An army of AI robots fighting off an invasion of giant insects might sound like some dodgy sci-fi, but scientists say it could soon become a reality. Asian hornets have already become established in much of Europe, Asia, and the US, leaving the UK at the edge of the predators' 'European invasion front'. Now, scientists from the University of Exeter have trained an AI to spot the hornets before they have a chance to spread. VespAI, as the researchers have dubbed the system, can automatically attract, record, and identify the invasive insects with near-perfect accuracy. 'VespAI shows promise as a robust early warning system to detect Asian hornet ingressions into new regions,' said co-author, Dr Thomas O'Shea-Wheller.

As infamous invaders to the North American ecosystem, the Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia) is devastating not only to native bee colonies, but also to local apiculture. One of the most effective way to combat the harmful species is to locate and destroy their nests. By mobilizing the public to actively report possible sightings of the Asian giant hornet, the governmentcould timely send inspectors to confirm and possibly destroy the nests. However, such confirmation requires lab expertise, where manually checking the reports one by one is extremely consuming of human resources. Further given the limited knowledge of the public about the Asian giant hornet and the randomness of report submission, only few of the numerous reports proved positive, i.e. existing nests. How to classify or prioritize the reports efficiently and automatically, so as to determine the dispatch of personnel, is of great significance to the control of the Asian giant hornet. In this paper, we propose a method to predict the priority of sighting reports based on machine learning. We model the problem of optimal prioritization of sighting reports as a problem of classification and prediction. We extracted a variety of rich features in the report: location, time, image(s), and textual description. Based on these characteristics, we propose a classification model based on logistic regression to predict the credibility of a certain report. Furthermore, our model quantifies the impact between reports to get the priority ranking of the reports. Extensive experiments on the public dataset from the WSDA (the Washington State Department of Agriculture) have proved the effectiveness of our method.

What do you wear to a "murder hornet" extermination? Since the insects are so dangerous, it doesn't matter how silly the suit looks, but that didn't stop the internet from commenting on it. As previously reported, the first nest of giant Asian hornets, more commonly called "murder hornets," was found in Blaine, Washington, close to the Canadian border last week. Scientists went in on Sunday to destroy the nest in hopes of stopping the invasive species from spreading. They wore white suits that appear to be some type of neoprene.