For the purpose of the program, researchers at APOPO are using African Giant Pouched Rats. Image courtesy: APOPO
Who knew rats are capable of doing more than creating a menace? A Belgian non-profit company called APOPO has proved that rats might be helpful in search and rescue missions.
The company is training rats and equipping them with tiny high-tech backpacks to help them to scramble through the rubble of collapsed buildings for survivors.
Donna Kean, a researcher at APOPO has trained rodents before for detecting tuberculosis and landmines.
Let’s take a closer look at this ground-breaking research.
Why rats?
The feature that sets apart rats from any other animal to carry out this arduous task is their size coupled with their excellent sense of smell. These two things make rats perfect for locating things in tight spaces.
Donna Kean said, “Rats are typically quite curious and like to explore – and that is key for search and rescue.”
Apart from this, like dogs, rats are easier to train.
However, unlike dogs who typically just go around the site of the debris during rescue operations, researchers at APOPO are hoping that the rats can actually go inside the rubble, owing to their tiny size.
“Typically, with dogs, they just go around the perimeter of a debris site, but with our rats, we’re hoping they can actually penetrate inside the debris and get closer to victims, to give us a better idea of what’s going on under there and exactly where victims are,” Kean said.
How are the rats being trained?
For the purpose of the program, researchers at APOPO are using African Giant Pouched Rats as they have longer lifespans as compared to common brown rats, according to a report by CNN.
The rats start their training in a basic environment that consists of a small and empty room. After some time, the complexity of the environment is turned up gradually to mimic it with real life. Donna Kean told Science Focus, “We can start adding in debris and making the training area look more like an actual collapsed building site.”
They are currently being trained to find survivors in a simulated disaster zone. Under these laboratory circumstances, the rats must first locate the survivors and pull a switch on their vest that will trigger a beeper. Following this, they are trained to return to the base where they are rewarded with a treat.
Kean said that the treat that the rodents get is kind of a smoothie. “The positive reinforcement is kind of like a rat smoothie. So, it’s avocado and banana mixed with ground-up rat pellets. We also have peanuts for some of this reinforcement as well.”
The tiny backpack which will accompany the rats is a prototype that is being developed at Eindhoven University in the Netherlands. The backpack is equipped with a video camera that sends live footage to a receiver module on a laptop and a GPS device. During their training, the backpacks are attached to the rats with a neoprene vest, the same material that is used for scuba suits.
So far, researchers at APOPO have trained the rats to scour areas, detect human presence and ring a sound to alert rescuers. With the help of the GPS device, rescuers will be able to pinpoint the location of the survivor.
The next stage involves the creation of “levels to mimic multiple floors of a collapsed building” and moving closer to “real-world scenarios”.
For the next stage of training, Kean says the team will create “levels to mimic multiple floors of a collapsed building” and move closer to “real-world scenarios.”
Since August 2021, the team has trained seven rats and now hopes that some of them can be deployed to an earthquake zone in Turkey, according to a report by Global News.
While training is crucial, the APOPO team has also made sure that the rats get their fair share of recreation. They get daily playtime in a custom-built playroom along with a diet of fresh fruits and vegetables.
The difficulties
While the training program has been more or less successful but sizing down on more advanced technology and making the rats adapt to different disaster zones hasn’t been easy.
It has been found that the GPS device could not penetrate the dense rubble and debris of the collapsed building. To address this, researchers are trying to create an alternative called the Inertial Measurement Unit, a location tracker that is used in the heels of firefighters’ boots.
The rats start their training in a basic environment that consists of a small and empty room. Image courtesy: APOPO
Another problem lies in the ability to differentiate between a dead body and someone who is alive. Researchers are not yet sure how the rats might react when they find dead bodies as they have only been trained to locate survivors.
However, they are planning to train the rats like dogs who can tell the difference between a living and deceased person based on the odour profile. But researchers are not really sure how to execute this kind of training.
How else have rats been used?
This is not the first time that rats are being used for humanitarian purposes.
APOPO has previously trained an army of rats to detect landmines. These rats can walk over mines without setting them off and use their noses to sniff explosives quickly and efficiently.
According to a report by National Geographic, one rat can search over 2,000 square feet of area in just 20 minutes. These rats have been able to clear over 13,200 miners from minefields in Tanzania, Mozambique, Angola and Cambodia, since the inception of APOPO in 1997.
APOPO began using rats to help detect tuberculosis in patients in Tanzania (2008) and Mozambique (2013). Currently, the animals are employed in over 21 medical centres in Tanzania’s capital Dar es Salaam and they double-check 75 per cent of potential TB samples from medical centres in Mozambique’s capital Maputo.
In the first 16 years of the program, the TB rats evaluated samples from 12,500 in Maputo and of those around 1,700 had been found positive.
With inputs from agencies
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