African giant pouched rats can detect landmines and diseases. Now some have been trained to ferret out elephant ivory, pangolin scales and more.
A new kind of border patrol agent could soon start work in African ports, sniffing out illegal goods that are smuggled across country lines. They’re rats. And they wear tiny red vests.Wildlife smugglers “are disrupting the biodiversity on the ground by poaching specific species,” says Isabelle Szott, a behavioral ecologist who helped train rats in Morogoro, Tanzania, with) also have potential. The creatures have an incredible sense of smell.
The rats learned to signal for pangolin scales, rhino horn, elephant tusk and African blackwood, which is popular for use in musical instruments. Eventually, the eight rats that completed the project could distinguish the four scents from 146 other odors commonly used by smugglers to mask and hide their goods, like cardboard, electric cables and synthetic wigs.Still, training the rats in the lab to detect scents is only the beginning.
While new wildlife detectives are being trained, some of the original cohort are now enjoying their golden years. Pampered with fruits, veggies and sun-dried fish, “they’ve got a whole retirement colony in APOPO where they just live out their days,” Szott says.
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