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Oct. 30, 2005, 9:41AM Wasps being 'packaged' to detect specific odors5 of the insects work together to trigger alarms for suspicious scentsBy GUY GUGLIOTTAWashington Post
A team in Georgia has built a tiny device that uses trained wasps to detect specific odors — a prototype "biological sensor" capable of sniffing out anything from chemical warfare agents to corpses.
Five fly-size parasitic wasps — which don't sting — are placed in a disk-shaped chamber about the size of two stacked checkers, with a hole in the bottom and a tiny fan that sucks air into the disk. If the wasps detect a suspicious odor, they gather around the hole, creating a cluster of pixels for a tiny webcam that sends an alarm signal. Entomologist W. Joe Lewis, of the Agriculture Department's Agricultural Research Service, said he and colleagues have known for nearly 20 years that, with a reward of sugar water, wasps can be trained in as little as five minutes to respond to almost any odor. "But this is the first packaged system," Lewis said from his lab in Tifton, Ga. Ultimately, the "Wasp Hound" will be "like a small BlackBerry" that can be operated robotically or by hand. The disk would be swapped out after a few passes. Lewis and Glen Rains, a biological engineer at the University of Georgia, are publishing their latest research in the January-February issue of the journal Biotechnology Progress. "The wasps are cheap and reliable, and you can breed thousands of them," Lewis said. Other researchers are showing that wasps are not the only insects that can be trained. "What we once thought of as instinct is, in fact, learning," Lewis said. "And once you know that, you have a whole new emerging technology."
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