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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain stuff from how Stuff Works, Hey, brain stuff,

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Speaker 1: Lauren vocabam here. Back in two entomologists Joe Lewis and

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Speaker 1: Jim Tomlinson joined in a project that for the first

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Speaker 1: time uncovered the ability of an insect to learn through association.

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Speaker 1: It was at the time not only novel, it was

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Speaker 1: an out and out revelation an insect, in this case,

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Speaker 1: the parasitic wasp, which feeds on and eventually kills certain

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Speaker 1: agricultural pests, could learn in a most basic way I

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Speaker 1: think Pavlov's dogs, except smaller and buzzier. From that study

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Speaker 1: and other similar research by for example, DARPA, the U.

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Speaker 1: S Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, we have

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Speaker 1: spun forward to the point where honeybees now have successfully

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Speaker 1: sniffed out long buried land mines in Croatia. That's a

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Speaker 1: long way from some thirty years ago when Lewis and

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Speaker 1: Tomlinson released their findings in Nature magazine to the astonishment

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Speaker 1: of many. Louis said, you talked at training an insect period,

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Speaker 1: and you get the look the I start narrowing. It

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Speaker 1: just doesn't make sense. So how did they start making

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Speaker 1: sense of it? Let's talk about associate of learning. The

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Speaker 1: whole idea behind this is fairly simple, even if no

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Speaker 1: one dreamed decades ago that insects could do it. With

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Speaker 1: Pavlov's dogs, when an outside stimulus a bell is often cited,

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Speaker 1: was associated with food, the dogs salivated. The dogs learned

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Speaker 1: intuitively that the bell meant food was coming for the Lewis, tumlins,

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Speaker 1: and wasps. Various odors that the wasps didn't normally recognize,

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Speaker 1: like vanilla or chocolate, or mixed with something that was

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Speaker 1: associated with the pests that these parasitic wasps were trying

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Speaker 1: to make their hosts. After a very short time, the

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Speaker 1: wasps associated the vanilla or whatever with the insects that

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Speaker 1: they wanted to attack, and thus would fly toward the odor.

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Speaker 1: It took less than five minutes to train the wasps, which,

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Speaker 1: like bees and dogs, have all factory senses thousands of

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Speaker 1: times more powerful than a humans. As the studies continued,

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Speaker 1: new researchers linked the smell of various chemical compounds and

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Speaker 1: explosives to food. Today, honey bee trained for just two

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Speaker 1: days could associate the smell of explosives with food and

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Speaker 1: seek out that smell too. Big advantages to training insects

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Speaker 1: to track odors rather than say a dog. They learn faster,

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Speaker 1: and there's a lot more of them to teach. But

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Speaker 1: releasing a swarm of wasps or bees onto a battlefield

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Speaker 1: or even a now quiet meadow in Croatia that may

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Speaker 1: be littered with minds has its challenges. Of course, tracking

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Speaker 1: the insects is foremost among them. It's impossible, as timlins

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Speaker 1: In points out, to put ships on each of them,

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Speaker 1: and you can't, as Louis says, put Alisha on a bee. Still,

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Speaker 1: scientists can trace the insects movements in at least small numbers,

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Speaker 1: through devices like drones and webcams, and something early researchers

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Speaker 1: called a wasp pound. Louis's waspound, about the size of

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Speaker 1: a large coin, contains five wasps, a tiny camera, and

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Speaker 1: a computer fan that pulls air through a small hole

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Speaker 1: in the bottom of the device. When the hound comes

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Speaker 1: near the target, smell the wasps, Lewis says, cluster around

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Speaker 1: that little hole, like pigs to a trough. Another problem

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Speaker 1: researchers face is scale. Training one wasp or one b

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Speaker 1: at a time can be laborious. Scientists have come up

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Speaker 1: with methods to train more than that, but insects, like people,

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Speaker 1: learn at different rates, so mass learning is not as accurate.

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Speaker 1: In addition, bad weather or anything that disrupts the insexibility

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Speaker 1: to smell can cause difficulties. Research is continuing. Tomlinson and

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Speaker 1: Lewis never envisioned be signiffiicg out bombs. Tomlinson is a

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Speaker 1: professor of entomology at Penn State and Lewis a retired

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Speaker 1: professor and a research entomologist with the U S Department

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Speaker 1: of Agriculture in Tifton, Georgia. They were looking for ways

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Speaker 1: to control pests biologically rather than with pesticides, and in

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Speaker 1: fact they were very successful at it. Along with UK

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Speaker 1: scientist John Pickett, Lewis and Tomlinson one the two thousand

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Speaker 1: eight Wolf Prize for Agriculture, considered by many as a

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Speaker 1: type of Nobel Prize in the field. From the official

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Speaker 1: announcement on the Wolf Foundation website, they were awarded the

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Speaker 1: prize quote for their remarkable discoveries of mechanisms governing plant

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Speaker 1: insect and plant plant interactions. Their scientific contributions on chemical

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Speaker 1: ecology have fostered the development of integrated pest management and

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Speaker 1: significantly advanced agricultural sustainability. Whether their work eventually will help

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Speaker 1: form the basis of a widespread practical use of bees

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Speaker 1: and wasps in sniffing out bombs or drugs remains to

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Speaker 1: be seen. Even they have some doubts. Tomlinson said, you

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Speaker 1: can train insects to find a mine, that's not a problem.

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Speaker 1: But then you release them into the field to find

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Speaker 1: a mine. How do you track them unless someone comes

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Speaker 1: up with a small chip so that you can track

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Speaker 1: them with some electronic means. I don't see how in

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Speaker 1: the world you can use them, and says Lewis, to

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Speaker 1: move it from the lab to the actual field. You

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Speaker 1: have to scale it up and refine it. But we

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Speaker 1: clearly can see that it can be practical in development.

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Speaker 1: It's technically feasible. It's all on valid sign it's the

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Speaker 1: ability is there. It's about the demand for it and

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Speaker 1: putting the infrastructure in place for that. Scientists have been

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Speaker 1: trying to find ways to harness the remarkable power of

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Speaker 1: smell for years. Bees, some believe, have such strong abilities

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Speaker 1: that they can smell out illnesses, even cancer. A Spanish

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Speaker 1: designer went so far as developing a prototype bowl complete

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Speaker 1: with honey bees that you can breathe into to see

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Speaker 1: how the bees react as a sort of proto diagnosis,

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Speaker 1: and tests are being done in California with cancer detecting

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Speaker 1: dogs too. Today's episode was written by John Donovan and

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