This N.J. professor helped count a quarter million bugs for a $5 million prize

When the XPRIZE Foundation, which gives incentives for technological breakthroughs, challenged scientists to record the biodiversity of rainforests, 300 teams signed up. The stakes were high, as the most successful group in the six-year competition would win $5 million.
Six teams gathered for 24 hours in July for the finalists’ challenge, to see who could count the most species in a square kilometer of Amazon rainforest. Without ever setting foot in it.
Two days later, all the pictures, DNA strands, and audio recordings had been catalogued.
The winners were announced last in mid-November at the G20 Social Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The winning team included a New Jersey professor who specializes in fish that deliver weak electrical charges.
More importantly — at least in the Amazon — he’s a whiz at soldering.
Eric Fortune, 57, a neuroscience professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, was the team’s lead systems engineer. He developed sensors and control networks for the team’s ten drones that landed in the rainforest canopy to collect data. He also developed an early version of the team’s camera contraption that uses a white screen to attract bugs from the forest canopy. They found 250,000.
“The real reward is that this work can have a lasting impact on these vital ecosystems and the communities that depend on them,” Fortune said. “It’s what drew us to this competition in the first place.”
The Limelight Rainforest team, named after the bright insect traps, was founded by Colorado Mesa University biology professor Thomas Walla.
Walla said Fortune was a key player in all the team’s innovation, as he built prototypes for collecting the sounds of the rainforest and for capturing insects to be photographed.
“Eric is a brilliant ‘out of the box thinker who melds his creative work in neuroscience with his passion for the wildest and most diverse ecosystems on earth,” Walla said. “Our team would not have existed without Eric Fortune’s boundless optimism and willingness to engage with technology to solve ecological problems…His work is really quite miraculous.”
The team of more than 50 experts planned to treat the habitat like a crime scene, collecting 45 liters of water by dropping tubes down from the drones to sample stream water. If mammals, birds or insects had eaten tree leaves or left droppings in the area, their DNA reached the water.
The team would also record bird songs and bat signals, and using artificial intelligence, recognized tree species from pictures of the canopy.
For the finals, the Limelight scientists traveled to Manaus, Brazil, then by boat up the Rio Negro, to a hut. They sent out ten drones, five with camera traps, five with insect traps
“And from there, everything just worked,” Fortune said.
More accurately, when things broke, he helped fix them.
“I was the MacGyver,” he said, as he was in charge of the team’s electricity, its ethernet and other networks, and “anything that no one else wanted to do.”
During the competition he used his bag of thousands of spare parts to attach USB connectors to cables and keep the machines running smoothly.
“We were prepared for a lot of different categories of failure, and we overcame all the little failures that came up,” he said.
The team had another advantage: close relationships with the Quichua and Waorani Indigenous groups, who had reviewed thousands of sounds and images of the rainforest species, validating the team’s AI identifications.
“Our Indigenous team members are the true masters of this knowledge,” Fortune said. “We were certain our AI was trained well because we had the world’s top experts validating the data that we fed into the AI.”
The team collected 27 million DNA strands as evidence of who had passed by, and found more than 250 species. It also identified 23,000 individual trees.
Fortune, whose academic work has titles like “Duet singing in plain-tailed wrens” and “Feedback Control in Weakly Electric Fishes,” took a circuitous path to the project.
He had visited Ecuador in high school, and when a professor colleague at Johns Hopkins University got called to serve in the Air National Guard after the 9/11 attacks, Fortune stepped in to take his place running a fieldwork trip in the South American country.
He spent half his career there studying birds, and joined NJIT’s growing biology department in 2013.
A scientist in Ecuador recommended Fortune for the XPRIZE team, given his time spent on the side of a volcano in a cloud forest, where he gained expertise in engineering equipment in rainforest habitats.
The prize money will be divided among the team; Fortune is thankful that the winnings will cover his trip expenses, as he paid his way for the competition.
He is already helping develop some of the team’s technology for broader use, by nonprofits, indigenous communities, and other groups working to conserve the rainforest.
He’s even discussing using the team’s tools that measure biodiversity in a way that could improve barren areas in the United States, like the parking lots of big box stores.
“I want to provide a mechanism to incentivize making those spaces less of biodiversity deserts,” he said, adding that his building overlooks an experiment that allowed natural flora to grow in a few empty planters. They’re now overflowing.
A system where companies could earn credit for increasing biodiversity on their properties could work elegantly, he said.
Looking back, he felt lucky to be part of the “hilarious, entertaining, thought-provoking” competition.
“I’ve never had more fun in my life,” he said. “Being part of this crazy adventure over three years has been an enormous learning experience, with so many twists and turns.”
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Tina Kelley may be reached at [email protected].