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Comment by robbrown451 | Hacker News Reader

They need little robots/drones to scout about at night for larva and kill them.

True, this will take a lot of robots. But that's ok, since during the daytime when the guests are there, the robots can go back to the fab shop and make more robots.

That should get the last few percent. I can't imagine anything going wrong with this idea. You're welcome!

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>They need little robots/drones to scout about at night for larva and kill them.

Those are called dragonflies. And they have the highest success/attempt rate in the animal kingdom at 95%: https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/animals-ecology/article-s...

they have the highest success/attempt rate in the animal kingdom at 95%

I'm sure you realize why it can't be 100%.

Dragonflies are gorgeus, my favourite bugs. I used to get hypnotized seeing them around my house as a child. But there were many mosquitos too.

Tangential, but local Odonata populations in Prince Edward Island have anecdotally exploded in the last couple of years. The greater region has seen a collapse of bat populations from white nose syndrome over the last decade. The coming of dragon and damselflies in mid- to late summer is a relief to the sanity of many.

The drawback is that relief does not come until dragonflies are in their adult stages, versus bats which would eat mosquitos all spring and summer.

At the very least, the dragonflies should be cyborgs that can be centrally controlled and can build cyborg components.

I'm pretty sure the Imagineers are already on it.

You could give the dragonflies little Disney Princess heads. That would be cute.

I like the way you think.

Gainesville has those: they're bats. The University of Florida has the world's largest bat houses. The bats eat 2.5 billion insects every night.

Swallows also do work. I read that each swallow can eat about 800 flies and mosquitoes a day. A combination of swallows during the day and nocturnal bats would be ideal.

I keep wishing this wasn’t vaporware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser

Good chuckle imagining that as the laser light show every night... title alone.

Just sell me popcorn and play Star Wars space combat music.

Might be easier to build one for indoor use only, to clear a room. First clear the room of humans & pets. Let it run for a while. Maybe converge multiple beams on a target to reduce the damage from misses. Use sound to identify and classify targets: quiet bugs that aren't mosquitoes or flies can be ignored.

Way better than a bug zapper! Those are commercially available, somewhat popular, indiscriminate killers of any small species that crosses the relevant boundary, and hazardous to humans -- they typically explode the insects, releasing parasites and pathogens that manage to stay alive.

> they typically explode the insects, releasing parasites and pathogens that manage to stay alive.

This seems dubious to me. I can't imagine it would aerosolize, and even droplets would need to be close to a human to infect them.

Is there a citation for this?

There seems to have been only one study, which is what is cited by everyone. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s002840010132

The study only looked at houseflies and as long as you're two meters away from the zapper, the danger is very low. You probably don't want the zapper on your patio but if it's in a part of the yard where people aren't close by, it's probably ok.

Wirecutter[0] cites at least two others, from Kansas State University[1] and the University of Delaware[2].

They have so many hyperlinks in the article that I don't want to check if any go to other studies. Certainly a lot of the links are to statements by professors and organizations rather than papers. But this passage seemed at least noteworthy:

"""We found similar statements from the Harvard Medical School (“Don’t buy a bug zapper”), Iowa State University (“Bug Zappers are Harmful, not Helpful”), the Texas Tech University Infant Risk Center (“Don’t use bug zappers”), and the US Department of Agriculture (PDF) """

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/do-bug-zappers-work/

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s002840010132

[2] https://archive.org/stream/cbarchive_110397_densityanddivers...

My thought exactly. Far more dangerous is to allow them to inject it into your veins rather than fling it through the air.

If, as the U of Delaware study found, only 0.22 percent (not 22%) of what's killed are mosquitoes, it had better be at least 1 / 0.0022 = 454 times worse.

[0] https://archive.org/stream/cbarchive_110397_densityanddivers...

I e always imagined for my balcony in Africa a 2d vertical axis laser array that zaps bugs that try to cross. I'm sure it could be done technically but obviously there are safety issues

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