Wild and Wacky (We are the Robots)

When I talked about spider recording in VC55 a couple of months ago, the discussion quickly became "imaginative", and by the end of the meeting, we had "decided" ;-) to equip a drone with an eVac and program it to fly a 10m grid covering the whole of VC55 taking samples. These would need to be sorted by hand to sort out the [insert taxon of choice, e.g. spiders] from the debris, and then sent off for DNA barcoding (High-throughput sequencing for community analysis: the promise of DNA barcoding to uncover diversity, relatedness, abundances and interactions in spider communities (2020) Development Genes and Evolution volume 230, 185–201). Not good news if you're an ecological consultant, great news for gene jockeys.

Mass sampling projects are "easy" to set up. "Hey, I know, let's sequence the whole of Wytham Woods." There was another one published yesterday (Changes in phenology and abundance of suction‐trapped Diptera from a farmland site in the UK over four decades. (2020) Ecol Entomol). What's not easy is processing the data they produce. It took the Danes 15 years to record the results of their malaise traps (The Swedish Malaise Trap Project: A 15 Year Retrospective on a Countrywide Insect Inventory (2020) Biodiversity Data Journal 8: e47255). Right now DNA barcoding is the only feasible way of tackling the mass of data such projects produce. But maybe not for much longer. A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) is coming: A light trap and computer vision system to detect and classify live moths (Lepidoptera) using tracking and deep learning. (2020) bioRxiv https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.18.996447, and: Successful launch of automatic insect counting in North Holland. I've been concerned about the impact of A.I. for some time. Well, not about A.I. as such, more about A.S. - the poorly functioning first generation systems - Artificial Stupidity. It's not there yet, but inevitably it will come.

Recently I've noticed a disturbing trend in entomology blog posts to include dodgy music videos. Until the A.I. finally takes over, it seems that We are the Robots: