Crickets, cicadas, katydids, and some other insects make noise by beating their wings. More significantly, they can change the pitch of their wing beats and, hence, the frequency of the noise in response to changes in pitch of other nearby insects. Swarms of these insects form peer-to-peer wireless networks that can propagate information at relatively high speed across significant areas—perhaps tens of kilometers.

The insects use this ability for their own inscrutable purposes. At least they did until they encountered Benjamin Epstein, PhD, vice president of special projects at OpCoast, a provider of custom products for networking, modeling and analysis, software and database systems, and security and lawful interception. Epstein had the idea that by wiring electronics into the wing muscles on cicadas he could in principle artificially modulate the wing beats, in effect loading information into the insects’ network and watching it propagate.

Epstein landed a research contract from the US Department of Defense to explore the feasibility of the idea for creating a living network of battlefield toxic-gas detectors. Other applications include mine safety and survivor detection in natural disasters.

The idea is to create a package of electronics, including a gas sensor, perhaps an audio sensor in case the insect proves uninterested in rebroadcasting a strange signal by itself, a wing-muscle stimulator, a tiny bit of intelligence, and some sort of power supply. This package has to be small enough to be implantable in the insect and to not interfere with its short-term survival. The size issue, Epstein says, was not so much a concern with cicadas, which can be rather large. It does become an issue with more common and smaller insects, such as crickets, which are more desirable hosts because they can thrive in a wider range of climates.

In operation, the electronics payload would be passive until the detector found whatever it was looking for. The package would then stimulate the insect’s wing muscles, causing the bug to emit a particular pitch. Presumably, neighboring insects would pick up the new pitch and repeat it.