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December 28, 2005
Bomb-Sniffing Wasps
No, this isn't from The Onion. Trained wasps:
The tiny, non-stinging wasps can check for hidden explosives at airports and monitor for toxins in subway tunnels."You can rear them by the thousands, and you can train them within a matter of minutes," says Joe Lewis, a U.S. Agriculture Department entomologist. "This is just the very tip of the iceberg of a very new resource."
Sounds like it will be cheap enough....
EDITED TO ADD (12/29): Bomb-sniffing bees are old news.
Posted on December 28, 2005 at 12:47 PM • 34 Comments
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Glauber Ribeiro • December 28, 2005 1:23 PM
It sounds like a perfect beginning for a "B" sci-fi movie.
AMontville • December 28, 2005 1:40 PM
If it does work, it's interesting to note (as does the article) that this flexible detection tool is biological.
Ed T. • December 28, 2005 2:05 PM
Yeah, and I can see the panic that would ensue if/when one of those containers broke, and released the wasps into a crowd. Never mind that they are the non-stinging variety.
Also, I am guessing this species is non-native to many areas -- any idea what the environmental impacts are of importing the species into such areas?
ARL • December 28, 2005 2:15 PM
They have been using Honey Bees for locating land mines for years now. Bees, ants and wasps can follow very faint chemical odors to locate food and each other.
Thomas Sprinkmeier • December 28, 2005 2:50 PM
There are moral questions left unanswered.
Can the wasps still fly with the kind of protective cloathing we give human bomb-detectors, or are we treating living things as a disposable resource?
Todd towles • December 28, 2005 3:05 PM
@ Thomas
Our world treats many living things as disposable resources. Are trees are living thing? I would say so...but they aren't animals. ;)
I just fail to see how a wasp would set off a bomb. The Wasps aren't disarming the bomb, only detecting. This is the reason why human bomb techs have to wear suits in the first place.
moonglum • December 28, 2005 3:10 PM
Thomas: I will assume you are being sacastic...if not do you eat only minerals? where do you draw the line as to what is living and what is not.
Adam • December 28, 2005 3:12 PM
It will be fascinating to see how this pans out in trials in the real world. What sorts of perfume, soaps, foods, etc, will cause the grouping effect?
Will that grouping be seen as probable cause for further searching, like dog sniffs are? (Despite the documented un-reliability of dogs.) On the bright side, its probably harder for wasps to play Mr. Ed and respond to the desires of the people around them...
jammit • December 28, 2005 3:14 PM
Not being able to protect the bees might be a problem, but they can only detect bomb material and not defuse because we don't have pliers small enough to fit into their tiny pinchers, so I guess that would be ok. The Isralies use bomb detecting pigs for two reasons:
(1) They have a more sensitive sniffer than dogs and easier to train.
(2) Most radical Muslims really, really hate pigs.
Steve • December 28, 2005 3:24 PM
This story was on National Public Radio's All Things Considered on December 5. The report may be found here.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?...
Osama bin Login • December 28, 2005 3:27 PM
Wow-I'm getting old. I remember when the only sniffing wasps did at airports was at people they deemed unworthy of flying, back when "jet-set" still meant something...
Anonymous Idiot • December 28, 2005 4:34 PM
Gee... when I first saw it, I read wasps as WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) and thought maybe Bruce was looking to thin the herd of Bush supporters...
(yes, this is meant in jest).
Joseph • December 28, 2005 4:39 PM
This species is the kind of wasp that lays their eggs inside other larvae, and then their young hatch and slowly eat their way out of the host larvae while it is still alive. Lovely little critters.
Kelly's Heroes • December 28, 2005 5:15 PM
@Todd towles
"I just fail to see how a wasp would set off a bomb. The Wasps aren't disarming the bomb, only detecting. This is the reason why human bomb techs have to wear suits in the first place."
Well you fail to see because you don't know about the hundreds of different types of bomb triggers out there. Mercury switches, wind/touch sensitive fishing line looking stuff. And that's just the few things I know about.
As for the bomb suits on human bomb techs, they're only there so that the family can have a nice funeral. Anything over your friendly, average size grenade and the concussion alone, from the bomb they're working on (if it detonates) is going to kill the bomb tech. And that's -from- an Air Force EOD tech.
Joe Huffman • December 28, 2005 6:45 PM
I admire the innovation in the research laboratory but I am skeptical of success in the real world. The wasps apparently have to be trained for each specific volatile chemical. The 2,4-DNT mentioned in the article as being present in dynamite doesn't exist in other explosives such as ammonium-nitrate/fuel-oil mixtures. Ammonium nitrate by itself doesn't really have any volatile byproducts--other than, in some cases, ammonia which would result in the obvious problem with false positives. Fuel oil sensing would also have similar problems with false positives as well as being easily replaced with almost any hydrocarbon including such things as diesel and/or powdered sugar.
The ATF as well as foreign regulatory agencies require plastic explosives to be manufactured with a small percentage of volatile chemicals such as Ethylene glycol dinitrate, 2,3-Dimethyl-2,3-dinitrobutane, para-mononitrotoluene, or ortho-mononitrotoluene. This is to make it feasible to easily detect the presence of the explosives.
It would be overly optimistic to assume terrorists would conform to these requirement in the manufacture of their own explosives.
Jonathan • December 28, 2005 6:49 PM
Didn't Ernst Jünger comment on this in the mid-1950s? I do remember that Zapparoni, the villain of 'The Glass Bees', began his industry with artificial insects trained to detect smells. But weren't there real bees as well?
Osama bin Login • December 28, 2005 6:55 PM
'Course, there'll also be bomb-sniffing lobsters soon--really!: "Scientists are deciphering the mystery of the lobster’s amazing sense of smell. What they’ve learned is helping them to build bomb-sniffing underwater robots." "...there is no better nose to imitate than the lobster's schnoz..." & "...RoboLobster is good at sniffing out plumes..." (LINK:) http://scicom.ucsc.edu/SciNotes/0201/lo/lobster/
Roy Owens • December 28, 2005 7:56 PM
Obvious questions:
1. How specific is the training? If trained to detect nitroglycerin, would the insect detect only that and not other chemicals with the same or even similar functional groups?
If the training is specific to a particular molecule, then there will have to be a swarm of wasps, each differently trained, to cover all of the chemicals peculiar to bombmaking. (I very much doubt the wasps will be able to smell aluminum pellets.)
If the training is not so specific, then false positives will bog down the system.
2. How time-stable is the specificity? Once the insect is trained to criterion, will the specificity hold there indefinitely? Or will the specificity drift over time?
How long is a wasp's training good for? Will it have to be retrained after an spell of searching, going through people's luggage or cargo? Will the huge host of airborne chemicals confuse the critters? Is this useful span in days, hours, or minutes?
Ari Heikkinen • December 28, 2005 8:21 PM
Well, if it's reliable and cheap too I can't see why not give it a try..
Davi Ottenheimer • December 28, 2005 10:19 PM
I like it. Integrated Pest Management takes on a whole new meaning.
Davi Ottenheimer • December 28, 2005 10:43 PM
BTW...do you think the DoD was offering a "bug bounty" when they sponsored the research?
Bruce Schneier • December 29, 2005 8:40 AM
"Don't wasps have a really short lifespan?"
If they're cheap enough, who cares?
Anonymous • December 29, 2005 8:41 AM
"I just fail to see how a wasp would set off a bomb. The Wasps aren't disarming the bomb, only detecting. This is the reason why human bomb techs have to wear suits in the first place."
I think these are just for detection, not for any subsequent action.
Bruce Schneier • December 29, 2005 8:43 AM
"Can the wasps still fly with the kind of protective cloathing we give human bomb-detectors, or are we treating living things as a disposable resource?"
I simply have to assume this is a joke.
abc • December 29, 2005 9:46 PM
Here's a project where they use honeybees to find mines, and then find the bees with a laser system. I know some people who worked on it.
ajt • December 30, 2005 8:29 AM
My partner is one of the people with their name on the patent for this technology. She worked for Joe a number of years ago when this work began. It's all very old hat really, nothing very exciting at all.
Anonymous • December 31, 2005 7:17 PM
" "Don't wasps have a really short lifespan?"
If they're cheap enough, who cares?"
PETA- just wait
Raul del Angelo • January 3, 2006 8:01 PM
I think the real use of these is to smell out draft dodgers, pot smokers, Muslims, members of the ACLU and all those others who don't have there specially scented Party ID card. The real use of this technology is to detect a scent that you expect to find not one that may occur. Like National ID cards.
Nicole • January 30, 2007 5:44 PM
Hold on a sec. Why are we even discussing the morality of using wasps to do a job that could potentially save human lives??? If it works, which I'm skeptical of, I say a human life is worth any number of wasps. Use them.
jessie • August 20, 2007 6:42 PM
I am trying to answer to my homework and i was trying to see what the average life of a wasp. Like how long can a wasp live? Can y'all help me? Email me by 7-20-07 by 10:30!
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