Calm down, hug a tree, and see if you can't learn to think things through a little better before inflicting your ignorance on the rest of us.

Bats

[Anonymous Coward]

How does this system compare with just attracting bats to the area? Just attach little wooden bat homes near your golf course or whatever. Bats eat a lot of bugs.

Vapourware?

[martinmcc]

I watched a program about mosqitos recently, and they are actually pretty cool creatures. As mentioned before, it is only the female that drinks blood, and it is used for making babies (mosquito babies I assume, not human), not for everyday sustanance. When they drink your blood, they actually distill it in real time, excreting out what they do not need as they drink.

But anyway, asides from the possible environmental impact it may or may not cause, does this not strick anyone as being highly unrealistic. How much would it cost to put up a city wide net of sensors and magnets, not to mention the power cost, replacing broken components etc. etc. Smells to me like a lot of vapourware.

I think we should just all sit down with mosquitos and have a good long chat, I'm sure we could work out our differences and learn to live together in peace and harmony.

Re:Vapourware?

[DingerX]

Well, duh, it is vapourware.

... until they perfect the tracking mechanism to determine the precise location of each mosquito, and feed that into an IMDS (integrated mosquito defense system), that uses picolasers to fry those bastards outta the sky.

Seriously, the world would be a better place without mosquitoes. Those of you in parts of the world where you don't have them, or you don't have many of them, really needn't comment on the environmental damage they['d do. The mosquito population can certainly stand the hit from being denied access to mammals in certain desert areas (known as "cities"). Mosquito though is one of the top vectors for human diseases, and many nasty ones.

On the other hand, spraying pesticides does come with environmental costs.

and for me, that "good long chat" would be: "look motherf*, if I ever see you around me, I will kill you, all your spawn, and do my best to exterminate your whole species!"

Re:Vapourware?

[meringuoid]

As mentioned before, it is only the female that drinks blood, and it is used for making babies (mosquito babies I assume, not human), not for everyday sustanance.

Great. So the mosquito bites me, gives me malaria, and uses the blood to make MORE MOSQUITOS. Now, if you'd explain to me why this is a good thing?

That disease kills some 1.5 million people a year. One million, five hundred thousand people a year, every year. That's death on a Holocaust scale, and not just for a few years but year on year with no end in sight.

Now, maybe there will be unpredictable ecological knock-on effects; food webs are like that. But I'll tell you what, to prevent one point five million deaths a year, if someone offered me the chance to press God's red button marked 'Instantly Exterminate All Mosquitos' I'd do it without the slightest hesitation.

Not all bugs are mozzies

[martinX]

Not all bugs are mozzies. If it kills all bugs, what happens to the critters that live by eating bugs?

I remember reading (somewhere on the innanet, so it must be true...) that the so-called mozzie zappers weren't too discriminatory. ~95% of the bugs caught in them weren't mosquitoes, but were bugs that had been attracted by the zapper's (deliberately attractant) light. This in turn was adversely affecting the local frogs. Less frogs meant more mosquitoes... and so on.

OTOH, my fly catching bottle smells like poo but catches nothing but flies :-)

Re:And then(there was light)

[codecracker007]

...and another crackpot comment gets (max)modded insightful

Interference: Not a problem

[uberdave]

A Mosquito Magnet is a propane powered device that attracts mosquitos by emitting a plume of CO2. The CO2 (and water vapour and scent additives) emulate the breath of warm blooded animals. The mosquitos are lured into the trap and killed.

The clever idea here is to network a bunch of these mosquito magnets, and a bunch of sensors, together, using wireless networking to remotely monitor propane levels, control burn times, etc. A large area can be protected, and the machines don't have to be on when they won't be needed (rain, high winds, cold, etc), thus extending their resources.

The networking can be done by whatever method is most handy. 802.11b was probably the "in thing" when they started development.

Re:Have they thought this through?

[Anonymous Coward]

Spiders will die too?

Wow, sounds like an awesome deal to me.

Re:Can the 3rd World afford it?

[mikefe]

How long before its cheap enough to not just be about making people in Florida feel more comfortable living in a swamp?

After the patent expires of course.