Hijacking a Cockroach

December 26, 2025/by Scott Kildall

The other day, I was at my new co-working space, Frontier Tower, and I saw the RoboRoach control kit by Backyard Brains on the table in my new home in the bio lab. It allows you to electronically control a cockroach. It’s even app-controlled through Bluetooth. This technology has been around for a while, as seen by their published date on YouTube and from this IEEE Paper, which discussed electronic impulses.

When Biohackery Tests Our Boundaries

It’s biohackery at its best and worst, and reminds me of an old Ars Electronica piece by Garnet Hertz, which uses a roach to control a robot. My own ethics of biology are usually that we should let nature do its thing and not interfere, which we as humans so often do. But roaches disgust me, and somehow making them into something you can control seems intriguing. I know this isn’t morally consistent, but there you have it.

Roach Biobots

To make a RoboRoach or roach biobot, a cockroach is fitted with a low-power electronic backpack and electrodes. Then, the antennae and cerci are selectively stimulated to trigger an escape response. For instance, if you stimulate the right antenna, the biobot turns left as a part of an avoidance reflex, and vice versa. This allows you to control where the cockroach goes, much like you would an electronic robot.

RoboRoach by Backyard Brains

Roaches to the Rescue?

While some people may be creating these biobots out of curiosity or entertainment, researchers are working on practical applications as well. They are trying to develop reliable roach biobots for search-and-rescue operations in collapsed buildings. They would release a team of biobots into the rubble, which would then travel through the debris. Their electronic sensors would send data back to a central location, where it would be analyzed to look for survivors. One day, cockroaches may do more than disgust us; they may actually come to our rescue.

The Emerald Cockroach Wasp: A Different Form of Biohackery

I remembered reading about how a certain species of wasp also hijacks a cockroach, but they do it not electronically, but rather through a whole other form of hackery. The emerald cockroach wasp is tiny compared to its prey, the much-larger cockroach, but it has a weapon at its disposal, which is chemical rather than electronic.

The details are complex, but it’s kind of like getting anesthetized before surgery, where you get an injection that will calm you down, and then you get the real dose of what knocks you out entirely.

“Jewel wasp (Ampulex compressa)” by Zezinho68, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0) via Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org

The Making of a Zombie Roach

The female wasp first stings the cockroach’s thoracic ganglion, a cluster of nerve cells in the thorax, with a mild, paralyzing biochemical agent. This causes the cockroach to lose control of its front legs. While the cockroach is incapacitated, the wasp delivers its second blow. This time, the wasp takes its time to find a precise spot in the ganglion in its head (essentially its brain) in the section that controls its escape reflex. The wasp injects a second dose of a different venom, and at this point, the cockroach starts grooming itself excessively for about 30 minutes. Then it becomes slow and fails to show any normal escape or survival responses, behaving almost zombie-like.

Next, the wasp chews off half of each of the roach’s antennae and feeds on the hemolymph (roach blood) that leaks out of them. Now that the unlucky roach has been subdued, the wasp leads the cockroach with its own antennae as a guiding stick, not unlike a dog on a leash. That’s some dark animal behavior at work. It’s an ingenious adaptation, and I don’t know how this happened.

The wasp then leads the zombie-roach to its burrow, where it lays 1-2 eggs between the roach’s legs. The wasp leaves and seals off the burrow to keep predators out. The roach is now food for the wasp’s offspring, which was the ultimate goal of this zombification. The cockroach’s metabolism has been slowed down by the wasp’s chemicals, so it hardly moves. The eggs hatch 3 days later to find a tasty meal just sitting there obediently waiting to be eaten. The larvae feed on the cockroach for 4-5 days, then chew their way into the still-living roach’s abdomen. There, the larvae live for 8 more days, consuming the internal organs and finally killing their host before creating a cocoon inside the roach’s corpse. Shortly after, they emerge as adult emerald cockroach wasps, ready to create their own zombie roaches.

A Synchronized Sea of Robotic Roaches

I’m tempted to order a RoboRoach kit, or even figure out the electronics and make my own. I’m not that squeamish, but handling roaches gives me the icks. Still, could I build a bunch of sensors that control these via Wi-Fi, making a synchronized sea of robotic roaches? A sort of live bio-performance.

The First Breathers

December 23, 2025/by Scott Kildall

Rise of the Cyanobacteria

Imagine an Earth that was dark, hot, and devoid of oxygen, thick with volcanic gases: mainly methane (CH₄), carbon dioxide (CO₂), nitrogen (N₂), and hydrogen sulfide (H₂S). There was no ozone layer (O₃) to block ultraviolet radiation. These compounds scattered and absorbed sunlight, especially in the visible range. The planet’s surface received a dim, reddish light, like a planet orbiting a red dwarf star.

Oceans were filled with dissolved iron, the seas probably looked metallic-green, and the planet glowed a purple hue instead of our familiar greens and blues. Microbial life, like the Purple Bacteria I wrote about last week, appeared mostly as thin films on rocks and sediments. They lived by tapping the chemical energy in sulfur, hydrogen, and other reduced compounds from the thick, dark atmosphere.

The Age of the Cyanos

So what changed the course of life on our planet? We can thank an unexpected microbial evolution for lending us this verdant planet we have today.

The Origin of Oxygenic Photosynthesis

Virtually all modern cyanobacteria, algae, and plants use a dual-photosystem architecture —Photosystem I (PSI) and Photosystem II (PSII) —that defines oxygenic photosynthesis today. This allows plants, algae, and cyanobacteria to capture short-wavelength light in PSII, splitting water molecules into electrons, protons, and oxygen. Then, this dual-photosystem uses PSI to boost the electrons released by PSII, which absorbs a second, longer wavelength of light, reenergizing them to generate the reducing power used to convert carbon dioxide from the air into glucose that the cyanos, plants, and algae use to grow and reproduce.

So how did we get these 2 different photosystems that forever changed the course of life on Earth? Each light-harvesting system came from different prokaryotes.

PSI and Green Sulfur Bacteria

PSI appears to have originated from Chlorobium limicola, a green sulfur bacterium, that has a PSI-like reaction center for its anoxygenic photosynthesis that uses ferrous sulfide (FeS) as the electron donor instead of water. The green sulfur bacteria live deep in the microbial mats, absorbing the longer wavelengths of light that the purple bacteria above do not use.

PSII and Purple Sulfur Bacteria

PSII is believed to have evolved from purple sulfur bacteria, possibly from Proteobacteria and Chloroflexi, that utilize hydrogen sulfide (H₂S) for anoxygenic photosynthesis. These live higher in the microbial mats, absorbing shorter wavelengths of light than PSI.

It’s believed that gene duplication events gave rise to the new proteins that replaced those of the PSI and PSII-like reaction centers for anoxygenic photosynthesis of the ancestral purple and green bacteria, leading to the evolution of PSII, whose unique innovation was to extract electrons not from hydrogen sulfide or ferrous iron, but from water itself. The by-product of this reaction produced oxygen, which, at the time, was toxic to almost everything alive.

Cylindrospermum – Blue Green Algae, microscope photograph

“Photo by Willem van Aken / CSIRO Land & Water, under CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)”

The Great Oxidation Event

Originally, these early microbes, cyanobacteria or their ancient ancestors, started producing oxygen in small amounts (< 0.001%) as far back as the Archean eon (4–2.5 billion years ago), predating the Great Oxidation Event (GOE) by about 1 billion years, likely before they acquired both photosystems.

Then, at some as yet unknown point in time, an ancient lineage leading to the age of the cyanobacteria acquired the genes for both PSI and PSII in a single ancestral cyanobacterium. This likely occurred via horizontal gene transfer, a relatively common process in which prokaryotes take up naked DNA, not via the usual routes of parent-to-offspring, but through direct contact or a virus. Once this ancestral cyanobacterium acquired the ability to use PSII and PSI, it forever changed the course of evolution on Earth.

Over hundreds of millions of years, the cyanos slowly proliferated, eventually producing oxygen in the oceans at a rate faster than it could be absorbed, causing mass extinctions of anaerobic lifeforms while paving the way for new metabolic strategies and, eventually, complex multicellular life.

This major episode is known as the Great Oxidation Event, during which oxygen levels began to rise from extremely low levels in the Archean (< 0.001%). Eventually, as cyanobacteria flourished and produced more oxygen, it began to accumulate on land, where the oxidative weathering of iron immediately consumed most of it, turning the land red with banded iron formations. We can see evidence of these banded iron formations in rocks around the world today. Eventually, oxidative weathering slowed and balanced, and free oxygen rose in the atmosphere to 10-40% of what it is today.

Eventually, a major secondary oxidation event, the Neoproterozoic Oxidation Event (NOE), occurred 800–600 million years ago. It’s linked to the rise of marine animals, major glaciation events, and carbon fixation by oxygenic phototrophs exceeding the respiration of organic matter. Together, this raised our oxygen levels to roughly 21% O2, the level in our atmosphere today that supports life on Earth, including our own.

Cyanobacteria Today

Cyanobacteria are incredibly successful organisms that are still found everywhere today. They live in our freshwater environments, ponds, damp soils, brackish water in estuaries, and many tolerate salinity, thriving in our oceans. They are just as important now as they were during the GOE. For instance, just one species, Prochlorococcus, a cyanobacterium in our oceans, produces about 20% of our planet’s oxygen.

They also often thrive in extreme environments like polar lakes and hot springs, and even inside rocks. Others tolerate desiccation and ultraviolet radiation. They often form biological crusts in arid and semi-arid deserts, where few organisms can survive. Still others proliferate in man-made environments like fish ponds and bird baths. In short, name an environment on Earth and there will be cyanobacteria living and thriving, having evolved and adapted to whatever conditions prevail.

In Appreciation of The Little Things

I don’t usually think about how biology helps humans. They should not be appreciated as our servants, but rather, on their own merit. But they do regulate carbon by sucking carbon dioxide from the air, fixing biomass, and exhaling oxygen. We often think about the trees as beneficial to stopping the onslaught of disastrous climate change, since they are more relatable, but the tiny cyanos are the thankless ones that we might want to appreciate a bit more. After all, you could say that without cyanobacteria, we would not be here today.

The First Light Eaters

December 20, 2025/by Scott Kildall

I was formally introduced to Purple Bacteria very recently, when I began collecting samples with a microbiologist friend of mine, near the shores of the Salton Sea. I wanted to see if they produce any meaningful data. Well, they do, but that’s for next week’s article. Today is more sciency, where I want to share what I learned all about this amazing family of microorganisms.

Purple bacteria, yes, that is the name of them, once ruled the planet. This was a mere 2.5-3.2 billion years ago. These microbes were among the first organisms to transform sunlight into chemical energy. This was before the Great Oxidation Event, where the oxygen that we know and love suffused the Earth’s atmosphere. The atmosphere was likely made of nitrogen (N2) and carbon dioxide (CO2) at the time.

Purple Bacteria thrived in this environment, feeding on hydrogen sulfide and other reduced compounds that seeped from volcanic vents and anoxic mud. This was more than two billion years ago, in the deep dawn of life, when sunlight was abundant but the chemistry of the oceans was alien to anything alive today. The purple bacteria were, and still are, anaerobic, since there was no oxygen around.

“Chromatium okenii al microscopio (600×)” by Mariiantoniietta, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons — File:Chromatium Okenii al microscopio.jpg

Not Your Usual Photosynthesis

Purple bacteria were the first bacteria discovered to practice anoxygenic photosynthesis — photosynthesis that does not produce oxygen as a byproduct. Instead, purple bacteria utilize electron donors like hydrogen sulfide (H2S), which produces elemental sulfur (S⁰) instead of oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis, giving off a Hades-like odor.

The purple bacteria use special pigments called bacteriochlorophylls that absorb light in the near infrared range (~720 nm to 1050 nm), unlike the chlorophyll of plants that absorb most strongly in the blue-violet (~430 nm) and red (~662 nm) of the visible spectrum. These unique bacteriochlorophyll pigments enable them to capture the faintest glow beneath the surface in extreme anoxic environments inhospitable to most lifeforms, just below where sunlight fades into darkness.

Interestingly, the ability to utilize bacteriochlorophylls in the infrared range has prompted researchers to use purple bacteria in biotechnological applications for treating anoxic wastewater with high pollutant loads, where their unique light-harvesting ability allows efficient energy use under low-oxygen conditions.

The Purple Earth Hypothesis

What if purple bacteria still dominated the Earth instead of land plants, algae, and cyanobacteria? Scientists still debate the earliest era of this choreography. Some now suggest that before chlorophyll-based photosynthesis arose, the planet might have glowed purple, a world dominated by bacteriochlorophyll pigments tuned to the reddish end of the spectrum. This idea, called the Purple Earth Hypothesis, imagines an ancient biosphere painted not in green abundance, but in violet or magenta survival. The Earth then would not appear blue and green as we see it today, but instead tinted by countless purple microbial mats rippling in the shallows.

The Great Oxygenation Event Changed Everything

Then, some 2.4 billion years ago, some ancient lineages of purple bacteria, most likely the common ancestors of modern purple bacteria and cyanobacteria, adapted to use water as an electron donor, releasing oxygen as a waste product. This shift changed everything when it precipitated the Great Oxygenation Event. Oxygen slowly accumulated in the atmosphere, reacting with iron in the oceans, rusting the planet red, and paving the way for more complex aerobic lifeforms like our own, forever changing the course of the history of life on Earth. But that’s a story for another day.

Still, for the purple anoxygenic photosynthetic pioneers, oxygen was poison. Their dominance of the Earth ended with the Great Oxygenation Event. After that, they were forced to retreat to sulfur springs, stagnant ponds, and the deep sediments where they still survive to this day.

Stacking Microbial Mats

But here’s where it gets even more interesting to me. These purple bacteria have survived and even thrived in their microbial mats for billions of years. As oxygen levels increased and ecosystems formed layers through the water column, photosynthetic organisms evolved to utilize the remaining wavelengths. Cyanobacteria and green algae dominated the oxygen-rich surface, absorbing blue and red light for photosynthesis and reflecting green, releasing more oxygen into their environment in the process.

Beneath them, in murky or oxygen-poor zones, purple bacteria continued absorbing in the near infrared as the water column itself also attenuates the near infrared to less than 1% of the surface, further depleting the available light in their zone. They also don’t need oxygen to survive; it’s poison to them, so they can live underneath in the anoxic zone, harvesting whatever near-infrared light is available for photosynthesis.

“Purple and Green Sulfur Bacteria and Their Biomarkers” by Alatleephillips, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons — File:Purple and Green Sulfur Bacteria and Their Biomarkers.png

Below that, the green sulfur bacteria survive and thrive in yet another anoxic layer. Green sulfur bacteria possess light-harvesting chlorosomes that form self-aggregated structures, resulting in red-shifted absorption bands. This allows them to utilize light energy at greater depths than other organisms that have these chlorosomes, allowing them to take what little light remains in the water column below the purple sulfur bacteria, harvesting far-red photons that are invisible to all others.

This is how “stacking” works in microbial mats: each species sits in its own spectral niche, filtering the light and passing the leftovers down to the next. Those who find a way to use what’s left survive and thrive in the following stacked mat below.

Final Thoughts

If I had a time machine for a day, I’d love to go back with an oxygen tank and check out the possibly purple Earth. What would a sunset look like? What would the oceans look like? I can only imagine.

Cells Make Light?!?

December 17, 2025/by Scott Kildall

About 10 years ago, I worked at the Exploratorium as a New Media Exhibit Developer for a couple of years. My job involved working on a team in the East Gallery — the living and biological systems. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this job would change the course of my art-making.

One project that I got drafted into was helping to revamp the Microscope Imaging Station. This is where you could control a live microscope in the bio lab with physical controls and a monitor. At first, I was like, sure, microscopes are cool. But then, when I looked at what was in a drop of seawater, my mind was boggled.

A decade later, I purchased my own microscope. I soon found myself getting pond samples, where you can find living critters, and posting “what is this” messages to a Reddit microscopy group. There are all sorts of things happening in this microworld that are utterly fascinating.

An image from my own microscope. I’m not even sure what this is!

Biophotons

Curiosity drives research, and while driving to a nature-based art residency in Oregon a few days ago, I listened to a Radiolab episode called Spark of Life. And this spark ignited my own imagination.

The interview is with Nirosha Murugan, a Canadian biophysicist, who is building on the work of many others, but is honing in on the studies of “biophotons” — small emissions of light that all living cells naturally emit.

Murugan had been trying to understand the intricate mechanisms of biology’s lock and key systems, which seemed inefficient for transmitting information. What can cells produce that reduces time to almost zero? Light!

So, she looked back at the famous experiments done by Russian scientist Alexander Gurwitsch back in the 1920s. Gurwitsch demonstrated that when two onion roots are placed in a common plane, the frequency of cell division (mitosis) increased in the region compared to the opposite side of the second root. He called it a “mitogenetic effect”. He demonstrated that the growth was stimulated by a very weak, ultraviolet light radiation (biophotons) emitted from the first root.

All Cells Produce Light

That’s right: all cells produce light. Not very much light, just a little bit. On the order of one photon every few seconds to minutes, depending on activity. Scientists need ultra-sensitive detectors to find these, nowhere close to the $20 off-the-shelf sensors I use.

The light can even be different wavelengths, like a glowing aura from your body, though, to be clear, “clairvoyants” could never see such a thing. But the analogy still holds.

Illuminating Mitochondrial Communication

So where is this light coming from? Most of us are familiar with mitochondria, tiny organelles found inside pretty much all living cells, and they are likely the producers of this. The mitochondria are the energy producers of cells. They produce the molecule called adenosine triphosphate (ATP) that fuels everything from our nerves and muscles to the synthesis of DNA. They also share information with the nucleus of the cell, particularly about reactive oxygen species (ROS) and other reactive metabolites derived from mitochondrial metabolism.

However, what is far lesser known is that mitochondria also release ultra-weak photon emissions (UPE), biophotons, between 300 and 900 nm (i.e., from UV to near-IR). These have been reported from all kinds of cells, small organisms, and even human skin.

Image source: Van Wijk et al. (2020), Frontiers in Physiology.

Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7360823/

The Mystery of Biophotonic Emissions

We don’t know why these biophotonic emissions are happening, but they most certainly are. While some scientists allege that this is just noise, biology doesn’t expend energy simply for no reason. We just don’t yet understand its reason. I suspect that it is some sort of signaling mechanism for body regulation. Light is fast, efficient, and can encode information as frequency and wavelengths. These emissions are also happening inside the body itself.

This ability of mitochondria to emit light could explain why new physical therapies using low-intensity light therapy (LILT – lasers) or photobiomodulation (PBM) therapy are being used to treat acute and chronic musculoskeletal conditions. It’s because when you apply these low-intensity light therapies, it raises the level of ATP within the mitochondria, and photoacceptors convert the light to influence cellular functions, including gene expression, growth and proliferation, survival, and differentiation. But there’s even more these mighty mitochondria can do.

Early Cancer Detection

Murugan’s research is looking at photonic biosignatures and applications in the human body, such as distinguishing cancer cells from normally functioning ones. This, of course, would be an amazing advance in medicine: early cancer detection.

Studies show that mitochondria emit biophotons in relation to the oxidative metabolism involving Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS), which themselves have numerous fundamental signal roles in cellular processes. Biophotons also interact with microtubules, which are responsible for the rapid movements of the mitochondria.

What this means is that biophoton emission may not be simply a byproduct of biochemical processes, but instead can be linked to precise signaling pathways of ROS, microtubules, and can produce regulated biophotons within cells and neurons. The absorption of biophotons by a nearby photosensitive molecule can produce an electronically excited state, exciting nearby molecules and triggering or regulating complex signal processes. It is this ultra-weak photon emission (UPE) language of mitochondria that is being investigated across numerous studies now for use in cancer detection.

The Secret Language of Cells

Returning to my fascination with the microworld, I am curious about the cells themselves. What is the mechanism? If all living creatures have a potential light signaling mechanism, what is it regulating? Would each of us have a hidden, internal communication system? Is there a standard language?

As with many things biological, the more I learn, the more questions I have than answers, and I find this to be thrilling.

Bird Songs Are Not What You Think

December 14, 2025/by Scott Kildall

I recently watched “The Listers” (free on YouTube), an extreme bird-watching documentary, which was both hilarious and eye-opening. The main character has a revelation while he is high on weed to begin bird-watching, and joins the Big Year: an annual bird-watching competition in the United States. We watch him and his friend as they go on a #vanLife adventure, learning how to observe birds, photograph them, record their calls, and document their findings.

The viewers get a glimpse into this world of odd, obsessive characters. I’d highly recommend it.

The Big Year is a numbers game. During the calendar year, you try to find as many birds as possible in the continental U.S. The winner gets the most valuable prize ever: reputation.

Participants use technology, uploading their GPS findings to eBird, where other community members verify that, indeed, you found the bird you said you did.

But What About The Birds?

As fascinating as all that was, what struck me was how little these birders actually seemed to care about the biology of the birds themselves. Beyond whether the bird is shy or not, they didn’t seem to care about the amazing science: that many birds see in ultraviolet, the specific characteristics of each bird, or that, most amazingly, what we hear as bird songs is not at all what the birds actually hear.

The Hidden Timing of Bird Songs

Bird songs may sound like simple melodies to humans, but birds perceive these sounds in a completely different way. They can hear timing — subtle temporal shifts — in ways we cannot. Their brains process the signals more rapidly than we do, so that the beautiful bird songs we hear are only some of the encoded information.

Our brains blur sounds that happen too quickly, such as notes spaced closer than about 25 milliseconds. Birds, on the other hand, process sound at a much higher temporal resolution, about 2 ms, which is around 10 times faster than humans. It’s as if we are hearing in slow motion, compared to them.

The interpretation of bird songs also includes information on different timescales, one around 10–30 ms and another in the 500–700 ms range. This requires auditory processing to be integrated temporally at different scales so the birds can extract critical information about what the bird songs are actually saying.

The encoded information, of course, remains completely unnoticed by us, who only hear a simple melody. However, the information can include many things, such as alarm calls that convey very specific details about predators. For example, chickadees will add up to 23 more “dee” notes to warn of a smaller, more agile hawk or pygmy owl that they see as more dangerous to them based on body size and agility, compared to a slower, larger predator like that of a great horned owl that is less maneuverable in flight and less of a threat to the little chickadees. To us, it all just sounds like a generic “alarm”, but to them, they hear valuable information that allows them to react, adapt, and survive.

“Sonogram of Luscinia luscinia vs Luscinia megarhynchos, by Yu Moskalenko, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0”

Songs That Speak of Self

Many bird species use songs much like we use our own voices for recognition, distinguishing neighbors from intruders by subtle differences in pitch contour and rhythm that sound identical to human ears.

Within a population of birds, individuals learn from each other and share vocalizations to sing a common dialect within that population. This is not so different from how people in one town might develop their own phrases and dialects that other people in other towns might find different or quirky.

But just as some of us bend the rules of speech to stand out as individuals, bird researchers also found copying errors, perhaps intentional anti-conformity ones that lead to the production of novel bird song features that provide cues to the individual bird’s identity. Some of those new features may become unique signatures of that individual and may even become more culturally and reproductively ‘successful’ than others, and may increase in that local population.

Song performance itself also encodes the quality of an individual: a male that can sustain rapid, precise trills without faltering demonstrates great health and stamina, signaling his fitness to both potential mates and rivals.

Finally, the meaning birds attach to songs is practical and precise. A song is not just a song. Instead, it can mark territory, advertise health and vigor, attract a mate, or convey identity, down to whether the singer is a familiar neighbor or an intruder.

More Than Music

For us, birdsong often exists as background music to a morning walk. It’s pleasant, relaxing, and melodic. But for the birds, it’s a rich, coded, complex language with subtle cues and temporal variations that are essential to their survival and reproduction. What we call music, they experience as communication at its most urgent.

I find this stuff fascinating. Once you start noticing how layered and intricate these songs are, it’s hard not to want to dig deeper into how they work. If you want to learn more, check out Benn Jordan’s YouTube channel, which covers the specific aspect of bird calls and their perception.

I don’t know much about the general birding community, so I’m not too qualified to comment on how the regular birder engages with biology. However, what struck me in Listers was how separate the birders were from the birds, nature, and the birdsongs in so many ways. Like what humans often do, they turn it into a competition, which is fine; it can still be a source of education and entertainment. However, in doing so, they missed out on some amazing biology in their quest to upload images to the app for verification.

Dragonflies: First In Flight

December 11, 2025/by Scott Kildall

I’ve been hooked on YouTube videos about biology these days. It’s an excellent format: about 20 minutes is all you need to digest a topic. The content is often well-produced, it’s free, and personal. I don’t know why I started getting curious about Dragonflies, but I loved this one by PBS Terra.

Dragonflies, or at least their predecessors, were the first creatures that actually flew. That was only about 400 million years ago, not long in the lifespan of Earth. Until then, we were mostly a soup of microbes and viruses. That’s also fascinating, but how did we get to flight after being on land for so long?

Image credit: Dragonfly ran-384 by R. A. Nonenmacher, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Evolution and Advantages of Flight

We don’t really know, but there are many hypotheses, like so many evolutionary advantages in nature, that flight emerged slowly. One popular hypothesis, called the plural origin hypothesis or the gill or exite hypothesis, states that wings and flight likely evolved from leg-gill structures (exites) that fused with the body wall, giving insects movable, jointed wings.

At first, the wings could have simply been used to glide from place to place, perhaps for temperature regulation, or for use as camouflage or a protective shield, or for something else entirely.

But eventually, these turned into flight. Despite it being a beta version for animal flight, it is still one of the most advanced flight designs around.

Unique in the Insect World: Independent Wings

By far the majority of insects have modified or reduced one pair of wings or even mechanically coupled their fore and hind wings.

As you have probably noticed, dragonflies are unique in the insect world for having two pairs of wings (forewings and hindwings) that, unlike most insects, can be moved independently, thanks to their direct flight muscles attached to the base of each wing that most insects do not possess. Only dragonflies and damselflies have maintained their four-winged independent control for over 350 million years of evolution.

But what does that mean for the dragonflies? Previous studies showed that dragonflies’ independent wings result in a significant reduction in lift, suggesting a hindrance rather than a benefit. However, the benefits are substantial in terms of improving aerodynamic efficiency. Dragonflies achieve this by reducing up to 22% energy wasted from the wake as swirl compared with a single pair of wings, in a manner not unlike the coaxial contra-rotating helicopter rotors, which are now being investigated in the future development of biomimetic micro air vehicles.

This enables dragonflies to be highly successful aerial predators, boasting remarkable agility and endurance in flight. This gives them the speed of a plane with the control of a helicopter, allowing them to hover, assess, and scoop. They can fly at low speeds or exceed 30 miles per hour, but also stop on a dime, hover, move backward, and even fly upside down. They are true masters of the sky.

95% Predator Kill Rate

But dragonflies aren’t just amazing in flight. Their prey: mosquitoes, horseflies, and even wasps don’t stand a chance. With their exceptional vision, compound eyes with a nearly 360-degree view, predictive hunting, aerial acrobatics, motion camouflage (making them appear stationary in flight), and ability to capture prey in mid-flight, scooping them with their six legs without having to stop, they can snatch up prey with an amazing 95% success rate, virtually unheard of in the natural world.

As a sci-fi nerdy kid, I understood just how bad-ass they were. With their giant eyes and exceptional acrobatic skills, they just looked so cool! They’d appear on the scene, buzz around, and then take off. We even see the dragonfly flight design in popular culture, such as the ornithopter in Dune.

Ornithopter ship in Dune

Flying Sperm Scoopers?!

I’d sometimes see two dragonflies having sex while flying, and I thought to myself, How can they do that? It was comical, and as kids, seeing animals reproduce was funny, curious, and deconstructed sex as a hidden or shameful act.

Dragonflies often mate in flight, where the male will grasp the female’s neck with specialized claspers and form a tandem linkage where the female folds her abdomen forward to meet the male’s reproductive organ, should she choose to accept him and his genetic offerings.

Why mate in flight? It shows off their acrobatic abilities, demonstrating their flight skills and making them more appealing as a genetic partner. Some males will even continue to fly with the female afterwards, known as ”contact guarding,” to prevent other males from approaching.

Still, some dragonflies have yet another trick up their sleeve, er, abdomen. When mating, before passing his own sperm, the male uses specialized penile structures, backward-facing hooks or barbs on their penises, to scoop out or displace sperm from rivals, so that they have the best chance of fertilizing the eggs.

Flying sperm scoopers? Badass indeed.

Why Dragflies Endure The Test of Time

Dragonflies have been buzzing around for hundreds of millions of years, but they still feel futuristic to me. Watching them hover, dart, and outmaneuver anything is like seeing a perfect blend of fighter jet and sci-fi spaceship. Maybe that’s why they’ve always caught my imagination, from childhood curiosity to late-night YouTube rabbit holes. They aren’t just prehistoric relics of a distant past; they’re living proof that some designs are perfect enough that they just don’t need updating.

Marvelous Maggot Sensila

December 8, 2025/by Scott Kildall

Until a couple of months ago, I thought of maggots only as disgusting creatures. I would unexpectedly discover them somewhere odd, like a backpack where I had left an apple a couple of weeks ago. And ick! And then they’d turn into flies that are buzzing everywhere. It felt like a horror movie.

How Composting Maggots Changed My Mind

While that experience might ring true, once I learned about Composting Maggots, when I was in Bali earlier this year as part of the Digital Naturalism (Dinacon) conference, it was a whole different story.

The ones in question are the Black Soldier Fly, and unlike our American houseflies, these don’t land on our food and eat it. They are nourished mainly by what they ate as larvae (maggots). The composting maggots are far more efficient than earthworms, eating things that worms cannot digest, like fried chicken, and at a much faster rate. They are also more efficient than our houseflies and blowflies, which produce a much worse smell and can spread pathogens and disease. Humans are even producing black soldier fly larvae on an industrial scale as a viable food source for livestock, pets, and aquaculture. These composting maggots are genuinely amazing, and they have changed the way I view them forever.

Data-Sonification of Composting Maggots

I even did a data-sonification of the composting maggots, which I featured on my new YouTube channel called BioSymphonic.

The Sensational Sensilia of Maggots

But now I want to get into the sensory organs of maggots, which are non-descriptively named Sensilia. They are tiny external sensory hairs and knobs found all over the body of maggots.

Studies on fruit fly larvae found that the body contains numerous individual sensilia all over the body. The sensilia are often mechanosensory, looking at the physical movement of the hairs. Still, others possess chemical, thermal (heat), gustation (taste), and osmosensation — the ability to sense changes in osmotic pressure.

However, the head of the fruit fly maggots (their pseudocephalon) contains four sense organs, each of which contains multiple different sensilla. This suggests cross-talk in detecting environmental cues because they contain different sensory inputs.

The individual sensilia then relay this information to the sense organs and nervous system, triggering the maggot or fly to react with the most appropriate physiological or behavioral response. This provides us with valuable insights into how the maggots perceive their surroundings and how they may respond.

Maggot Sensila

Klann, M., Schacht, M. I., Benton, M. A., & Stollewerk, A. (2021). Distribution and morphology of selected external sensilla in T. castaneum larvae [Figure 1]. In Functional analysis of sense organ specification in the Tribolium castaneum larva reveals divergent mechanisms in insects. BMC Biology, 19:22. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-021-00948-y BioMed Central+1

Metamorphosis: The Maggot’s Second Act

Sensational sensilla are not the maggot’s only fascinating feature. Maggots first transform into pupae, a transformation between the immature and mature stage, which then transform into flies. Interestingly, these are technically the same organism — they have the exact same DNA — but they look completely different. Their bodies change, and their senses are completely different.

It’s the genetic expression of that DNA that changes, based on environmental factors. This is a stark reminder to us that we are not fixed beings, but rather a combination of our DNA and how it expresses itself in our particular environment. Like maggots, we are also not hard-coded creatures; we are flexible and we can be malleable.

It’s in that DNA that allows flies to have compound eyes, sophisticated odor sensors, and taste sensors. Even though they are tiny in comparison, they become more relatable in some sort of primitive way than a maggot can. I think about Jeff Goldblum slowly transforming into a fly. It appears in popular culture, like when Ric Ocasek’s head appears on a 1984 Cars video or lyrics to The Human Fly by the Cramps.

A Maggot’s World Is Not Our World

But maggots? No eyes, no feeling (at least as far as humans are concerned) of animal agency. They seem entirely other. There is also never just one maggot; always a squirming mass. This is actually because their writhing groupings help retain moisture and break down food more efficiently. Their modus operandi is to burrow into decaying matter, stay protected and moist in that squirming mass, and just eat away.

Perhaps this is where our feeling of disgust comes from; much like the bug-like insects of Starship Troopers, we have trouble relating to the physical form. They are tiny, moist, and squirmy. They feel alien and off-putting.

Yet, their simple senses bear examination. Imagine having such fine sensors for moving through matter, a rich world of decaying matter that surrounds your entire body. In that decay is your life, without true eyes or ears, just touch, taste, and the delicious pull of decay. Exposed air is secondary.

We Don’t Know What We Can’t Sense

I think now of the fish joke, infamously told by the now deceased David Foster Wallace:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

The point is that we don’t know what we can’t sense. I’d like to be reincarnated as a maggot for just a day. My eyes and ears would wither away, and I could feel the rich world of decay through this sensilia. Just a day is all I’d want. I’d return with that experience of sensing moist decay as a delicious medium.

Spidey-sensing Crickets

December 5, 2025/by Scott Kildall

Once again, after reading Ed Yong’s Immense World, I was inspired. This time, it was the classic predator-prey relationship, a sort of arms race of sensory evolution. I began thinking about a specific relationship between the wolf spider and the wood cricket, and it stuck with me. The super-sensing of the wood cricket is utterly remarkable.

The wolf spider, which is similar to the jumping spider in terms of relying on eyesight, hunts its prey, including crickets, by sneaking up on them and chasing them down. They are bigger, stronger, and faster, and so they will often win their fights.

The Power of Cerci

However, the crickets possess a few evasive mechanisms of their own in this arms race of sensory evolution. The most compelling one is their cerci, a pair of spines that sense air vibrations.

Not just by a little bit, but a lot. I mean, they sense everything.

The cerci are small sensory organs that are covered with hundreds of tiny filiform hairs, which can detect even the most minor molecular vibrations caused by the slightest amount of disturbance in the air, on the level of anything that comes close to it.

Despite knowing about the cerci for so long, researchers are still studying how predators affect the survival and behaviour of the wood cricket (Nemobius sylvestris) by exposing different cricket life stages to three conditions: aerial predators only (“air”), wolf spiders only (“spider”), and no predators (“control”). Early-stage juveniles showed the highest predation, particularly from wolf spiders, which are abundant in their natural habitats. Those juveniles hid more frequently, staying off leaf surfaces to avoid detection; a response not observed in the air-only or control treatments. Young wood crickets don’t just hide at random; they read the danger level in real-time using their cerci, and they change their behavior to stay alive.

When the spider gets close, the cricket jumps in some direction, well out of the way of the spider. It works almost all of the time. In short, you can’t sneak up on this cricket.

Filiform mechanosensory hairs on the cerci of Acheta domesticus.
Heys, J. J., Rajaraman, P. K., Gedeon, T., & Miller, J. P. (2012). A Model of Filiform Hair Distribution on the Cricket Cercus. PLoS ONE, 7(10), e46588. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0046588

Nano-Sensing-Maximalization

What stuck with me was the nano-sensing of the cricket. It’s a special built-in superpower. Along the tips of their cerci, crickets have rows of microscopic filiform hairs that act like ultra-sensitive motion detectors. Each hair is tuned to respond to the slightest air movements down to the size of molecules, so a cricket can “feel” a predator’s approach before it even touches the ground or rustles a leaf.

As Yong points out, this is the rare case of maximalization, where the sensors, the cerci, can’t possibly be any more sensitive than they are without being overwhelmed by molecular noise from the air itself. In other words, crickets have reached an evolutionary endpoint with these structures, a perfect balance between performance and practicality that we simply cannot improve upon.

This maximal sensitivity comes with profound survival benefits. A cricket doesn’t need to see a spider stalking it nearby; it simply senses the faint shift of air as the predator moves and responds with an immediate, life-saving jump. It’s a reminder that natural selection doesn’t just shape strength or speed; sometimes it hones perception to near-perfection, allowing a small, seemingly fragile creature to persist in a world full of threats.

Custom Electronics to Help Sense the World as a Cricket Would

My own work in creating custom electronics sensing boards often stems from what is already available. Although I haven’t (yet) put it to practical use, I created a “wind sensor” board that detects very small disturbances in the wind above it. It’s a lot like how a cricket would sense the world, only on a human scale.

You wave your hand above the sensor, and it captures just the smallest movement. It’s like an anemometer, only a solid-state sensor, with some sort of exponential sensing curve so that it can pick up both small movements and larger changes, but I’m generally focused on the smaller ones.

While I’m not sure when I will make a BioSymphonic installation from this, I am pretty sure that something will arise from it. Maybe many of these in a field, picking up the micro-movements of wind, detecting small changes like so many organisms that we share the world with do on daily basis. These are ones outside of our coarse perception, which we don’t need, but nevertheless offer a fine window into hidden biological realms.

Feeling the World Before It Happens

What fascinates me most about the wood cricket is how it survives not by strength or speed but by tuning into the invisible, pushing its cerci to the very edge of what physics allows. That’s survival through perception; the art of feeling the world so acutely that danger is avoided before it arrives.

When I build my own wind-sensing boards, my sensors may never be as elegant or efficient as the cricket’s, but they let me glimpse what it might be like to live in that hidden layer of information beyond our human senses. Maybe that’s the lesson here: there’s a whole dimension of the world we can’t normally feel, but life all around us uses it every day.

Eight Eyes Good

December 2, 2025/by Scott Kildall

On a recent large campout, I met a new friend (Andy) who was equally fascinated by the hidden world of biology as I am. We talked about many things, including animal perception. He was both excited and repulsed by the eyes of spiders, especially with the ones that don’t use webs, such as Jumping Spiders and Hunting Spiders. Unlike the Orb Weavers, which rely on web vibrations to sense the physical world around them, these arachnids use a complex system of visual perception to hunt their prey.

Most spiders have eight eyes. Who knew? Well, apparently, just about everyone.

Jumping Spider Eyes.jpg, photo by Opoterser, Summer 2007. Licensed under CC BY 3.0.

Eyes of A Hunter: The Vision of Jumping Spiders

When I got home, I started reading about spider vision, especially in jumping spiders. Unlike the web-weaving spiders, who passively capture their prey, these spiders are active hunters, operating like a cat, where they stalk their prey and then pounce on them.

Much has been written about spider vision, as covered in articles such as this one, but I’ll summarize some of the key points.

How Eight Eyes Work Together

Jumping spiders don’t just have eight eyes; they have eight eyes that collaborate in real time to give them a nearly 360-degree field of view.

What’s so remarkable is that their eyesight is exceptionally sharp for their tiny size. Their two very large forward-facing principal eyes act like their telephoto lenses that sit on moveable tubes that swivel independently, providing sharp, colorful, high-resolution, detailed vision in a narrow “X-shaped” zone. Meanwhile, the other three smaller sets of eyes continuously detect and monitor black-and-white motion across a wide field, including behind them, like our peripheral vision, fuzzy and indistinct.

Together, the system works much like our own central and peripheral vision, which only gives us a limited 210-degree field of view. We have to use mirrors on our cars to cover our blind spots, but a jumping spider carries its own built-in 360-degree surveillance system of the world around it.

Diagram of the approximate visual fields of a jumping spider (Phidippus), as viewed from above, by David E. Hill. Originally published as Figure 6 in Peckhamia 83.1 (2010): 1–103. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Empathy Through Vision

While I found all of this reading to be utterly fascinating, it begged a deeper question, and the one that I think about a lot, which is how do we develop a true understanding, actual empathy with another animal that perceives the world so differently, but not that differently than ours?

Where I landed, and I usually shy away from technical solutions, would be a virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) experience, where a headset would feed information into a constructed 3D world or the actual world directly into your eyes, simulating what the spider would see. It’d be fascinating to “see” as the jumping spider does. We’d still, of course, have our own visual mechanism with our weak two-eyed vision to contend with, so it wouldn’t be how a spider actually perceives the world, but with the proper gear, we could get a 360 feed into our brain.

At first, it might feel like sensory overload, similar to trying to watch eight screens at once and still follow each of the eight stories. But our brains are remarkably adaptable; we could start stitching those eight feeds into something coherent and relatable.

Beyond vision, imagine that we could sense subtle vibrations in the web like an Orb Weaver, or like Jumping Spiders that can see ultraviolet patterns that our own eyes are incapable of seeing. The simple act of trying to live inside their sensory world, even briefly, might allow us to perceive genuine empathy, as we are doing so in a way that begins to shift our brains towards understanding how the spider’s brain works to perceive its world.

Vision as a Bridge to the Creatures We Share the World With

And that’s what I think about, with my own artwork, and how to use technology to create some sort of empathy. As we understand the perils of the anthropomorphic view of the world, empathy with other creatures who share our planet seems like a good starting place.

And vision offers a natural bridge; it’s how we identify and orient ourselves, how we map meaning onto the world that we see around us. To try to borrow another species’ way of seeing is not just an experiment in perception; it’s a way of loosening the boundaries of our own perspectives. What would it do to our sense of wonder if we could sense our world the way a spider does, with the overlapping vision of eight eyes, the ultraviolet patterns our eyes cannot detect, or the subtle tremors detected in the webs that give physical cues to the location of prey and environmental variables?

The very act of trying to see through another set of eyes asks us to admit our limits and imagine more generously, and begin relating differently to the creatures that we share our world with.

Good Vibrations

November 29, 2025/by Scott Kildall

When I was a kid, I’d play with my friends in our little clubhouse in the backyard, which was a dirt crawlspace behind the shed and the fence that bordered our neighbors. All sorts of creepy-crawlies were back there. My curiosity won over any sense of disgust, and I’d pick up rolly pollies, pincher bugs (earwigs), and, as it went, the many spiders that roamed around back there. I let them crawl on my hands and arms, dispelling any latent arachnophobia I may have had.

I watched Orb Weavers spin their web and capture so many unlucky flies. The web structure fascinated me. I’d slowly disassemble the web, strand by strand, and watch them rebuild their prey nets. It wasn’t any sort of malicious intent, but rather a drive to understand how these spider webs worked. I don’t think the science was quite there when I was a kid, on understanding how the spiders used their web’s vibrations, but I now do.

A few years ago, while reading Ed Yong’s “Immense World”, the book that changed everything for me, I found some answers. And since then, I’ve conducted further research on the topic.

The Sightless Plight of the Orb Weaver

It turns out that the eyesight of Orb Weavers is pretty much nil. Since they can only see shadows and motion, but not any detail, they use their web itself as a sort of external sensory organ, with the vibration of the threads acting as input to both Slit sensilla and Trichobothria.

The slit sensilla are isolated microscopic cracks or groups of cracks arranged in parallel arrays called lyriform organs, which are found in the spider’s exoskeleton, and are used to sense substrate vibrations. Trichobothria are tiny sensory hairs that pick up air currents and vibrations, so that these spiders can determine if the vibrations are coming from the air around them or from their web, allowing them to sense the movement of prey or changes in the wind, providing advantages for predatory behaviour and survival.

To Catch A Fly

When a fly gets caught in the sticky web, it struggles and creates chaotic vibrations. The spider uses its slit sensilla and trichobothria to recognize it as a fresh catch or to distinguish it from environmental sounds, such as wind, or movements in its support structure (trees, fences, etc.). Not only can it distinguish environmental vs prey cues, but the spider can even distinguish between a small gnat (characterized by high frequency and light amplitude) and a larger insect (characterized by lower frequency and stronger amplitude). If the victim is too small, it may not be worth eating, and if it’s too large, it could present a problem for the spider, so that’s also valuable information worth knowing.

The Spider Centers Itself

As you may have noticed, these spiders sit at the center of their web and place their legs on separate radial lines, each one acting like a separate vibrational input channel. When a flying insect gets stuck, its vibrations reach some legs sooner than others, and with greater or lesser strength. The timing and amplitude of the vibration allow the spider to rapidly triangulate the location of its prey: stronger vibrations mean they are closer to the center, and weaker ones mean it is further away.

The spider will then assess what to do, and if it is going to eat the prey, it knows exactly what it might be and where to go to get its meal.

“Orb Weaver Spider’s Web” by Fir0002 / Flagstaffotos, licensed under CC BY-NC 3.0

The Magical Web: A Finely Tuned Musical Instrument Used For Extended Cognitive Learning

The web of a spider is like an instrument, and like any good instrument, it needs to be properly tuned. Orb weavers adjust the tension of their silk lines, not with tuning pegs, but rather by cutting and reattaching lines. Tight threads act like guitar strings, carrying specific vibrations quickly and clearly, while looser threads dampen vibrations, filtering out wind noise and even biasing the web toward certain prey sizes according to the spider’s preference.

They pluck their own web to determine its condition and adjust their web under windy circumstances to filter out excess environmental noise, allowing them to continue honing in on their prey.

The web itself is like a cybernetic extension of the spider, with systems of control and feedback, not entirely unlike our own cognitive abilities, which utilize a centralized nervous system. Spiders like Orb Weavers are not cognitively limited but rather show a wide diversity of learning behaviors from habituation to contextual learning. They can rapidly adjust their behavior in response to environmental inputs, possessing a form of adaptive intelligence tied to their unique vibrational sensory mechanism, which can detect distance, size of prey, number of prey, and other valuable information in the web of life.

Guitar Solos For Love and Life

The web is also used for courtship. The much smaller male orb weavers “strum” specific patterns on the female’s web to avoid being mistaken for prey and eaten (though sometimes the females deliberately eat them anyhow…oops!). The female can tell it’s not a random prey struggling because the rhythm is unique. Each species has its own pattern. And, in some cases, males will strum unique patterns to distinguish themselves from one another, kind of like who can play the best guitar solo in hopes of mating and not ending up becoming a meal.

Spider Hackers

Finally, like anything on the World Wide Web, there are also spider hackers. Some spiders, such as kleptoparasites like Argyrodes, deliberately pluck threads in short, irregular bursts that mimic a struggling insect, tricking the host into rushing over. Then, they use stealth and quick raids to steal its captured prey, some silk, and, in some cases, they will even ambush the Orb Weaver itself.

Final Thoughts

From the childhood curiosity of poking around a backyard shed filled with bugs, and watching spiders spin to modern science revealing the complexity of sound vibrations, the humble Orb Weaver reminds us that the world is filled with subtle signals as long as we know how to tune into them. Their webs are not just traps but finely tuned instruments used for survival, communication, and even love. This shows us that life can be played like music, intricately, risky, and astonishingly precise. Good vibrations, indeed.

Space Spiders

November 26, 2025/by Scott Kildall

I love reading sci-fi, not because I’m an obsessive nerd, but because the ideas I glean from those books inspire me. I recently finished Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky after it had been sitting in the virtual dust of my Kindle for a few years.

Wow.

The premise is that humanity is destroying itself, sending the last gasp of civilization-builders into space. In the final act of terraforming, one such ship intends to launch a bunch of monkeys onto a lush planet along with a nanovirus to accelerate their evolution into an advanced species by many centuries instead of millions of years.

However, there is an accident, and the human ship explodes, the monkeys overheat and die, and the virus instead infects the spiders roaming about the vessel. These arachnids land, evolve over generations, develop language, grow to be huge — think Shelob from Lord of the Rings — and form complex societies.

Still from the film The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (New Line Cinema, 2003), Fair Use

Finding Empathy With Spiders

The challenge here, and returning to the notions of the BioSymphonic, is relatability. How do you develop empathy with giant spiders when their sensory mechanisms are so different from ours?

Tchaikovsky first accomplishes this by describing generations of spiders with the same names. Bianca, Portia, and Fabian. Bianca is an inventor; Portia is a leader; and Fabian an upstart male who can be useful. The larger female spiders dominate the males, and they struggle for some sort of equality.

These roles are similar to many spider species in real life. We have all heard of the infamous female Black Widow spiders. While they don’t always cannibalize the males after mating, as is commonly believed, they do occasionally eat smaller males ones for sustenance.

Webs, Signals, and Silent Speech

But where it gets really amazing is the differences in how spiders and humans communicate. Spiders can’t hear, but they can sense vibrations in their webs through slit sensillae, small grooves on their legs that deform when exposed to vibrations, along with hair-like setae on their legs. This allows spiders to “hear” low-frequency vibrations better than we can.

In the book, the spiders communicate by stamping their legs and waving their palps in complex patterns. Different vibrations may communicate alarm, courtship rituals, or define territorial boundaries. Different species of spiders use different patterns that are their own unique language, much like humans have different languages.

So, the city architecture evolves into using webs as communication lines. It is soft, sticky, and organic. Instead of hard machines and metal wires, spiders aim for the biological. They use ants to do their bidding.

Pheromones and chemicals drive their evolution rather than factories and computers. Females release pheromones that attract males, and the males can differentiate between adult and subadult females, and even their current feeding status, to help find the perfect mate. Between females, adult females avoid the pheromones of other adult females, presumably to reduce sexual competition.

The Cold-Blooded Edge

Spiders are ectothermic (cold-blooded), not endothermic. They do not generate their own body heat to maintain a constant temperature like mammals or birds do. Instead, their body temperature changes with the surrounding environment.

This gives them a huge advantage when it comes to energy expenditure since they don’t have to maintain a constant body temperature. This means they can survive on less food than we warm-blooded creatures can, allowing them to thrive in environments where resources are scarce. As you might imagine, this becomes a significant advantage when they eventually go into space.

Parallels With Humanity

Like with humans, the spiders fight wars amongst themselves. They struggle with diseases and with other evolved creatures (not so much like humans). They are surprisingly human in their frustrations and anxieties around self-preservation. Their intelligence and problem-solving rely on group coordination. Spiders die frequently and without the pathos of humans, though there is still grief, too. It’s odd.

However, unlike humans, they don’t form attachments to their babies. So, we don’t have that overplayed rescue plot, where the mother-father character saves their kid. That was refreshing.

Where Did Spiders Come From?

Although I had trouble relating to the many Fabians or Biancas, I did care about their survival as a species. I’ve always had a healthy respect for spiders, and this made me reconsider their evolution. Where did they come from?

It was long believed that spiders, like insects, all evolved on land, though it was never known exactly what they evolved from. However, new fossil brain evidence of an ancient sea creature called Mollisonia symmetrica that lived 515 million and 480 million years ago has turned this theory, well, backward.

symmetrica are part of the group of arthropods that includes insects and crustaceans. But the issue is that M. symmetrica has a brain unlike any other arthropod in its group; it’s arranged ‘backward’, much like that of a different group of arthropods, the modern spiders. M. symmetrica also had a segmented body like a scorpion, a close relative of spiders, and six pairs of legs. By 400 million years ago, we have fossil evidence of true spiders on land. So, from sea to land, to space, apparently, there are no limits to where spiders can go.

No Spoilers

The less-interesting plot of another human generational ship plods alongside. More relatable, and of course, the two storylines eventually merge. No concrete spoilers, only vague ones. But when they do, it’s good stuff.

The Corn Plant and the Wasp

November 23, 2025/by Scott Kildall

The corn plant (Zea mays) is a tall, grass-like crop that provides us with sweet corn, tortillas, popcorn, and more of our staple foods. First domesticated in southwestern Mexico nearly 10,000 years ago, its symbol of abundance now adorns many brands. But did you know that the corn plant is also intelligent, in its own unique way? It senses its environment and responds with precision. In fact, when under attack, it mounts a defense and even summons reinforcements in the form of wasps.

Corn Plant Male Flowers
H. Zell, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Predators vs Plant Defenses

Caterpillars, particularly the beet armyworm (Spodoptera exigua), are among corn’s most vicious predators. They chew through the leaves, reducing the plant’s ability to photosynthesize. During heavy infestations, armyworms can even damage the ears, chewing through the husks into the tender kernels inside, causing massive crop losses. But corn isn’t just a defenseless plant, unable to escape or fight back, as some of us may believe. It fights back using chemical signals in the form of airborne messages known as volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

Beet Armyworm Caterpillar

By Unknown author – Nicotine Keeps Leaf-Loving Herbivores at Bay. PLoS Biol 2/8/2004: e250. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0020250, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1374967

Aroma as Armor: Meet VOCs

VOCs are the plant world’s version of pheromones. Many plants emit these naturally to attract pollinators, deter pests, or even communicate with neighboring plants. For example, linalool is a common floral volatile found in lavender, basil, and coriander. It plays a dual role: attracting pollinators like bees and butterflies while also deterring herbivores and inhibiting the growth of certain fungi and bacteria. It’s part of the plant’s front-line defense and is a major ingredient in the scent profile of flowers and herbs.

Another powerful VOC is (Z)-3-hexenyl acetate, which gives freshly cut grass its distinctive smell. This VOC is part of a group of Green Leaf Volatiles (GLVs) named after that distinctive smell, and this group is the most widely employed chemical defense in the plant kingdom. Produced within seconds of leaf damage, this compound warns nearby plants of an attack, prompting them to boost their own defenses.

However, VOCs are rarely emitted alone; they’re often part of complex, species-specific chemical cocktails that carry nuanced meaning in the plant-insect world. Despite their abundance, we cannot even sense them without complex laboratory experiments, specific to each compound.

Invisible Chemical Defenses

Plants, as well as trees, have a whole world of chemical signaling that is invisible to us. As I walk through the wilds, looking at leaves, I often imagine clouds of plant pheromones wafting through the sky, communicating with anyone with the knowledge and skills to listen.

When corn undergoes some form of mechanical damage alone, it emits those GLVs to warn its neighbors of an attack so they can mount their chemical defenses. However, that is not the only trick up its sleeve.

Corn has a special mechanism when it’s being chewed on by caterpillars. Not only does it detect mechanical wounding from the chewing, but it also recognizes specific molecules in the caterpillar’s saliva, like fatty acid–amino acid conjugates (FACs) such as volicitin (N-(17-hydroxylinolenoyl)-l-glutamine). Researchers have analyzed this oral secretion and curiously discovered that the fatty acid portion of volicitin is derived from the plant, while the 17-hydroxylation reaction and the conjugation with glutamine are carried out by the caterpillar using its glutamine.

These compounds act as herbivore fingerprints. Once the plant detects those insect-modified, plant-derived fatty acids, the corn plant initiates a response, which triggers the production of some very specific VOCs.

Airborne SOS: How Plants Call for Backup

One of the key VOCs released is (E)-4,8-dimethyl-1,3,7-nonatriene, better known as DMNT. This compound doesn’t repel the caterpillars directly. Instead, it acts like a distress beacon, which specifically alerts parasitic wasps.

DMNT Chemical Diagram

By Scott Kildall

Wasps (Cotesia marginiventris) are natural enemies of caterpillars. But they have their own tricks up their sleeves. Not only can they detect VOCs, they can identify DMNT specifically. Studies have shown that they can distinguish between all the VOCs to differentiate between mechanical damage vs. herbivore attack and even determine which plants with a heavier herbivore load to target for the best success.

So, the wasps follow the scent of DMNT right to the source. When they find a caterpillar feeding on the corn plant, they inject it with eggs. The wasp larvae hatch and consume the caterpillar from the inside, neutralizing the threat and giving the corn a chance to recover. A perfect example of just one of the many mutually beneficial relationships that exist in nature between seemingly unlikely allies.

How Corn Defends Itself

Equally impressively, neighboring corn plants can detect these VOCs and prime their own defenses before they’re attacked. These “eavesdropping” plants produce anti-herbivore compounds of their own, such as proteinase inhibitors that interfere with insect digestion, or increased levels of defensive enzymes and toxins, which may be toxic to the insects or just irritate or repel them. By preparing in advance, they reduce the damage when a caterpillar finally shows up.

Final Thoughts

So the next time you drive past a cornfield, remember: it’s not just a quiet sea of green, it’s filled with silent alarms, chemical messengers, and strategic alliances. That simple crop of corn is in reality a biological battlefield where plants actively recruit their allies to outwit their predators, to the benefit of both. So, plants, it turns out, aren’t passive at all. They’re just using a language we are only beginning to understand.

Color Isn’t Real

November 20, 2025/by Scott Kildall

I tell this to my college-level design students in the first class. They have been well-trained in color theory and are about to go into the professional world, where every color has meaning. To humans, that is.

I don’t say this to make a smug scientific point, but rather to emphasize a subjective way of looking at the world in front of us, both in terms of intersubjectivity of humans, and also between species themselves. Our experience with color seems so natural, so obvious, that we rarely question it. But the truth is, all species, including humans, perceive the world only as our biology allows us to see it.

The Spectrum is Real. Color is Interpretation

What is real are the trillions of photons all oscillating at different frequencies. Our brains detect these different oscillating frequencies and map them out to be what we perceive as colors.

Humans have trichromatic vision, with color receptors (cones) in our eyes that can “see” the colors blue, red, and green based on their wavelength. We can see yellow, purple, orange, and all the other colors from a combination of those three receptors.

However, this means that we only see a tiny slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, specifically the visible spectrum, which ranges from 400 to 700 nanometers (nm). Outside of that narrow range, there are also gamma rays (<0.01nm), X-rays (0.01 – 10nm), ultraviolet (UV) (100-400nm), infrared (700nm to 1mm), microwaves (1mm to 1m), and radio waves which partially overlap with microwaves from 1mm to 1km.

“Electromagnetic Spectrum” image sourced from GeeksforGeeks

Within the visible spectrum, blue or violet corresponds to photons that oscillate in the 400-500nm range, green in the 500-565nm range, yellow in the 565-590nm range, orange in the 590-625nm range, and finally red in the 625-700nm range. So, what we perceive as blue, red, green, and yellow are just different wavelengths of visible light that our cones can detect, which are processed by our brains to see as color.

Bees Don’t See Red, But They See More

Bees don’t see red at all. Like humans, they have trichromatic vision, but theirs is different. They have sensors for blue and green, not red, but they also see in the ultraviolet range (100-400nm).

Many flowers have evolved visual patterns in the UV spectrum that act like landing strips or target guides for pollinators such as bees; patterns that are completely invisible to us unless we use special cameras. So while a daisy may look plain white to us, a bee sees vibrant colors, like a well-lit runway inviting them to come in for a landing.

“White Gerbera Daisy in Ultraviolet Light” by Brett Zimmerman

This inability of bees to see red is why most red flowers are pollinated mainly by birds that have tetrachromatic vision, which enables them to see UV, blue, green, and red. Still, some red flowers are also visited frequently by bees. Why? It’s because those red flowers also emit UV that bees detect, inviting them to visit despite the red they don’t see.

Reindeer in the Arctic: Seeing What Snow Conceals

Another striking example of ultraviolet perception comes from reindeer, who live in the Arctic, where the landscape is covered in snow and bathed in diffuse light for much of the year.

Reindeer are dichromats, and mainly see in the shorter blue wavelengths, but not red, which is why a hunter’s orange vest doesn’t stand out to them like it does to us. However, they also see in the ultraviolet light range, which helps them survive. This ability is aided by a second type of receptor called rods, which work exceptionally well in the low-light conditions of the Arctic.

Reindeer eyes are adapted to detect UV wavelengths around 320–400 nanometers, which is also the wavelength of light that bounces off lichen (their primary winter food), urine trails, and even the fur of predators like wolves. In visible light, as we see things, all of this blends into the snowy background. But in UV, these features stand out in high contrast, like hidden ink under a blacklight.

This ability gives reindeer an evolutionary advantage: they can find food, track herd members, and detect threats in a world that looks nearly featureless to us.

Reindeer vision in action: Lichen absorbs ultraviolet light and appears dark against UV-reflective snow, making it easier for reindeer to spot food and predators in Arctic conditions.

Image credit: Nathaniel Dominy / Dartmouth College via EurekAlert!

Zebrafish Light Their Murky World in Near-Infrared

A case study on the other end of the spectrum is the zebrafish, which is a small freshwater creature that lives in murky rivers and flooded rice paddies. Unlike bees, which can see shorter wavelengths than we can, zebrafish may be able to see just beyond our visible spectrum, into the longer wavelengths in the near-infrared (NIR) range. Scientists have discovered that zebrafish respond neurologically to light in the 750–850 nanometer range, which are frequencies we can’t see, but are abundant in their freshwater environment, especially when visible light is scattered by sediment suspended in murky waters.

Zebrafish (Danio rerio)—commonly used in vision and neuroscience research.

Image credit: Photo by Azul, public domain (CC0), via GoodFreePhotos.com

This near-infrared sensitivity likely gives them a visual edge in muddy or low-light conditions. What appears dull and brown to us would have contrast to them, revealing predators and prey. Their world is tinted not by red or blue, but by light we can’t even perceive. Another example of an animal with a unique ability to detect wavelengths outside the visible spectrum, giving them an evolutionary advantage that helps them survive.

Final Thoughts

The world is made of electromagnetic radiation spanning a vast spectrum of wavelengths, of which we only “see” the tiniest portion. Even then, what we see is just what the cones in our eyes can detect, and how our brains process it. This means that color isn’t a fixed property of objects, as we are taught with language, such as “the green chair,” but rather, a subjective experience that is species-specific and often tied to ecological need and enhanced by evolution. Therefore, every organism on Earth “sees” its own version of reality, not reality itself, since the reality of vision and color is entirely subjective.

Dogs Live in the Past

November 17, 2025/by Scott Kildall

We are well aware that dogs have an ultra-keen sense of smell. They’re sniffing everything: the floor, plants, and most awkwardly, the crotch of your houseguest.

But each inhale they take is more than just a smell. It’s a massive download of data. When we look at how dogs process scent, we quickly see how differently they perceive the world around them.

A Nose That Knows: Dogs Vs Humans

Dogs can detect about 50 times the number of scents that a human can, with an olfactory brain center that is about 40 times larger than that of humans. They can also smell things up to 2 miles away and detect individual ingredients in a stew.

Figure: Olfactory Brain Center Comparison, Human vs. Dog

As humans, we can only imagine what it might be like to be a dog. If you try really hard, you can put yourself in the paws of a dog, and imagine walking through the city streets or along nature trails with bionic noses. On a breezy day, you could detect specific people up to 2 miles away.

Canines sniff through each nostril separately, triangulating the position of anything emitting odors, building a “scent map” of the world, just as we do with vision. These maps would be indistinct, clouds of markers that shift with the wind and fade with time. The world of scent is fuzzy and uncertain, unlike our sharp vision, which is relatively crisp. Yet, despite the fuzziness, if we were like dogs, we could find a child lost in the woods, where we dropped our keys out on a hike, or what we did with our precious phone, even from far away. That’s more than we can say for our sight.

Built For Smelling: Dog Scent-Detecting Physiology

The dog’s nose has a complex scent-detecting physiology. Inside, it’s filled with thin, curled bones called turbinates that create a huge surface area that’s lined with smell-sensitive cells. When a dog sniffs, the air is split into two paths: one for breathing and one just for smelling, so that the breathing doesn’t interfere with their superior scent-detection. They also exhale air through special slits in the sides of their nose to stir up more scent particles. The air inhaled for smelling is deposited in the olfactory region, where it accumulates without being expelled. Their brains are wired to process these deposited smells in incredible detail. This helps them recognize people, animals, and other smelly things in ways we can’t, with a memory of that scent that lasts a long time.

Figure: Dog nasal cavity with turbinates, key to scent detection. Adapted from Buzek et al., 2022, Animals, 12(4), 517. CC BY 4.0 (https://doi.org/10.3390/ani12040517).

The Incredible Things That Dogs Can Smell

We are all familiar with drug-sniffing dogs from TV shows and the food-sniffing beagles at international airports, as well as search and rescue dogs that find people lost in the wilderness. But their sense of smell goes far beyond that. An increasing number of studies are being conducted using medical detection dogs to identify infectious and non-infectious diseases. While those studies suffer from a lack of standardization in training and data collection, their success rates range from 19% to 99%. They demonstrated that dogs can detect certain cancers (including colon, lung, bladder, breast, ovarian, and prostate), seizures, and diabetes, as well as infectious diseases like malaria, bovine viral diarrhea, and bacterial infections. Imagine going to Dr. Rex the Dog for a diagnosis!

What Dogs Can’t See

However, when we compare their sense of sight, we quickly see they can’t see like we can. Dogs, like most mammals, are dichromats and can’t see the red colors that humans can. This is why, incidentally, the orange color of a tiger appears camouflaged to their prey even though it does not to us. But we’ll save that discussion for an article on camouflage and the color spectrum.

Figure adapted from Fennell et al. (2019), Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 16(154), 20190183. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2019.0183

While the dog’s visual world is less rich in terms of wavelengths of light, they can still detect motion much better than we can. The flick of a squirrel’s tail pops out to them much more than it does to us.

Dogs Can Smell The Past

With their poor visual acuity, I started thinking about how a dog moves through the world, with this incredibly enhanced sense of smell, and imagined what it would be like to be a dog. I realized this: dogs can smell the past.

It would be like walking into a room and seeing what happened two weeks ago. Like faint after images of a friend visiting the house last week, with visual images overlaid on top of one another, blurring the boundaries of time. Canines would have an entirely different perception of time than we do, like living in the past while being in the present.

While some people think dogs can’t tell time, they actually “smell time.” Search and rescue dogs are well-known for tracking the scent of missing people. But when they find a trail, how do they know which way to go? They sniff in each direction and follow the strongest scent. Even if we could somehow smell their trail, we could never detect which is just barely weaker, yet dogs know not to follow it because it’s of the past.

However, dogs can also be trained to locate the past. How far back can dogs smell? We don’t yet know. Cadaver dogs used in criminal investigations have even helped archeologists successfully discover prehistoric burial sites dating as far back as the Iron Age. How’s that for a nose for the past?

Final Thoughts: Imagine the Life of a Dog

So, with this olfactory information in mind, I challenge you to take a walk like a dog. Not on all fours (unless that’s your jam), but simply imagining the world with that slippage of time. Where the present moment slowly fades away, becoming just one more layer in a deeper scent-marked story that combines what happened days, months, or even years ago, all lingering like an after-memory.

Everything is Alive

October 30, 2025/by Scott Kildall

Everything is Alive

Seaweed, Mycelium, and Fern Soundscapes

We don’t think about the vibrations of seaweed, or a fern, or mycelium. But we should. Every organism, no matter how still or silent it may appear, emits an electrical field, ever so subtle. These signals might be nuanced, but they tell a fascinating story of energy, growth, and environmental interaction. By capturing these faint patterns as sound, we can hear the “voices” of these unheard organisms, giving us a new way to connect with the living world around us.

Capturing The Sound of Seaweed

I recently captured data from several otherwise unheard creatures using custom sensors that I made.

Sensors on seaweed

My high-quality electrical sensors capture electrical data from seaweed, mycelium, and a fern, and I translate these recordings into ambient soundscapes to reveal the hidden vibrations of these organisms.

What does the data look like? Something like this, with a pronounced spike at sunset. I don’t even know what’s going on with these sea creatures.

Plot of two different seaweed samples

What Makes The Actual Sounds of Seaweed?

Curious as I am, I did some digging and found scientific studies that may shed light on what’s happening with these seaweeds. While I am translating data from the seaweed into sound, it turns out that seaweeds produce audible sounds as well.

Seaweeds, just like land plants, create energy from the sunlight via photosynthesis. They absorb carbon dioxide and water during the day, using it to produce sugar, which they utilize for energy and growth. Just like animals, their metabolism produces waste. All plants release pure oxygen as a waste product of photosynthesis, the very molecule we need to survive. Oxygen is released dissolved in water or as bubbles of oxygen gas.

During the day, the rate of oxygen production via photosynthesis typically exceeds the rate of oxygen consumption by marine organisms. As a result, in water as in air, as the day goes on, the area around the seaweeds becomes supersaturated with oxygen, and bubbles of oxygen gas form. Studies have found that it’s the formation of these bubbles of oxygen that is the major contributor to the sound that seaweed makes. As bubbles form and reach a large enough size to detach from the seaweed, they create a short ‘ping’ sound that rapidly decays. The continual release of oxygen from countless surface pores on the seaweed creates a sound that you can measure.

Interesting, but what’s going on at sunset?

One might logically assume that as sunset approaches, the rate of bubble formation might slow down as available sunlight decreases.

However, I suspect a couple of things are going on here. One is time. It takes time for those bubbles to reach a certain size to escape the surface tension of the seaweed. Seaweeds have surface features that allow them to hang on to oxygen bubbles throughout the day, which, in water, causes their leaves to float. Different species have distinct surface features, which influence their ability to retain oxygen. This could explain why the green algae produced a stronger peak at sunset than the red, simply because the red is better at holding onto bubbles of oxygen.

Another factor is supersaturation. The area immediately above the surface of the seaweed becomes supersaturated with oxygen after photosynthesizing all day long. At sunset, photosynthesis ceases. That means that the air immediately above the surface is no longer supersaturated, resulting in a significant increase in bubbles being released, and therefore ‘pings’ of sound. The sound gradually declines to a low level overnight as oxygen bubbles continue slowly escaping from the seaweed’s surface.

So, these sounds, or the energetic processes related to photosynthesis, are very likely creating or contributing to the electrical signals that I am recording.

Here’s another interesting little tidbit. Other studies have shown that not only do seaweeds produce sound, but they also respond to that sound with an increased growth rate. This means that when a seaweed is actively photosynthesizing and producing sound, the sound it generates stimulates the other seaweeds around it to grow. Therefore, they also photosynthesize and produce more sounds in a fascinating positive feedback loop of life, sound, and growth.

Sensor-Based Soundscapes Event

I presented my sensor-based soundscapes for the event:

“The Psychedelic Snail, and Other Pollinators You Didn’t Know You Needed: A Night of Culinary & Artistic Adventure” at Heron Arts in San Francisco, along with Home Grown, an architectural artwork by Raylene Gorum, and a Sonic Grazing Table by Maria Finn.

We played my soundscapes on silent disco headsets, while the guests ate the very food that they were listening to: ferns, seaweed, and mushrooms.

This was perhaps weird enough for me to reconsider the aliveness of everything, even the plants, which most of us hardly think about. It felt like a merging of science and art. By translating electrical signals into sounds of life and consuming the organisms that produce those sounds, I was inviting people to hear and taste the pulse of life itself, blurring the boundary between them and us and reminding us that everything is alive.

Listen to the Sounds of Seaweed, Ferns, and Mycelium

I also just uploaded the soundscapes to SoundCloud. You can listen to them yourself here:

Seaweed

Fern

Mycelium

The Quiet Voices of the Living World

Listening to the fascinating sounds of seaweeds, ferns, and mycelium reminds us that life is constantly communicating, whether we hear it or not. Every single vibration, every little pulse, is proof of its aliveness. These recordings should never be viewed as just ‘background noise.” They bridge the gap between us and the quiet voices of the living world that we so often overlook. Perhaps, if we listen closely, we might find ourselves more deeply connected to the living world and all its wonders.

The Microbial Underground

June 13, 2025/by Scott Kildall

I recently read The Hidden Half of Nature, and was captivated by the first third of the book, where the authors talked about soil and harvesting a healthy microbial ecosystem. Starting with a “dead” dirt backyard in Seattle, the couple slowly transforms it into a vibrant ecosystem where their outdoor plants soon thrived after their soil experiments. They harvested soil, which was crawling bugs and other critters, and purportedly, a rich host of microbes.

The rhizosphere— where the plant roots interact with the microbes —was the site for transformation. Microbes are key here, extracting nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (NPK) into usable forms for plants.

Plants symbiotically provide sugars, amino acids and other nutrients for these microbes to thrive. It’s one basic element of plant science, but we often forget this with large-scale farming, relying on pesticides and other growth agents.

For home use, I became entranced with making soil bins — what would appear here, in a soil system? Would I get the bugs they described.

A few weeks ago, I deployed three of these in a spot in Nevada City, where the soil is subject to intense heat. I’m not even sure how healthy the soil is, but it doesn’t look great

Aided by ChatGPT, along with my own research, I came up with three soil bins. Each one had about 4”-5” of healthy native soil — the existing bins had been maintained at some point, but had fallen into disrepair.

Bin #1: Moist Decomposer Habitat

Target insects: Earthworms, roly-polys, millipedes, springtails
Watering: High (6–10 GPH)
Cover: Open or lightly shaded, with a bark slab/log to retain moisture

Top Layers:
~1.5″ composted leaf litter (aged, moist)
~0.5″ rotting wood chunks (shredded or in small pieces)
Fine bark, wet leaves, and wet wood chunks mixed on the surface

Bin #2: Surface Predator Habitat

Target insects: Spiders, ground beetles, hunting crickets
Watering: Low (1–2 GPH)
Cover: Open

Top Layers:
~2″ coarse bark mulch
Flat rocks scattered on top to create temperature variation and shaded hiding spots

Bin #3: Fungal & Organic Matter Habitat (Biochar Bin)

Target insects: Springtails, compost beetles, mycophagous beetles
Watering: Moderate (3–4 GPH)
Cover: Open, with a few bark shards for shaded fungal refuges

Top Layers:
~1″ humus or well-aged compost
~1″ straw mulch or leaf mold
1 quart activated biochar, spread evenly across the top layers
Two freshly cut wood pieces placed to encourage fungal colonization

I’ll be observing these over the next few months, checking moisture levels with my sensors, looking for bugs and seeing if fungal life grows there. What’s the goal? Who knows exactly, but curiosity is driving my inquiry.

Prototyping an AQ Mesh Network

May 19, 2025/by Scott Kildall

Inside or Outside

In October 2023, San Francisco had another bad air day. Smoke from Northern California fires pushed the AQI into the 200s, which are dangerous levels, especially for exercise. Public warnings urged people to stay indoors and avoid cardio activity.

I had a workout session scheduled with a physical trainer on a breezy hill and brought along a portable air quality sensor. Just outside my house, the AQI was over 200. But on the hilltop, it dropped to the 30s, which was fine for jumping jacks and running sprints.

When I got back into my house, I measured it inside, and it was at 300, even worse than outside.

The coarse measurements weren’t helpful. It was the fine ones that provided the information I needed to make better lifestyle choices.

I went to a local store, bought a HEPA air purifier, and watched the AQI numbers slowly crawl down to more acceptable levels.

What I realized is that having many air quality sensors throughout a home or small location provides useful information. I had already designed similar sensors for my Sensors and Soundscapes installations, so I built more and deployed about eight of them inside and outside my house over the following weeks.

Scalable Options

Purple Air provides a great crowd-sourced service, but at ~$240 per sensor, it’s not a scalable option.

People spend a lot of time inside their houses, and what is useful is to see how your bedroom compares to your kitchen. Particulates from your stir-fry dinner drift into other rooms. Maybe there’s circulation in some places, maybe there isn’t.

I use the same family of Plantower sensors as Purple Air, and can make a my own sensor package with an ESP32 chop for around $40 per sensor. The data gets displayed on a small screen and also pushed to an MQTT server (Adafruit IO) for long-term analysis and immediate web display.

Mars College Prototype

At Mars College—a DIY pop-up art community in the desert—I prototyped an air quality (AQ) mesh network. In Bombay Beach, dust storms can cause poor air quality, and asthma rates are higher than average. Yet little scientific research has been done in the area.

I deployed my custom AQ sensors across the desert, in trailers, and in the homes of Bombay Beach to collect data. I wanted to explore whether this data can be useful for changing behavior, whether indoor air quality is worse than outdoor, and if any patterns can be identified.

What I learned

My sensors were low-cost, deployable and reliable. None of the Plantower sensors themselves

broke. I soon learned that during the dust storms, I saw higher counts of the large particulates (PM10s vs PM1.0).

I made a simple p5.js sketch that could show me live data, within the minute. I could see spikes in some of the kitchens when meals were cooked. If folks were smoking outside near the lounge, you could tell. Soldering irons were also a culprit.

In the trailers, during a dust storm, the dust would often get inside and swirl around the trailers afterwards, which meant running HEPA air filters just after these storms was helpful. The visual display prompted my own behavior change.

Did the behaviors of others also change? I was told that folks started ventilating their kitchens better. Some of the “Martians” went outside to vape. People reported looking at the simple temporary website I made to check to see the conditions outside.

The more complex data-analytics, well that never really happened. It was beyond my skillset and required more time than I had available.

Future Possibilities

The pilot project was a success, and I received a small grant to develop more sensors for Mars College 2025.

I’m currently refining the tech to make the sensors more configurable across different Wi-Fi networks, and also working on open-sourcing the hardware and software.

I’m also reaching out to organizations to test the prototypes. Their low cost makes them ideal for temporary sites, like a land trust monitoring particulates from local campfires.

The data can remain private, with a simple API for organizations to access and control how it’s used.

I’m curious to see where this goes next.

Week 10: Macros

April 3, 2025/by Scott Kildall

This week was Macros. Pretty straightforward stuff, and definitely something to figure out after doing a lot of other things in Ableton.

A Macro is a UI knob that you can map to any instrument control or effects control in its group.

One reason to do this is that you save on UI space — you don’t have to go into the effects rack and change specific parameters.

Also, you can setup different Macro variations, which are settings for these controls, and activate different settings this way.

Finally, for data-mapping you can create a virtual MIDI control change mapping — this will super-help with my data controls.

The idea here is to create MIDI CC maps to macro knobs and then map the macro knobs to the rack controls. This way you can change individual controls, without ever having to remap the midi values.

Here is the GitHub Repo is link to my weekly explorations.

Week 9: Chain Selector

March 24, 2025/by Scott Kildall

This week, I worked on Chain Selection in Ableton. I didn’t spend too much time on it, what with a lot of projects and other life stuff going on, but fortunately, it’s not all that complicated.

What this can let you do is create different instruments / synths as one instrument, with a separate MIDI controller/commands to switch between these.

Where this could be really helpful with data-parsing is that I can start to have more dynamic compositions with different synths.

The downside is that I can’t actually switch through the instruments themselves, so still have the same EQ, compression, echo effects, etc.

So, if the instruments are similar, then it is no problem.

I think there is also a way to do this with a drum kit, but I didn’t get that far.

Here is the GitHub Repo is link to my weekly explorations.

Week 8: Presets & File Management

March 18, 2025/by Scott Kildall

I should have tackled this one earlier, but this week I went through Ableton presets, file management and keyboard shortcuts.

Presets are essentially like a file format, which contains your entire instrument, any effects, etc. You can save these out for future use. So, let’s say you have a Kick drum that you really like with a specific echo effect, you can save this as a preset.

I also went through all the file types, searching and filtering, keyboard shortcuts and more, making my workflows better.

This is at a stage where I am putting together daily compositions more effectively, and want to make sure not to duplicate effort everywhere.

Here is the GitHub Repo is link to my weekly explorations.

Week 7: Operator Synth

March 10, 2025/by Scott Kildall

In my ramblings through my 100 day project of designing a data-based soundscape in 20 minutes, I kept on running into various Operator synths. I had looked at these last year when I was first getting into Ableton, and sort of understood it.

It’s still confusing! Operator is a pretty complex synth to understand everything it does, especially when compared to Wavetable, and so the level of technical rabbit-holing is high.

But, the idea is that you have four possible oscillators you can use. They can be audible ones — ones that generate sounds or inaudible ones, ones that modify the frequency of an audible one.

There a different algorithms, or arrangements of how the oscillators all work. You can have two audible oscillators producing a sound, and with each one being modulated by another. You can apply all sorts of controls to each one.

It’s overwhelming, but the take-home is that I’ll being working with pre-built Operator packs and then making slight modifications to my workflow.

Here is the GitHub Repo is link to my weekly explorations.

Week 6: Delay and Echo

March 3, 2025/by Scott Kildall

I rushed through this week, since I have other projects. *And* I’ve also been starting a 100-day project to do quick compositions in Ableton, so my time is being diverted from systematic learning.

Delay and Echo effects….these are pretty essential to any sound composition, with Echo being a more sophisticated iterations of the delay.

While I went through each of these two effects with a couple of YouTube tutorials, most of what I learned was just to try things out. The science behind this, unlike, say EQ or Compressors doesn’t seem to translate as well to these two.

I can think of very few situations, where you don’t

Here is the GitHub Repo is link to my weekly explorations.

Week 5: Wavetable Synth

February 24, 2025/by Scott Kildall

I thought the Wavetable synth would be a lot easier to experiment around with, but it turns out that making something that sounds good harder than the other instruments so far.

It has a synth sound, not an instrument sound and has tech underpinnings that are key to understanding it.

Instead of a sine wave, etc that makes a sound, say at 440Hz, you can use a recorded waveform. A wavetable synth gives the user not just one waveform at a time, but a stack or “table” of different waveforms. Using digital movements between the waves, you can transition between the different shapes in the table, allowing sounds that shift and evolve, with a liveliness not found in more basic sample-based synths.

It’s pretty cool and these can be used to harmonize different tracks. They seem like a good representation of data — data to digital synth and could be a more easier translatable data pattern than some of the others that I’ve played with.

Here is the GitHub Repo is link to my weekly explorations.

Learning Ableton: Week 4 — Simpler & Sampler

February 17, 2025/by Scott Kildall

Week 4: Simpler and Sampler

This week, I wanted more fun than last. I dove into Ableton’s Simpler and Sampler effects. I hadn’t taken these too seriously before, relying on Ableton’s built-in instruments to make my data-based soundscapes.

What this exploration revealed was the ability to convert any audio sample into an instrument. With millions of samples out there in thousands of sample packs, it’ll be a matter of filtering through the noise to find what I want.

I can use field recordings as well — or really anything. Like with everything Ableton, there are just so many possibilities.

The difference between Simpler and Sampler? The main one is that Simpler uses a single sound sample, while the Sampler can contain a multitude of samples.

While Sampler is more complex, I can imagine a project where I take different samples, transpose them into notes and then map them into a single instrument to create a single instrument soundscape.

Simpler could be used as an adjunct instrument to an existing one, and has more controls.

Now, I feel like with the built-in Ableton Instruments, maybe some VSTs, the drum rack and the Simpler & Sampler, there are a whole host of possibilities for soundscape generation.

Here is the GitHub Repo is link to my weekly explorations.

Learning Ableton: Week 3 — EQ and Compressors

February 9, 2025/by Scott Kildall

Week 3: EQ and Compressors

This week, was about the fundamentals of EQ and Compressors. I reviewed what I kind of already know about EQ-leveling and delved into compressors. Not super exciting, but hey it felt like I should know this next in my weekly self-taught Abelton class.

The YouTube vids often get jargony and into to the weeds. The take-home idea is that you want the instruments to sound clear and not muddled. The biology of our ears is that when we have conflicting sounds at different frequencies, we can’t make sense of it.

There is an actual science to putting the sounds together. You can create muddy effects if you want, but you need to do this deliberate, and make crisp soundscapes, music, etc that pop the different decibels of sound.

The compressors can help with this, reducing a specific instrument. We’ve all been to movies where we can’t hear the dialog over the explosions of an action sequences. That’s poor sound mastering at work.

Here is the GitHub Repo is link to my weekly explorations.

Learning Ableton: Week 2 — Launchkey Keyboard

February 2, 2025/by Scott Kildall

Week 2: LaunchKey Keyboard

This week, I chose to to focus on learning all about the Launchkey 37 keyboard / MIDI controller that I purchased last fall. At $200, it’s an affordable keyboard, and offers tight integration with Ableton.

And, I hardly knew how to use it before this week.

I puttered around YouTube videos for awhile, until I decided to RTFM — read the fucking manual. This was tedious, but I waded through it and figured pretty much all that the keyboard can do, which is a lot.

The reason I got the keyboard was that it lets me map a range of data to a 37 note range — enough for my data significations — so I can preview what the data might sound like from the MIDI controller itself, developing the soundscape with a faster and more creative workflow, rather than fussing around with the mouse+keyboard. It is much more intuitive to press buttons this way.

The pots automatically get mapped to the the audio effects, which is helpful for dialing in a soundscape.

You can also use the pads like a drum kit, and can even do clip triggers automatically, so I can think about sequencing a whole performance from a set of sensors.

This will be incredibly useful for my future work.

Here is the GitHub Repo is link to my weekly explorations

Learning Ableton: Drum Kit (Week 1)

January 27, 2025/by Scott Kildall

Learning Ableton

My knowledge of Ableton is spotty, but this laptop application is now in my essential toolkit for my ongoing Sensors and Soundscapes artwork.

During my winter session at Mars College, I’m setting up a structure for learning, which is that every week, I will tackle a new core feature of Ableton and try to learn what I can in several multi-hour study sessions.

I’ll develop some Live Sets to explore these features some notes on what I discovered and what I got stuck on. These get pushed to a Git repo, which could be useful, I guess, but probably more for my own notes.

Week 1: Drum Kit

I learned quite a bit ab out Drum Kits this week. The history of the drum kit, goes back to the 19th century with the slow evolution of the single player drum set, that we are now familiar with in all sorts of music.

Most people usually use just 16 pads (though technically they can have up to 128) — or samples that don’t have pitch associated with them. A lot of the controllers support just 16 switches.

Often, they are one-shot samples, emulating a drum set, or a variation on them They can be repurposed to be any sample, and you can chain kits together, apply instrument racks, MIDI effects to specific pads, or to an entire set.

Probably the coolest, though maybe not most useful feature is the ability to create your own drum kit using AI. The steps are in the repo, and it feels kind of clunky, but what you can go is gets say a 5-second clip of a drum track you like, and then slice them to MIDI tracks, where each sample becomes its own pad. You can then do a Swap Similar, to alter the pads to samples in your own library. You can even use the beat patterns that are in that sample and play with them.

Sort of stealing, or borrowing, but the music industry is filled with this ethos of sampling, remixing and maneuvering. I don’t see a problem with it.

Here is the GitHub Repo is link to my weekly explorations

Life on Mars, Year 3

January 21, 2025/by Scott Kildall

This is the 3rd year in a row that I’ve spent the three winter months at Mars College.

What is Mars College?

On the website, we describe it as this:

Mars College is a three-month educational program, R&D lab, and off-grid residential community dedicated to cultivating a low-cost, high-tech lifestyle. We are in our sixth year of operation and continue to explore future ways of living and learning.

That description only scratches the surface of what we do here. The people here (Martians) come from diverse backgrounds, and many of us have chosen to avoid working full-time, stepping away from the American capitalist work mentality.

Mars is located near the quirky town of Bombay Beach. Some folks live in town, while others, like me, camp in the desert about a mile away.

The “college” operates in an anarchic, DIY spirit, where we lead workshops, support one another, and pursue a wide range of goals—from building sculptural installations and researching sustainable desert structures to running immersive AI classes, exploring bodywork practices, and much more.

It’s an odd group of people. I love them.

Reset

This time feels like a pause—a reset. It’s a chance to escape the everyday grind of San Francisco, where I often feel overstimulated, over-scheduled, over-cultured, and even over-loved. In my home city, I’m constantly pulled in many different directions.

At Mars and Bombay Beach, there isn’t much to do. We have a dive bar and a convenience store. Entertainment is something we create ourselves. There aren’t many text messages to coordinate plans— it’s a simpler life.

I took a left turn away from the climbing ladder of the art world long ago. That’s a story for another time, but in short, I found its mercenary aspects too off-putting. The gallery scene replicates much of the corporate world I left behind, where status matters, promotion often overshadows value, and the snobbery of art writing fosters elitism.

I’ve always opted for the homegrown and always will. I make things, and I’ll continue my quirky research into sensors and soundscapes.

Daily Life

I’m camping in the desert in my travel trailer, which serves as a temporary art and science lab. I’ve set up a 3D printer, a soldering station, an air filtration system, and an array of sensors and devices.

It’s comfortable. I sleep incredibly well under many blankets, with the cold nights and the silence of the desert. That said, it’s dusty and sometimes challenging. I’m constantly troubleshooting batteries, managing solar power, and figuring out sustainable routines.

There are about 60 of us here, and it’s wonderfully social—something I love. By the time November rolls around in San Francisco, I often feel burnt out from spending too much time alone in my studio. As an extroverted artist, that’s always a challenge.

What I’m doing for Mars 2025

This season, I’m focused on research rather than production, and have several areas of investigation.

Desert Ecology: organizing field trips and science experiments around this amazing area such as collecting Purple Bacteria, checking out sites like Obsidian Mountain, and learning more about air quality.

Purple Bacteria. What I do with my art is build sensors in nature that capture data that humans don’t normally perceive. Last year at Mars, with the help of my friend Marzipan (who is a molecular biologist), we gathered and incubated purple bacteria samples.

Over the summer and fall, I discovered that these bacteria produce small amounts of electricity, with electrical signals that appear to align with circadian rhythms. Their electrical output increases in response to sunlight.

This phenomenon is worth deeper scientific exploration. I plan to deploy my sensors here to track and analyze more samples.

Additionally, I aim to create a future sound installation that translates this data into music, building on my Sensors to Soundscapes work.

Building an Air Quality Mesh Network

The air quality (AQ) in Bombay Beach can become quite poor during dust storms, and higher rates of asthma have been reported in the area. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been enough scientific research conducted here.

Air quality monitors are sparse, so I plan to deploy my custom AQ sensors across the desert, in trailers, and in the homes of Bombay Beach to collect data. I want to explore whether this data can be useful for changing behavior, whether indoor air quality is worse than outdoor, and if any patterns can be identified.

All the data will be pushed to an MQTT server for public access, and I’ll create a simple website to display it in real time.

Prototyping a Solar Boat

I am building a small 3D-printed solar boat (2 feet by 1 foot) for a residency project in the fall. It will be equipped with sensors to measure water quality, oxygenation, and depth using sonar.

Picture a small, remote-controlled paddleboat that glides slowly across a lake, transmitting data in real time that can be interpreted audibly.

It’ll be a prototype with no intention to show it, and include documentation on its progress.

Weekly Experiments in Ableton

I use Ableton for sound synthesis and am still at the beginner-to-intermediate stage of mastering its capabilities. While it’s easy to create with, truly understanding what you’re doing reveals countless layers of complexity.

I plan to set a new weekly exercise or area of focus and dive into it, helping me further develop my Sensors to Soundscapes work.

Weekly Experiments in Touch Designer

Touch Designer is the program that takes my raw sensor data and converts it to MIDI notes for Ableton. Unlike the Ableton software, TD not at all easy to figure out how to make things work, but once you do, it sure is powerful.

I want to get proficient at making visual displays of raw data, as they come into Touch Designer, so that my installations can better include a visual component that shows the data itself, from the sensors.

Off Grid Solar

At Mars, we run on solar power, and I’m currently apprenticing with “Solar Sam” who manages the off-grid solar systems for the entire community.

While I have a solid understanding of microelectronics, I’m new to solar setups and eager to learn how to install panels and manage battery storage for AC in homes, off-grid communities, trailers, and more.

Martian Cocktail Academy

I developed a love for making cocktails during the pandemic and became an amateur “mixologist.” I want to have fun, share knowledge, experiment with techniques, and document the cocktails we create.

This will also be a positive social experience, focused on intentional drinking—exploring how flavors combine—instead of relying on alcohol solely as a social lubricant.

Be a Mentor and Leader

I want to enhance my leadership skills, which includes serving as a “Camp Lead” for the Natural Intelligence Camp here at Mars. We are exploring analog practices, emotional intelligence, and much more. My goal is to help others have a positive and healthy experience during their time here.

Desert Ecology @ Mars College

October 15, 2024/by Scott Kildall

Desert Ecology
Citizen Science & Fields Trips
by Seamus (Scott) Kildall

What it is

Mars College is situated in a striking landscape beside the Salton Sea, an odd lake with an even stranger history. The Desert Ecology program invites you to step away from the computer screen for a day and explore this fascinating natural world with field trips and science experiments.

This program will be a weekly offering. You can join for every expedition, or drop in on specific sessions. No prior knowledge is required.

(Collecting water samples from the Salton Sea)

Why I’m leading this

The natural world fascinates me more than the one behind the screen. While I use digital tools in my own work, increasingly, my time away from the screen is what gives me both joy and growth, which is especially the case at Mars College.

And, this is why I co-founded Natural Intelligence Camp, which aligns with my personal discoveries.

The physical site around Mars College teems with fascinating biology, geology, and history, which I want to explore in, learn from, conduct science experiments with and share knowledge of.

Some Specific Adventures

Setting up an Air Quality Monitoring network

How toxic is the air in Bombay Beach? Much has been written about it in the media. While asthma cases are high in the area, there are many correlative factors in the data, so it’s to tell what is really going on.

In the 1st week at Mars, we will set up 10-20 air quality monitoring devices at Mars College and the town of Bombay Beach. These will feed live data onto the web, which we can then monitor with a web browser, providing an essential service to the community.

Additionally, the devices will transmit data over the three-month period at Mars to a server. We will then publish the results, serving as a beacon of citizen science. There has not been a comprehensive air quality study like this in the area to date, making it a valuable tool for increasing knowledge around this important issue.

(Custom-built Air Quality Sensor)

Collecting Purple Bacteria from the Salton Sea

We will collect muddy samples from the Salton Sea, led by our resident biologist Marzipan. We will incubate these, and after about a month they will develop into vibrant Purple Bacteria.

In my preliminary studies from samples taken last year, I discovered that these Purple Bacteria emit significantly fluctuating electrical currents in correlation to diurnal rhythms.

At Mars, Marzipan and I will tease apart their dynamic roles using different techniques including artificial light regimes and electrical conductance.

Both of us are interested in using the data from this for visualizations and/or sonficiations, and want to open these samples up for artistic exploration.

Some Purple Bactria samples from the Salton Sea

Gathering and Mixing Clay-Based Building Materials with Charlie

Charlie, a Martian from last year, led us on some fascinating talks about building with clay, and he also did some prototyping and preliminary studies. He plans to return this year and get deeper into what the earth here has to offer us.

We will collaborate with him and gather clay-based materials from the ground, and mix them to use for building, a time-honored technique that takes us back to the earth and offers possibilities for sustainable futures.

Invitation to All Martians

I would love to collaborate with fellow Martians, who have specialized skills and knowledge, and if you are one of them, let’s plan a weekly outing for the Desert Ecology Program!

Fungitopia at Four Chicken Gallery, June 27 (2024)

June 13, 2024/by Scott Kildall

Fungtiopia opens at Four Chicken Gallery: 432 Cortland Ave, San Francisco on June 27, 6-9pm.

This will be a new version of this artwork, which I developed this year and presented at the Bombay Beach Biennale a few months ago.

Inspired by scientific research that mycelium may have their own language, I developed this installation, where four different mycelium samples will “play” an ambient soundscape based on their live electrical data.

Imagine entering a large side room with yoga mats, where you can lie down and relax to a slowly-changing soundscape with four different instruments changing and fading in and out, evoking a psychedelic immersion.

Or, you can enjoy the refreshments and examine the mycelium in the front room, where we can talk about the art and look at the data flow from the mycelium.

A left-brain and right brain, of sorts.

Four Chicken Gallery is a pop-up gallery in Bernal run by the generous Todd Hanson, who curates short-run shows, and it is perfect for this artwork. I’m excited to bring this to my community here in the Bay Area.