In the 1974 movie The Conversation, Gene Hackman plays a paranoid surveillance expert who specializes in wiretapping.
A case goes wrong, and Hackman’s character ends up being the eavesdropped instead of the eavesdropper.
The movie ends with him tearing his apartment to pieces as he desperately searches for listening devices.
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I thought of this movie earlier this summer while reading a story on National Public Radio’s website about a researcher who is using similar methods to monitor pest activity in crops.
Emily Bick, an entomologist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has figured out how to use high-tech wiretapping technology to determine which bugs are having lunch in corn plants.
Her invention, called the Insect Eavesdropper, includes a contact mic that is attached to corn stalks. The mic registers the vibrations that are moving the stalk, including those made by munching insects.
Her target is the corn rootworm, known as the “billion dollar bug” because of how much damage it causes in the United States.
She claims the algorithm is 80 to 96 percent accurate when determining if the corn rootworm has made itself at home in a corn plant.
Bick first started this work by trying to find a better way to detect moths feeding on sugar cane fields in Indonesia.
Surveillance in both these cases is being conducted in crops with big stalks, which would make it fairly easy to attach the contact mics.
But what about the crops more commonly grown on the Prairies, such as canola and wheat? They don’t have the thickest stems in the agricultural plant world.
Farmers have enough problems with lodging without worsening the problem by attaching brass discs to their wheat.
I realize that the Insect Eavesdropper system wouldn’t actually attempt to attach mics on every plant, but you get an idea of how challenging this might be.
Maybe farmers could stake their wheat plants the way gardeners do with their tomatoes.
One would have to hope the insects didn’t turn paranoid the way Gene Hackman’s character did and begin dismantling the entire wheat field.
It’s a great ending for a movie; not so great for a harvest.
