Hi GOSH Community!
Each month, I’m sharing regular Mothbox updates while working with the Digital Naturalism Laboratories (Dinalab) team in Panama. For those curious, you can read the previous Mothbox updates here. In today’s post, I’ll recap what we’ve been working on since mid-November.
You can now buy a moth shirt and other cool merch!
We now have an online store where you can buy moth-themed shirts, swimsuits, hats, and more to raise funds for the Mothbox project. Andy (@hikinghack) developed a fun script to help generate patterns from moth image datasets that can be turned into clothes. So now you can order your own moth-themed clothing that also represents all the insects we saw on September 3rd, 2024, on a trip to Mt. Totumas in Panama!
Testing out battery life
One of our top priorities right now is to see how long the Mothbox can last in the field. To better understand the current Mothbox’s (v4.5) battery life, we’re running several field tests where we are daisy chaining batteries, attaching solar panels, and experimenting with different programmed schedules for how long the Mothbox runs each night.
Photo of a Mothbox daisy chained to another battery.
The two programmed schedules we are experimenting with include one in which the Mothbox runs every other hour from 7 pm to 5 am (program A) and one in which the Mothbox runs every hour from 7 pm to 5 am (program B). We generally find that Mothboxes running program B last one night, and those running program A last about three.
Photo of a Mothbox being deployed off Pipeline Road in Gamboa
In November, we got the chance to bring two Mothboxes on a trip to Jose Pobre, where we deployed them in a nearby pasture! We’re still processing the data, but we are excited to see what insect photos the Mothboxes captured while on our trip.
Photo of a Mothbox overlooking the Caribbean Sea in Jose Pobre
Canopy tower deployment
At the end of November, the Dinalab team set up Mothboxes at a nearby canopy tower in Gamboa to see what insects we could find at different canopy levels! We successfully deployed three Mothboxes at varying levels. We were curious about what insects we’d find at the top, but unfortunately, when we did a preliminary check of the data, we didn’t find many moth detections. We realized that when we deployed at the canopy tower, it was a full moon, which means that the Mothbox had a very bright competing light source! So, we’d like to try another canopy tower deployment during a new moon to see if there is an increase in moth detections.
Bri and Kitty deploying a Mothbox at the top of the canopy tower
Data cleanup
We also took some time this month to clean up our data to ensure that our file naming conventions were correct, following the organizational structure documented here. After cleaning up the data, our next step is to start running scripts to generate metadata and identify moth detections.
What’s next for the Mothbox team?
Over the next few months, the goals for the Mothbox team are to develop a new version of the Mothbox that is scalable and easy to manufacture and to finalize the AI machine learning pipeline for detecting and identifying insects from Mothbox data. We will also continue field testing to better understand the Mothbox’s battery life in the field.
For more information on the Mothbox project, visit our GitHub. In the meantime, I’ll be back with more project updates next month!