The general consensus of mosquitoes is that they’re unchill creatures. I’m not really sure what good they contribute to the animal kingdom but they do a lot of damage. Mosquitoes are known transmitters of Zika virus, West Nile virus, dengue, malaria and Chikungunya virus. Each year mosquitoes kill 1million humans a year making them the world’s most dangerous animal to humans.
To summarize, mosquitoes suck. Which strangely sounds a lot like today’s popular music artists
Which led me to thinking, can I fight fire with Fire? Can I kill mosquitoes with bad music?
To test my hypothesis I set up a tank and caught some mosquito larvae from a nearby pond. Next I put together a little sound system and started to play some music.
But it was a trap you see because earlier that day I made a playlist that was designed to hurt or seriously injure the listener. The playlist consisted of cardi b’s entire album, the catch me outside girl, that one Friday song and I even threw in the baby shark song. No sane creature should ever be forced to hear the contents of this playlist.
So anyways I press Play, cover my ears and then walked away for a while.
After about an hour of playing the music I check on the tank and nothing was happening.
If anything the degenerate creatures were enjoying it. This made me quite upset as My goal was to eradicate a species, not to show them a good time
So change of plans. I upgraded the sound system by taking apart my ultrasonic sound gun I made and redesigned the 555 timer circuit. I put it back into place and used some jumper wires to Attach piezo modules instead of the earlier ultrasonic array. Then I waterproofed them as best as I could with some clear silicone
I then let the “music” Play again for an hour and when I came back the mosquitoes were dead.
So What’s killing them? I like to imagine they’re driven insane by a constant loop of Cardi B but in reality I tuned the 555 driver circuit to oscillate at a frequency that resonates pockets of air in the mosquito larvae. Essentially when I play music at this frequency, the larvae’s organs rupture.
My original plan was to get real cute and fancy with my 3D printer and designed a little housing shaped like a boat, but after getting halfway through a 20 hour print I ran out of filament so I just used a plastic Chinese take out container.
The electronics got taken out of the sound gun and placed onto the top of the boat, along with a 12v battery I made using some old 18650 cells. I then gued 4 piezo modules using marine adhesive to the bottom of the takeout container and wired them to the output of the drive circuit. Once I got everything situated the actual build process was done. And here’s the result, probably as far as I know, the most aggressive biological weapon ever created.
I like to imagine that you could take this with you and drop it into a stagnant pond that is chock full of mosquito larvae, and then absolutely unload your devastating payload of music. However In many ponds there’s other forms of wildlife such as fish, frogs turtles and, though it’s unlikely, I’m afraid that the ultrasonic audio could damage some fragile organs on them as well. In other words the mosquitoes have taken hostages. and while it is a cowards move, I do respect the unspoken mutual laws of combat in the animal kingdom. Unfortunately I know half of you freaks just wanted to see me commit mosquito genocide, but I cannot do it and accept defeat at the hands of my moral compass.
To wrap this project up I think it works great in stagnant empty pockets of water such as bird feeders, small ponds or other uninhabited pockets of water. To take this to the next level I could add some solar panels and a charging circuit, or even tune the frequency so that it only harms mosquito larvae, but that’s way too much work than I’d like to put into this project
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