Wasps: Man's New Best Friend! Entomologists Train Insects to Act Like Sniffing Dogs

By Science Daily

http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2006/0702-wasps_mans_new_best_friend.htm

A new research has proved that wasps are just as good smellers as dogs, and even more sensitive. If rewarded with sugary water, wasps can be trained to smell from disease to explosives! Wasps can smell with the sensors in their antennae just as well as dogs, and are cheaper and easier to train. They can be reproduced by the thousands, and they only take minutes to be disciplined from noisy stingers to police sniffers. Rains tells DBIS that "So far, they've been able to detect, to some level, any chemical that we've trained them to.” Lewis states “We can train a wasp in a matter of 10- 15 minutes.” So far, one of the more efficient tests that have been done was where scientists made wasps smell out coffee. When the smell of orange was pumped into a pipe- nothing, but when the smell of coffee was, all the wasps crowded around it. We now know that wasps can smell out chemicals, explosives, diseases, fungi on crops, human remains, and we predict that they will be able to sniff out cancer in the future!

When I read this article I thought “wow, a wasp is a man’s best friend?” and took is as a joke, but now I really realize that wasps could be more useful than dogs to smell stuff. Since they can be produced and trained so easily, wasps could become really popular. They could help the police track down gangs and smell diseases. We could benefit a great deal from these tiny animals. We could keep them in hospitals to identify diseases, and we could save many lives. We could even use them to smell out cures to diseases, and find many new healing remedies. If they grow really popular we might even start having them as house pets! Thinking food chain wise (everything is linked) that might mean that we might need a larger sugar supply, since wasps will only be trained with sugar water. That means more jobs. Wasps might become the new in! I’ll watch out next time I have a soda and trained smeller wasps are around!