 So instead I'm going to talk about the hunt for the elusive fungus snat in Australia I'm from Australia and I'm on a tour From Singapore going over land visiting make spaces etc. All the way through to Shenzhen China Spending five weeks or so doing that. So anyway real quickly So Australia has this is a much longer talk. I'm going to condense it down. So we'll just skip some slides Australia has a lot of interesting orchids and whilst most people focus on the orchids themselves What's interesting is the pollinators of the orchids because that is how the orchid usually how the orchid Reproduces so here on the left. We've got a Wasp and another much larger This this wasps only maybe a millimeter or too long Where's that one? There's quite a bit larger and you can see this one's maybe 20 millimeters or so longer And it's sitting on my finger These don't sting So We'll just skip that so While I was doing all that trekking the path there I came across this log here and this is raised up and it's about two meters long and in there is a bed of about 60 Helmet orchids, so this is a very tiny orchid and This is one of the targets that I'm looking at. Oh, sorry. I forgot to mention No one knows what pollinates this orchid No one knows what kind of insect it is so I thought I'd go out and try and discover what pollinates the the flower and So the leaf here the big ground leaf is about 20 millimeters Maybe 10 millimeters in diameter the the opening there. So this is the opening This is a side view and this is a bit of a top down and there's the entrance there There's another species so this one flowers for about three weeks in the middle of winter and there's another one that Flowers at the end. There's a bit of an overlap between them This one's for about a week or two and this is a side view of the orchid Flower and it is a little bit smaller. So the first thing we tried This is a multi-year project. The first thing we tried was nice and simple just build some traps This one was a Failure this one was a little bit better and it was just a drink container top cut off Upended and put inside so act like an upward facing tunnel a funnel and hopefully the insect would Visit the flower and then go up inside and then get trapped and not be able to come back We captured a few insects that way, but it wasn't Wasn't very good. So We moved on to another idea that I had and that was to cut out some overhead projection Plastic into make little flags put them on bamboo skewers or metal skewers and There's a special substance you can buy called tangle foot and you can paint Paint that onto the flag or like it looks like a flag and then the insects flying around stick into it and they're trapped And you can see the orchids down here At the bottom and so there's lots of target Areas for them to fly around in There were a few problems with that in that not planning ahead Got them out in the field How do you collect them and take them home when you've got all these sticky bits and the first year? We actually coated both or the first session we coated both sides with sticky stuff So luckily we bought some glad wrap back with us and we wrapped them in glad wrap But then we had problems with photography. So you're now photographing through multiple layers of plastic and Lumps and bumps etc. So it didn't come out very good. So Another improvement we did later was to laser cut them all out and you could actually etch No, you could etch nice Information into it all etc. So that was quite fun. This is what the looks comes back looking like So these are mainly the big ones are mainly fungus gnats They do look a bit like mosquitoes, but they don't have a probiscus and they're thigh That is close to the body there is quite fat and large So another innovation was Quickly thought let's make a 3d designer box for it all custom design and I have maybe I don't know 10 or 12 of these boxes now So I've got many years worth of Collection and I can go to each one and pull them out and have a look photograph them again if I need to or whatever And that's what it looks like out in the field Lot in there So, yes, we had a bit of success. So you can see that When some insects go inside a flower Especially orchids. It's not like a bee that the bee builds up Tiny particles of pollen in orchids. They mostly come as sacks and called a polliner sack And that is sort of ripped out of the flower and gets stuck on to the back of the insect And you can see they're all different shapes So that then says well, okay, we've got some insects. This is actually going on out in the field there Obviously because the flowers are getting pollinated, but which it flower was this one trapped in which flower did this Was this pollinated in etc? So I then went and collected some different Flower polliner and these are to give you a sense of scale. I didn't put a scale on there, but these are Toothpicks and so you can see this is the end of the toothpick under a microscope It's quite quite small and just a millimeter or two if you're lucky just a millimeter across and So we've got the top two the top two here Helmet orchids and this is a Mosquito or midge orchid and this is a snail orchid and these are the target These are four orchids that are all flowering at the same time So I thought right. I'm into electronics. Let's get in there and how about we photograph the flower and we'll do we'll take do a flower a photograph every point eight of a second and We will get about 87,000 photos per day on to and but to get that speed we've got to lower the resolution down to HD resolution, so 1920 by 1080 which is pretty good still a pretty good resolution and The rig allows me to get about five flowers per year so I'll do one for a week or something like that sometimes longer sometimes shorter and in 2017 I ended up with 3.2 million photographs I want to get as fast as possible because I want to see the insect going inside Yes, yeah at this resolution I could go faster by making it smaller But I want to see you know want to be able to identify what kind of insect it is So that the the object here is to actually capture something going in get a photograph Hopefully with a polymer sack on its back so you can say that this species going in and then you'd see the flower wilt and become pollinated or Insect going in Right insect going in and coming out with without a polymer sack really running out of time Electronics did a lot of 3d printing for it all laser cut Made our own assembly made the housing for it But then how do you adjust the lens so 3d design and printed lens? That's the rig out in the bush Camouflage than I want to steal it So this is the size of it all that's the flower down there. Sorry about the people over there That's the flower there and that's a raspberry pi camera, which you know is not very big There's another target shot over there so very tiny that's about 7 millimeters across So results it's our infrared so I can capture day night 24 hours a day That's a night time shot at 3 in the morning. This is daytime because it's infrared the colors are all muted So the results I'm not going to look through 3.2 million photographs So I use open CV to do motion detection But then I've got problems with storms in the middle of winter So I need to ignore leaves that are flipping and moving in the rain, etc. That's a fungus that flying away There's a bit of flowchart on how it all works the results we have ants lots of ants crawling around with here we've got a crane fly and a I think that's a Fly fruit fly fruit fly and there's a wasp there and This is one a fruit fly inside and just to show once again the size This is the same photo, but this is a daytime shot of it all and that's the fly inside there So it's only a couple of millimeters across Results Not much. I haven't actually found after one and a half years. I haven't seen anything So I haven't actually got proof of anything going in or out But I've got lots of interesting photographs of it's amazing the place just comes alive at night time After I leave just a five minutes after I leave everything just erupts with insects and things flying around monitor lots of things profiling tracking temperatures, etc a number of issues Files in directories How to delete 85,000 files, so you need to run you just can't run RM, you know in Linux to delete that number of files Main costs this caught the rig costs about four hundred dollars per rig I only have one but batteries USB flash drives first year I couldn't forward 128 gigabyte hard drives of flash drives could only forward 64 gigabyte flash drives Presented in Maketh Shenzhen make affair, which was fun. Thank you very much everyone. Thank you for the loan of the laptop Okay