When Gabe Mott, Shobhita Soor and Mohammed Ashour proposed building a commercial-scale cricket farm optimized with robots and data, the idea earned the McGill University students the $1 million Hult Prize, the largest student competition for social good, in 2013.
But when it came to launching the concept, they needed to leave convention behind, including most of what had been written in science journals about rearing billions of crickets.
Apparently, people hadn’t been thinking big enough about Acheta domesticus — or at least publishing their ideas.
“There were a few articles out there with a good framework for how insects respond to various conditions, but they didn’t have scale in these experiments. They couldn’t do things in the volume that we could do it,” says Mott. “We had to accept that, and we had to walk away from everything in the scientific literature.”
