Seems like it might be possible to track Asian hornets with motion sensors tuned to the hornet’s flight signature, which is the disturbance in the air created by the beating of the hornet’s wings. Species have unique signatures, I believe, if they are analyzed closely enough. A drone aircraft could survey an area during peak activity times, detect the hornets, track them to their nests, and transmit that data to searchers. Data could be collected in places such as Japan, where the hornet is already established, and used to create the profile that the computers would look for. Hover time for drones is getting to periods approaching an hour, if I am not mistaken, and a motion sensor can be deployed on a tether so that the prop wash from the drone can be eliminated.
Flying insects the size of an Asian hornet are rare in the U.S., and using technology to track things that size seems the most logical way of finding these monsters and wiping them out before they get established in North America.
It isn’t plausible to expect to sense the air disturbance from an insect’s wings from any appreciable distance, so let’s go with the characteristic sound of their buzzing, and with their visual silhouette. You could probably train a sensor to look for that. A network of static sensors sufficient for full coverage of areas the hornets are likely to survive and establish should require no more than a fee billon sensors, costing no more than a few trillion dollars to develop, deploy, maintain, and monitor.
I admit to not being an expert in drone or motion sensor technology, and it’s always possible that I’m ignorant of how sophisticated this technology might be, but at first blush this quite frankly strikes me as preposterous.
First, it’s not clear to me that a drone, creating its own air disturbances and having to deal with more general environmental “noise” like wind patterns, plants, birds, and other creatures, could find these creatures at all. Speaking of plants, how is it going to see through tree canopies and other impediments? The Asian hornets have so far been found only in Washington and British Columbia, and the only nest was on Vancouver Island, an incredibly heavily forested region.
Even if you can detect wasps and hornets and bees generally with your drone, there’s a lot of problems implied in your phrase “if they are analyzed closely enough.” Even if it’s true that different insects disturb the air in different ways, and that these differences can be detected and described “if they are analyzed closely enough,” the next question is whether you could develop a sensor that would detect such minute differences from tens or hundreds of yards away, while mounted on a flying drone and having to negotiate all of the other environmental variables that might disturb the sensor’s performance.
Then, if you’re just looking on Vancouver Island and in western Washington, you’re looking at tens of thousands of square miles of territory. Even if you can narrow it down to areas where the hornets have previously been sighted, you’re talking a massive amount of area which, as already discussed, has significant tree coverage.
Well, for certain values of logical, I guess. If anything was going to work for this, it would probably be the sort of land-based sensors suggested by Darren Garrison. But more generally, despite all the hype that this story has been getting in the media, these insects are far down the list of things that Americans should be worried about.
This is precisely what entomologists in Washington and British Columbia have been suggesting, along with targeted traps in areas where the insects have been sighted.
I don’t think this is as crazy as y’all make it sound. Say, when researchers go into the field to set traps, they also install drone bases. A base is just a hook or platform nailed to a tree with some feature a drone can use to home in on it (visual or radio).
The researcher puts on the hook a small drone which contains a sound recorder and camera. After recording for a day, the drone powers up and flies to a station where a researcher downloads data from all the incoming drones, recharges them, then triggers them to fly back to their bases.
Of course a drone is a lot more expensive than a simple bait trap, but if the sensors can indicate whether a hornet has been caught (or flown by) it saves the researches having to visit all the traps on foot.