It’s a moth, it’s a drone, it’s ‘Smellicopter’

Melanie Anderson pulls aside a small curtain in a dark closet. A dim red bulb is the only light.

“This might take a while because I want to grab male moths,” she says, reaching into the cage behind the curtain.

She pulls out a mottled brown Manduca sexta, sometimes called the Carolina sphinx moth. It’s big — larger than her palm.

“That looks like a female. It has slightly smaller antennae,” she says. “So I’m going to put it back.”

For this University of Washington engineer, the antennae are the key.

Anderson reaches once, then twice more into the fluttering mass of insects in the cage. She finally snags a male.

This moth’s antennae have a cyborg destiny aboard a new kind of drone called the “Smellicopter.”

“I tell people ‘moth antenna’ and they’re like, ‘What does ‘MOTH’ stand for?’ And I’m like, ‘No, no, no. The insect,’ Anderson explains. “We actually use a live biologic component of the moth — the antenna — and we put it on an electrical circuit to read signals from it.”