A Sting Operation

It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. No matter what line of work you’re in, there’s always somebody willing to do your job for less. Just ask any unemployed K-9 in danger of losing his plush civil service job to a wasp.

Yep. A wasp. According to W. Joe Lewis of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and Glen Rains of the University of Georgia, wasps can be trained in minutes to sniff out drugs, bombs, and bodies. And their sense of smell, which can detect odors as faint as one part per billion, will outperform that of a dog 100% of the time.

The two researchers discovered in 1990 that wasps are able to detect the chemical distress signals sent out by plants which are under attack by caterpillars, swarming to the plants to lay their eggs inside the unsuspecting hosts. Further study revealed that the wasps could be quickly trained to associate virtually any scent, such as chocolate or vanilla, with the presence of an available egg host or food source. “So far we’ve really looked at a wide variety of things and they’ve been able to detect everything they’ve been exposed to,” says Rains. The pair have perfected the training process to the point that they can create an association between any odor and food with only three feedings over the course of five minutes–an important factor, because wasps only live for a couple of weeks.

So, will we soon be seeing wasps straining toward crime scenes at the ends of tiny little leashes?

Not exactly, says Lewis. “What we did was approach the idea of containerizing into a little small capsule area and then pulling the air sources over them. They converge to the inlet quickly and the little camera picks up that all the little dark bodies have suddenly converged around the intake hole in this device.”