Facehugger vs. Artificial

[Company Man]

Something I always wondered. Would a facehugger be so inclined to attack a synthetic, er cybor... uh, artificial person.

Would it not know the difference? Even if did or didn't would it still attempt to attach and implant? Could it take?

Just something different to think about.

[Hieronymus]

We have no idea what kind of sensory organs facehuggers have, so it's hard to say what they interpret as prey.

We know that Kane was attacked while wearing a space suit.  That helps us tease the situation apart.  Short answer: the senses that a facehugger could use to detect someone in a space suit should detect an android, and the senses that could be used to distinguish an android from meat might be blocked by a space suit anyway.  So if the facehugger attacked Kane, it would probably have attacked Ash.

Kane would have been thermally insulated, so the facehugger might not have seen his body heat (although it might have detected heat from an externally-mounted power supply or something).  Likewise, it wouldn't have smelled his breath, or pheromones, or anything like that.

That probably leaves motion.  Even without eyes, facehuggers and eggs should be able to detect vibration through the ground, and facehuggers may even have a form of echolocation.  That would pick up an android or a human equally well.

Finally, there is the possibility of some kind of electrosensory organ similar to the ampullae of Lorenzini on a shark, which could pick up the electrical field of a living thing (the efficiency of such organs drops drastically outside of saltwater, but we're talking about a species that does six impossible things before breakfast here).  Depending on whether there was any kind of radiation shielding built into Kane's suit, the facehugger might or might not have been able to use such a sense to detect him.  Androids would presumably put off an electric field as well, but for different reasons.

[SM]

There's a deleted scene form Aliens where Bishop is very close to the Aliens while he's in the pipe, yet is pretty much ignored.