Pentagon plans cyber-insect army

DARPA is calling for for bids on a project to create an army of cyber-insects that can be remotely controlled to check out explosives and send transmissions.

Micro-systems would be inserted at the pupa stage, when the insects -such as dragonflies and moths- can integrate them into their body, so they can be remotely controlled later or sense certain chemicals, including those in explosives.

The invasive surgery could "enable assembly-line like fabrication of hybrid insect-Mems interfaces", Darpa says.

A winning bidder would have to deliver "an insect within five metres of a specific target located 100 metres away".

The "insect-cyborg" must also "be able to transmit data from relevant sensors, yielding information about the local environment. These sensors can include gas sensors, microphones, video, etc."

Entomology expert Dr George McGavin of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History said the idea appeared "ludicrous". "What adult insects want to do is basically reproduce and lay eggs. You would have to rewire the entire brain patterns."

Darpa's previous experiments to get bees and wasps to detect the smell of explosives foundered when their "instinctive behaviours for feeding and mating... prevented them from performing reliably", it said.

Via everyone: Multipolarity Meme, robot.net, the Raw Feed, BBC News, The Washigton Times, etc.

Related: Trained wasps to sniff out chemicals and ulcers.

BBC news has also a selection of projects using animals in warfare:

A monkey test subject being experimented on for safety equipment that was being tailored for fighter pilots.

WWII: Attach a bomb to a cat and drop it from a dive-bomber on to Nazi ships. The cat, hating water, will "wrangle" itself on to enemy ship's deck. In tests cats became unconscious in mid-air.

WWII: Attach incendiaries to bats. Induce hibernation and drop them from planes. They wake up, fly into factories etc and blow up. Failed to wake from hibernation and fell to death

Navy personnel training a dolphin for sabotage duties.

Vietnam War: Dolphins trained to tear off diving gear of Vietcong divers and drag them to interrogation, sources linked to the programme say. Syringes later placed on dolphin flippers to inject carbon dioxide into divers, who explode. US Navy has always denied using mammals to harm humans.