Well..this is ingenious! Rats that detect mines? Who knew?
expmag.com
Every weekday, as the sun comes up over Morogoro, Tanzania, an elite team of land mine-detection specialists begins its training. While the breeze blows through the grassy, 60-acre training ground, the specialists weigh in (to ensure their carefully calibrated diets are on track), then set to work searching for deactivated, buried land mines.
They have been trained since birth for this vital work. And for every land mine they find, during training and in the field, they’re rewarded with a delectable mash of bananas and avocados, or maybe a few peanuts.
The specialists are rats. Gambian pouched rats, to be exact. The organization they work for, APOPO, has trained hundreds of them to sniff out and signal the location of buried land mines
And they’re ideal for the job. Weighing about three pounds — roughly the size of a three-month-old kitten — they’re light enough not to set off the explosives. Their superb sense of smell enables them to detect the presence of as little as a billionth of a gram of explosive material. Indigenous to the sub-Saharan region where they work, they’re efficient breeders, with a gestation period of about a month. They’re highly intelligent and exacting, but also fun to work with — congenial, outgoing, curious.
Through the end of 2021, the rats have been responsible for finding 150,000 explosives, including land mines, that were then safely deactivated and removed from the ground. Across seven countries in Africa and Southeast Asia, they’ve had a hand (or paw) in returning 70 million square meters of land back to communities that need it, and “freed close to 2 million people from the terror of land mines,” says Lily Shallom, APOPO’s communications manager.
These highly trained rats have sniffed out 150,000 explosives
The rats are fine: How once-overlooked animal skills are helping humans
expmag.com
Every weekday, as the sun comes up over Morogoro, Tanzania, an elite team of land mine-detection specialists begins its training. While the breeze blows through the grassy, 60-acre training ground, the specialists weigh in (to ensure their carefully calibrated diets are on track), then set to work searching for deactivated, buried land mines.
They have been trained since birth for this vital work. And for every land mine they find, during training and in the field, they’re rewarded with a delectable mash of bananas and avocados, or maybe a few peanuts.
The specialists are rats. Gambian pouched rats, to be exact. The organization they work for, APOPO, has trained hundreds of them to sniff out and signal the location of buried land mines
And they’re ideal for the job. Weighing about three pounds — roughly the size of a three-month-old kitten — they’re light enough not to set off the explosives. Their superb sense of smell enables them to detect the presence of as little as a billionth of a gram of explosive material. Indigenous to the sub-Saharan region where they work, they’re efficient breeders, with a gestation period of about a month. They’re highly intelligent and exacting, but also fun to work with — congenial, outgoing, curious.
Through the end of 2021, the rats have been responsible for finding 150,000 explosives, including land mines, that were then safely deactivated and removed from the ground. Across seven countries in Africa and Southeast Asia, they’ve had a hand (or paw) in returning 70 million square meters of land back to communities that need it, and “freed close to 2 million people from the terror of land mines,” says Lily Shallom, APOPO’s communications manager.
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