Wasps aren’t exactly man’s best friends, but when it comes to sniffing out trouble, some scientists think they’re better, cheaper and easier to train than hounds.
Scientists from the University of Georgia and USDA Agricultural Research Service are training a strain of the insects to detect everything from concealed explosives, drugs and human remains to — hopefully — diseases like cancer. The results will be published in the journal Biotechnology Progress in the next few months, and is already available online.
Unlike dogs and electronic sensors currently in use, the wasps are disposable. They cost pennies and take minutes to train. Researchers hope wasps and other insects with a predilection for sniffing — like honeybees and moths — will be in widespread use within five to 10 years.
“It opens up a whole other resource of organisms that we could produce and train and use in this way,” said Joe Lewis, a research entomologist with the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service.
For now, scientists are concentrating on wasps. They’ve built the Wasp Hound — a $60 odor-detection device made of a small PVC tube containing five wasps.
The Wasp Hound has a fan in the top, which draws odors into the tube through a filter. If the wasps catch a whiff of whatever they’ve been trained to smell, they crowd around a hole in the filter. A web cam inside the tube is attached to a computer, which alerts the operator to the wasps’ reaction with a beep or flashing light.
The wasps have been trained to detect a range of illegal or dangerous substances, including 2,4-DNT (a chemical in TNT); putricine, which is associated with decaying flesh; and molds that produce poisonous compounds called aflatoxins in foods like peanuts and milk.
The wasps can sense chemicals in concentrations as tiny as a few parts per billion in the air, which is the same range dogs and chemical sensors pick up, Lewis said.
“They smell — they have olfactory sensors on the antennae. It’s like our nose on their little antennae appendages,” Lewis said.
The Wasp Hound could be used by farmers to monitor crops for diseases and pests, airports checking for explosives, doctors monitoring diseases or even defense forces looking for land mines, the researchers said.
By Rachel Metz