How artificial intelligence is being utilized at Montreal’s Insectarium

In a time of evolving technology, artificial intelligence is being used more and more, including at Montreal’s Insectarium.

The museum is using AI to enhance their research, hoping to give visitors a more interactive experience.

The museum’s director, Maxim Larrivée says the Insectarium began working with David Rolnick, a member of the Quebec AI Institute Mila. Larrivée describes Rolnick as a passionate entomologist and an expert in artificial intelligence.

“The first step was to build an algorithm that would allow the visitors here in the museum to photograph butterflies and other insects that they see and have the AI identify them,” said Larrivée.

They integrated AI into their mobile app “Application Espace pour la vie.” The identification algorithms are being used to help give visitors an interactive learning experience.

“In the museum, it allows them to name the butterflies, name the insects that they see more rapidly, and on the mobile app they have detailed information associated with those, where they’re from, where they eat, are they pollinators, do they eat plants and stuff like this,” Larrivée said.

He says due to the sheer number of insects, it can be intimating on where to start when you become interested in them.

“The first thing that you want to be able to do to create a connection, an authentic connection to insects, is be able to put a name on it because then the door opens to what do they eat, what services do they provide, ecosystems, and you can learn more about it and create this authentic connection,” Larrivée explained.

“AI, in a way, with these identification algorithms, allows us to create more rapidly this connection and grow what we call here at the insectarium your entomophilia. And then this inspiration and its connection allows you to deepen your relationship with them and appreciate, like we don’t necessarily want people to fall in love with them and appreciate what they do for us, for our well-being and our health, and how we can learn to better coexist with them.

“We depend on them for so many things, right? So, we have a lot of information about the pollination of our fruits and veggies, bio-control of pests in forest ecosystems and in agriculture. They’re really essential for our well-being and even our wallet in some ways.”

He says the tool opened many possibilities for them.

“We went, what if we use it in research and become able to do monitoring without killing insects? Because often you have to kill them to put a name on them and study them,” said Larrivée.

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Automated Monitoring of Insects (AMI)

From there, they gradually met colleagues in Europe, and started an international collaboration called the Automated Monitoring of Insects, AMI.

Larrivée says insects are extremely diverse and the Insectarium was interested in moth monitoring, something that happens at night, which can get tiresome.

They figured, they could take photos of their sheet where they attract them, and identify and count them with the help of artificial intelligence, something that is otherwise difficult to do.

“Counting them, you know, there can be hundreds of species, thousands of individuals in prime time during the spring and summer. And it becomes impossible to count them and identify all of them,” he said.

“It was a little bit of science fiction, but this technology was coming into its own.”

The most important thing about AMI is a custom-made UV light to attract nocturnal insects that land on the platform. Then, there is a computer that has a camera that takes photographs of the platform and lights it up every 10 seconds, and takes about 4,000 images every night.

“We started deploying systems here to prototype and test them here at the back of the Insectarium,” Larrivée said. “So behind the Insectarium, there’s a nice habitat in the Botanical Garden. We’ve been monitoring moths and nocturnal insects with our automated systems for three years now.

“You have to imagine that from there, all these photos after that have two algorithms that basically find them on the board and another one, once they’ve been detected, that identifies them to species and counts them.”

With that, they also built a database called Antenna that allows them to manage the data, and proof it so that it can be used by a scientist to understand how insect diversity is evolving.

“We know that it’s been collapsing for the last 30 years dramatically. And the goal with these is to basically turn them into the equivalent of a weather station, but a biodiversity station, so that we can see how biodiversity is fluctuating and understanding what are the main factors impacting it so that we can mitigate those, because insects contribute to so many ecosystem services from pollination to decomposing and bio-control and forests and agriculture.

“Understanding how we can reduce the impact of several factors like habitat degradation, pesticides and all these things and climate change will make a big difference and give us a lot more flexibility.”

He says they’ve already made discoveries for new moth species that hadn’t been found yet in Quebec through this system.

Since then, they have deployed some in Nunavik, and other places in southern Quebec, and are planning to expand that even all the way to the top of the summits of Parc national de la Gaspésie next summer.

Larrivée says they now have this consortium of researchers in Canada, the United States, and all across Europe that are deploying these camera systems to automatically monitor insects.

Larrivée says that AI has been a game changer.

“One of the biggest hurdles to understand the current biodiversity collapse of insects is our capacity to count them and measure them in a way that we call standardized. So that we can compare from one place to another and not try to kill them doing so because we already know that they’re in peril. So with AI, we’re able to do it without harming them and rapidly and make the information available very rapidly also. So for us, it’s a completely game changer.”

Larrivée says that from a scientific perspective, because the museum has a big research branch that is not necessarily presented in the museum, they are rapidly gathering diversity trends for pollinators across the province, and that they’re able to provide this information to decision-makers, to better manage their biodiversity and learn to better coexist with them.

“It’s a win-win within the experience of the museum, but also with the expertise that we bring to citizens of Quebec.”

By working with Mila, Larrivée says it was “a match made in heaven” as they had the expertise to confirm that the photographs that were fed in the model to train their models were well identified.

“When they trained their model, they were able to ensure that the performance of the model was validated with correctly identified insects. So that is how our experience as entomologists working with the Mila allowed us to build something that was reliable and performed really well.”

Climate change also plays a big role.

“There’s all these pressures, right? You have pesticides, you have habitat destruction, you have exotic species that are displacing other species. But what’s happened with climate change is that it … amplifies those pressures and it’s really been what’s tipped the scale on the wrong side for insects and created this collapse of their diversity.

“While climate change is hard to mitigate these other factors, we can show how important the pressure that climate change is creating on them and see how with the other factors are creating pressures on them. We can limit or slow down their diminution.”

Larrivée encourages everyone to come out and see AI in action for themselves.

“Come and see us at the Insectarium right now, right? Come and connect with those insects, learn about these tools and take advantage of the nice tropical weather that we have here in the the Grand Vivarium, while it’s pretty cold outside.”