Speaker 1: Welcome to brain stuff from how Stuff Works, Hey, brain stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren vocabam here. Back in two entomologists Joe Lewis and
Speaker 1: Jim Tomlinson joined in a project that for the first
Speaker 1: time uncovered the ability of an insect to learn through association.
Speaker 1: It was at the time not only novel, it was
Speaker 1: an out and out revelation an insect, in this case,
Speaker 1: the parasitic wasp, which feeds on and eventually kills certain
Speaker 1: agricultural pests, could learn in a most basic way I
Speaker 1: think Pavlov's dogs, except smaller and buzzier. From that study
Speaker 1: and other similar research by for example, DARPA, the U.
Speaker 1: S Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, we have
Speaker 1: spun forward to the point where honeybees now have successfully
Speaker 1: sniffed out long buried land mines in Croatia. That's a
Speaker 1: long way from some thirty years ago when Lewis and
Speaker 1: Tomlinson released their findings in Nature magazine to the astonishment
Speaker 1: of many. Louis said, you talked at training an insect period,
Speaker 1: and you get the look the I start narrowing. It
Speaker 1: just doesn't make sense. So how did they start making
Speaker 1: sense of it? Let's talk about associate of learning. The
Speaker 1: whole idea behind this is fairly simple, even if no
Speaker 1: one dreamed decades ago that insects could do it. With
Speaker 1: Pavlov's dogs, when an outside stimulus a bell is often cited,
Speaker 1: was associated with food, the dogs salivated. The dogs learned
Speaker 1: intuitively that the bell meant food was coming for the Lewis, tumlins,
Speaker 1: and wasps. Various odors that the wasps didn't normally recognize,
Speaker 1: like vanilla or chocolate, or mixed with something that was
Speaker 1: associated with the pests that these parasitic wasps were trying
Speaker 1: to make their hosts. After a very short time, the
Speaker 1: wasps associated the vanilla or whatever with the insects that
Speaker 1: they wanted to attack, and thus would fly toward the odor.
Speaker 1: It took less than five minutes to train the wasps, which,
Speaker 1: like bees and dogs, have all factory senses thousands of
Speaker 1: times more powerful than a humans. As the studies continued,
Speaker 1: new researchers linked the smell of various chemical compounds and
Speaker 1: explosives to food. Today, honey bee trained for just two
Speaker 1: days could associate the smell of explosives with food and
Speaker 1: seek out that smell too. Big advantages to training insects
Speaker 1: to track odors rather than say a dog. They learn faster,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot more of them to teach. But
Speaker 1: releasing a swarm of wasps or bees onto a battlefield
Speaker 1: or even a now quiet meadow in Croatia that may
Speaker 1: be littered with minds has its challenges. Of course, tracking
Speaker 1: the insects is foremost among them. It's impossible, as timlins
Speaker 1: In points out, to put ships on each of them,
Speaker 1: and you can't, as Louis says, put Alisha on a bee. Still,
Speaker 1: scientists can trace the insects movements in at least small numbers,
Speaker 1: through devices like drones and webcams, and something early researchers
Speaker 1: called a wasp pound. Louis's waspound, about the size of
Speaker 1: a large coin, contains five wasps, a tiny camera, and
Speaker 1: a computer fan that pulls air through a small hole
Speaker 1: in the bottom of the device. When the hound comes
Speaker 1: near the target, smell the wasps, Lewis says, cluster around
Speaker 1: that little hole, like pigs to a trough. Another problem
Speaker 1: researchers face is scale. Training one wasp or one b
Speaker 1: at a time can be laborious. Scientists have come up
Speaker 1: with methods to train more than that, but insects, like people,
Speaker 1: learn at different rates, so mass learning is not as accurate.
Speaker 1: In addition, bad weather or anything that disrupts the insexibility
Speaker 1: to smell can cause difficulties. Research is continuing. Tomlinson and
Speaker 1: Lewis never envisioned be signiffiicg out bombs. Tomlinson is a
Speaker 1: professor of entomology at Penn State and Lewis a retired
Speaker 1: professor and a research entomologist with the U S Department
Speaker 1: of Agriculture in Tifton, Georgia. They were looking for ways
Speaker 1: to control pests biologically rather than with pesticides, and in
Speaker 1: fact they were very successful at it. Along with UK
Speaker 1: scientist John Pickett, Lewis and Tomlinson one the two thousand
Speaker 1: eight Wolf Prize for Agriculture, considered by many as a
Speaker 1: type of Nobel Prize in the field. From the official
Speaker 1: announcement on the Wolf Foundation website, they were awarded the
Speaker 1: prize quote for their remarkable discoveries of mechanisms governing plant
Speaker 1: insect and plant plant interactions. Their scientific contributions on chemical
Speaker 1: ecology have fostered the development of integrated pest management and
Speaker 1: significantly advanced agricultural sustainability. Whether their work eventually will help
Speaker 1: form the basis of a widespread practical use of bees
Speaker 1: and wasps in sniffing out bombs or drugs remains to
Speaker 1: be seen. Even they have some doubts. Tomlinson said, you
Speaker 1: can train insects to find a mine, that's not a problem.
Speaker 1: But then you release them into the field to find
Speaker 1: a mine. How do you track them unless someone comes
Speaker 1: up with a small chip so that you can track
Speaker 1: them with some electronic means. I don't see how in
Speaker 1: the world you can use them, and says Lewis, to
Speaker 1: move it from the lab to the actual field. You
Speaker 1: have to scale it up and refine it. But we
Speaker 1: clearly can see that it can be practical in development.
Speaker 1: It's technically feasible. It's all on valid sign it's the
Speaker 1: ability is there. It's about the demand for it and
Speaker 1: putting the infrastructure in place for that. Scientists have been
Speaker 1: trying to find ways to harness the remarkable power of
Speaker 1: smell for years. Bees, some believe, have such strong abilities
Speaker 1: that they can smell out illnesses, even cancer. A Spanish
Speaker 1: designer went so far as developing a prototype bowl complete
Speaker 1: with honey bees that you can breathe into to see
Speaker 1: how the bees react as a sort of proto diagnosis,
Speaker 1: and tests are being done in California with cancer detecting
Speaker 1: dogs too. Today's episode was written by John Donovan and
Speaker 1: produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff has merch now. You
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