Carnivorous Lamp

November 11, 2022 11:27 AM

This is a really silly question, but it's just something that I was idly wondering about. Could you run an LED light at night to attract bugs and then somehow ingest those bugs to make enough electricity to run the light?
posted by Just this guy, y'know to Grab Bag (3 answers total)

Best answer: Ecobot II ran on a diet of flies, digested by a microbial fuel cell. They mention an earlier machine that ate slugs.

According to this article:

Engineers hand-feed this robot insects, which it digests in a microbial fuel cell—essentially a tank of sludgy bacteria and oxygen—that converts the insects into electricity. An eight-fly meal can drive it up to seven feet.

I can imagine using that power for light instead, though Ecobot II apparently only produced 100 microwatts, which would be a pretty dim bulb. A typical LED, not a super bright one, might need about 100 milliwatts, or a thousand times more energy. Maybe with a bigger tank and more bugs?
posted by moonmilk at 12:23 PM on November 11, 2022 [3 favorites]

Best answer: I was wondering what the equivalent in fireflies would be.

This reddit comment claims a firefly produces about a third of a lumen in light. Google suggests an LED produces about 100 lumens per watt. So very roughly 3 milliwatts per firefly. It would take 30 Ecobots to be as bright as one firefly.
posted by moonmilk at 12:35 PM on November 11, 2022

SlugBot previously but that link is dead.

A news article with opinions from a cowardly fermentable human:

After a hard night of slug busting, the robot returns home and unloads its victims into a fermentation tank. While the SlugBot recharges, the fermentation tank turns the slug sludge into electricity.

But the robot, voted one of the best inventions of the year by Time magazine, has attracted some criticism.

One Time reader called the invention ``reckless'' in a letter to the magazine. ``To create robots that devour flesh is to step over a line that we would be insane to cross,'' he said.

posted by away for regrooving at 9:21 PM on November 11, 2022 [3 favorites]