It’s all the buzz these days – parasitoid wasps could be the next biggest thing in forensics.

“These wasps do not sting and have an extremely sensitive olfactory system,” Glen Rains, an associate professor in the biological and agricultural engineering’s coastal research department, told The Red & Black.

“It also turned out that to improve their foraging efficiency when searching for hosts to lay eggs, they learn from their positive and negative encounters and become classically conditioned to odors that hosts or food are there,” he said.

Rains and his wasps were filmed in May by National Geographic for a television show based on forensics. The wasps’ scent ability was compared to that of a police dog named Brixa, according to a College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences news release.

Unlike dogs, wasps identify odors through scent receptor neurons on their antennae, Rains said.

He believes National Geographic learned of his research from a presentation he gave at an annual American Academy of Forensic Sciences meeting.

“The presentation I gave compared wasp sensitivity to a cadaver dog,” Rains said. “We did not reach the limits of sensitivity for either, but the wasps were more accurate than dogs. The wasps had fewer false positives.”

He said it was difficult to determine the lower limits of scent detection, but both dogs and wasps are very low.

Rains said training happened very quickly. The parasitic wasps are given sugar water and simultaneously are exposed to an odor for several seconds and then given a two-minute break.

“After that the wasp will respond extremely well when exposed to the odor again,” he said.

To better train the wasps, Rains engineered a pipe called the Wasp Hound.

The Wasp Hound has one end covered by a fan and a Web camera, while the other has a removable cap with a pinhole through which odors are emitted, according to the release.

If the wasps recognize the odor, they crowd around the pinhole. If not, they do not react. A software system then analyzes the reaction to determine if it is a negative or positive response to the scent given.

“The Wasp Hound was developed to be able to observe behavioral changes of the wasps without having them flying around,” Rains said. “There are too many distractions in the environment that could make the wasps unreliable in an open area.”

Rains is no stranger to insects’ scenting ability – as a child, he researched the chemical trails ants left behind to lead others to food.

For his latest project, he was inspired by and worked with retired United States Department of Agriculture entomologist Joe Lewis.

“The reason we were studying them is they’re important as biological control agents,” Lewis said in a telephone interview.

He said they wanted to learn how the wasps tracked their reproductive hosts, a type of bollworm that infects tomato plants.

However, Lewis said, he and Rains were unsure if the wasps could be trained to identify scents that are not natural to them – such as drugs and bombs.

“We hope to begin unraveling some of the processes involved in learning and memory using the wasp as a model, and use that information to develop an even more sensitive detector,” Rains said.

He said he hopes the parasitic wasp research – and similar studies with honey bees – will help in creating a mathematical behavior model to predict odors the insects are identifying.

“There are literally millions of insect species, some of which may be tuned to very specific chemicals in their environment,” Rains said. “For example, blow flies are tuned to odors produced by decaying meat and can find dead bodies very quickly.”

Lewis said their findings are major discoveries, though they are more accepted now than they would have been in the past.

“Twenty to 30 years ago, had we suggested insects could learn, we would have been laughed at,” he said.