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Universal "Death Stench" Repels Bugs of All Types
Hugh Pickens writes "Wired reports that scientists have discovered that insects from cockroaches to caterpillars all emit the same stinky blend of fatty acids when they die and that the death mix may represent a universal, ancient warning signal to avoid their dead or injured. 'Recognizing and avoiding the dead could reduce the chances of catching the disease,' says Biologist David Rollo of McMaster University 'or allow you to get away with just enough exposure to activate your immunity.' Researchers isolated unsaturated fatty acids containing oleic and linoleic acids from the corpses of dead cockroaches and found that their concoction repelled not just cockroaches, but ants and caterpillars. 'It was amazing to find that the cockroaches avoided places treated with these extracts like the plague,' says Rollo. Even crustaceans like woodlice and pillbugs, which diverged from insects 400 million years ago, were repelled leading scientists to think the death mix represents a universal warning signal. Scientists hope the right concoction of death smells might protect crops. Thankfully, human noses can't detect the fatty acid extracts. 'I've tried smelling papers treated with them and don't smell anything strong and certainly not repellent,' writes Rollo in an e-mail. 'Not like the rotting of corpses that occurs later and is detectable from great distances.'"
Maybe for some bugs, but for those nasty caca roches, I get a bowl, wipe the top 4 inches around inside with vegtable oil then put whatever inside... coffee grounds, bananas... whatever... There are tons of dead ones in there but that doesn't stop more from coming. Also, cockroaches are cannibals.
Wouldn't this be the perfect bug repellent? I guess they don't emit the fatty acids when you squash them, or people wouldn't still get bugs in there houses. :-)
LOAD "SIG"
RUN "SIG"
... quit coming to my roach motel.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
we will come! :) We don't care if other people build it either
-Mister cockroach.
The article says humans cannot detect the fatty acid extracts, but I wonder if this theory expands to mammals. After getting a couple of squirrels with my tube trap, squirrels now seem afraid to enter. My wife thought they might "smell death"
The same thing works on sharks. I watched a Discovery show where they got the sharks into a feeding frenzy, dropped some of the repellent (dead shark material) into the water, and all of the sharks took off in seconds.
Thinking about it, I doubt very much that humans millennia ago smelled dead human and though, "Hey, I wonder what killed him. I'm going to go see."
Join the Mobile Infantry and save the Galaxy. Service guarantees citizenship. Would you like to know more?
...an insect repellent.
Your anecdote does nothing to invalidate the article's data.
It makes sense for any animal to avoid a site where its own are dead.
It's the same category of reflex that makes us want to throw up when someone pukes (being social animals we often eat together), that makes us universally find some smells offensive (pretty much always originally attached to something potentially toxic), etc.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Several gardening experts claimed that grinding up bugs and spraying them on crops would repel bugs, but field tests have shown no special results. Perhaps this only works in confined spaces like were cockroaches live.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Mosquito sprays, shark repellants - all that does, is bring about mutations in species, so that the supposed repellant can be overcome with ease. Results are repellent-insensitive mosquitoes, sharks impervious to ultrasound etc.
Bollocks. Can you provide a single reference to a shark repellent which was proved or convincingly demonstrated to be effective and any evidence of a subsequent mutation that caused that species to be immune?
I vote we hose down K Street with it. We'll have a representative democracy in under 5 minutes!
How are they going to use this for protecting crops? If ants are repelled, wasps and bees will be, too, and there goes your pollination.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
Oil is a remarkable sealant - something to keep in mind. I don't have a cockroach problem but, here in Michigan, the wolf spider (and various other species scare the bejebus out of me (ever hear a 12 year old girl scream?) so I have discovered that eucalyptus oil is handy to keep them at bay.
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An obvious reason why pest traps may be less effective is if the dead pests emit a smell that makes others stay away.
If you spread this smell around, it will make pests stay away - but if it comes a point they develop "immunity" to it, it will also greatly increase the effectiveness of pest traps.
So the solution to live cockroaches on my floor is dead cockroaches?
As someone living in a gentrifying neighborhood, any chance this works on hipsters?... (some ground up Converse All-Stars and stovepipe jeans?)
It's called Evolution if there is any kind of advantage (Which outweighs any disadvantages) to the mutation it stands a chance of progressing and becoming widespread. Hence viruses that are immune to most variants of penicillin and bugs that are immune to pesticides. One must say that this doesn't always track though see http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~kyperry3/Blue_Fugates_Troublesome_Creek.html although this involved a very small population who were cognescent.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
What sort of stench does slashdotters emit that predominantly serve as a warning signal to females? And why is there no research on it?
Freakin' lasers?
Because you're simply placing too much emphasis on natural selection being somehow performed with a destination in mind.
Evolution is mostly accident. The fact that the fatty acids inside a dead corpse happen to put off others has nothing to do with those creatures benefiting from it - it's just the way fatty acids smell when a living thing dies. And any sensible living thing might well benefit from detecting a unique odour that only occurs around rotting corpses so that it can steer clear of the area - the danger might still be present and/or a rotting corpse isn't particularly a good thing to smother yourself in.
However, my question would be more along the lines of: if it's a universal smell, why don't humans smell it... and are vultures and other carrion-eaters put off by it?
I remember seeing something of this nature from Planet Earth in which certain groups of insect actually have "grave yard" section in their colony where they put their dead.
Nature doesn't have a knack for anything, it's a dumb process.
But you're kind of right - if the reproductive advantages a species of insect gains from living in human dwellings outweighs the reproductive advantages of an aversion to "Death Stench," insects unaffected by this odor will fill the niche.
Does this mean we'll never have sharks with frickin' lasers?
"..."
"were repelled leading scientists to think..."
WTF!?
It's called Evolution if there is any kind of advantage (Which outweighs any disadvantages)
Sort of. Any advantage that outweighs a disadvantage and allows for more procreation stands a chance. The procreation bit is key.
Image: Flickr/bensheldon. Note: This photo was chosen from a disturbingly large volume of dead cockroach images on Flickr.
Every once in a while the internet totally redeems itself. :-P
Just the stuff I want to read over breakfast.
If your only tool is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail.
it's our apartment too We've been around for a hundred billion years and we'll be here long after you!
It doesn't surprise me that penicillin (an antibiotic) doesn't work too well against a virus. That's not a mutation.
Perhaps you meant bacteria that are immune to penicillin (which, in many cases, are the result of stupid people insisting on trying to treat viral infections with antibiotics).
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
All the time I spent vacuuming out dead roaches from my computer cases... wasted. If I'd mashed them flat instead, obviously I'd have had a lot fewer live bugs to eliminate from my code as a result.
Is this why there's an article today that RAID's days may be numbered?
oops sorry my mistake must cut down on liquid lunch :)
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
This is really interesting, especially considering the potential application for protecting crops. I have 2 concerns though:
1) How quickly does the substance dissipate? Would a farmer have to spray the every time it rains/there's a light breeze?
2) How long before some bugs say "ah, screw the smell, i'm hungry, dammit!" Some insects might evolve to sacrifice their natural defense from disease for the sake of a good meal, thus making the process useless... Thankfully there aren't really a whole lot of diseases that affect both insects and humans, what with us being in an entirely different phylum and all...
weinersmith
Yup already acknowledged my mistake to the other reply
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
A few decades ago, Edward O. Wilson proved that ants mark their trails with scent by removing their organs individually and smearing them around. Eventually he found one that would cause them to follow the trail, and would demonstrate his discovery by writing his name in ants.
I heard a recorded lecture where he told this story, and he also mentioned that they discovered the "dead ant" smell that would signal the colony that "this one is dead, go put it on the pile." When they put the scent on a live ant, the other ants would carry it off to the pile, ignoring the fact that it was squirming the whole way there. And until the stinky ant cleaned itself off enough, they would keep putting it back every time it left the pile.
Maybe for some bugs, but for those nasty caca roches, I get a bowl, wipe the top 4 inches around inside with vegtable oil then put whatever inside... coffee grounds, bananas... whatever... There are tons of dead ones in there but that doesn't stop more from coming. Also, cockroaches are cannibals.
Got a roach problem? Cheap boric acid, sold in plastic bottles everywhere. Don't dump it, pour it, spoon it. Don't waste time preparing mixtures of food and boric acid. Snip the top off of the plastic top. Tip the bottle a little bit, and squeeze. Practice until you can create clouds of fine particles floating in the air. Globs and clumps of white powder do you no good at all - you want a very fine cloud to float out, so that it can settle and coat everything.
Get rid of kids and pets for a couple days - some people say this stuff is bad for them.
Proceed to walk all around the house, puffing powder into every corner, nook, crevice, and cranny. Don't forget to crawl under the sink, behind the toilet, behind doors - everywhere. Get the cracks between window frames, behind mirrors, closets, every where! Got a crawlspace under the house? Get down there and puff away. Don't forget the attic, if you have one. Powder the water heater, and the cubby hole that it stands in. (gas heater? this stuff isn't flammable, but for safety sake, you might turn the gas off for a few hours) Get under and behind appliances like microwaves, refrigerators, freezers, washers, dryers and dishwashers.
Perhaps most importantly, puff this stuff into all cracks between baseboards, paneling, corners of rooms, door frames. If you can get a tool behind a baseboard or panel, pry it out slightly to puff dust behind it.
I've cleaned out unbelievable infestations in repossessed mobile homes. They don't come back! Three or four of those 1 pound bottles will take care of the largest single wide mobile home, I've used six in doublewides.
If no one is actually living in the home, there's no need to "clean up" right away. Leave everything like it is, so that if you've missed anyplace, those cannibal roaches come out to consume the dead.
When it is time to clean up - just sweep and mop floors. There's no need to vacuum the dust from inaccessible places. Just leave it to aid in prevention of future infestations.
For ten dollars or less, you can accomplish what the high dollar pest control companies cannot.
NOTE: Dusting for roaches may be less effective in the moist basements inhabited by geeks.
This will have the same problem in twenty years on crops and pesticides that we're having in antibiotics today: It'll lose effectiveness over time. No matter how you cut it, sooner or later a living organism will find its own survival compels it to attempt to cross the barrier. And when it survives, it will pass its genes onto its progeny. Eventually there will be a gene that pops up where this "universal" stench impulse is suppressed, and it will populate wildly.
The problem here is capitalism doesn't care -- only protecting high value targets would be the sensible precaution, but why only do that when can make millions, even billions, for a few years until the resistance is developed? And nevermind the ethical implications of short-circuiting a natural defense mechanism -- we might give cockroaches and other insects, that make up a significant amount of the biomass, the ability to spread diseases on a massive scale, since they aren't afraid of their dead anymore.
Oops.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Wouldn't the smell also repel pollinators as well?
This sounds cool. But I wonder if it would backfire.
This seems like bunk to me. I've cleaned some very nasty rentals, and I've removed roach grave yards by the pound. Every roach I've ever seen doesn't bat an eye at eating their departed comrades.
Okay, I understand now that the smell itself is flagged by the animals as a warning sign. It was a genuine question I had, yet some begrudged slashdotter felt the need to mod me as a troll...
Well this is the most common mistake people make about evolution. There is no "divine intervention" so there is no purpose, however I wouldn't call it "accident". It's much more like a filter.
You have 3 cockroaches, one is dead and two are living. One of the two living is fat and hates the smell of other dead cockroaches. The other is thin and doesn't get bothered by the smell of dead cockroaches. The dead cockroach was killed by an airborne disease. The fat cockroach stays away while the thin cockroach doesn't care. The result? The thin cockroach dies from the same disease, thus the genes of the fat cockroach get passed along, making the chance of future cockroaches being fat and repellant to the smell of other cockroaches much higher than if both had lived. Thus nature has selected.
50 years later this strain of cockroach has migrated to a more difficult terrain. Offspring is never a copy, but an alternation, and every now and then the fat cockroaches get thin offspring. Now 2 cockroaches both feel repelled by the smell of a dead cockroach, except one is thin and the other is fat. The terrain requires mobility in order to survive so naturally the fat cockroach dies and the thin lives on to have offspring of its own. Now the strain is generally thin and is generally repelled by the smell of dead corpses. As time passes new dangers and threats emerge, and old ones disappear. During this entire period the species are filtered to only sustain those fit enough to live.
So it's not an accident, it's a filter. If you are adapted well enough to pass it you may, if not then you get stuck and so does your genes. As a side note there was a study done in the 70's, I think, where a scientist bred 12 generations of mice and had their tails cut off. The result? Nothing, the new mice kept having the same type of tail that their ancestor had. So we don't evolve as peers, we evolve as species through death.
I am the lawn!
I'm guessing this would be a pretty non-toxic bug deterrent as it wouldn't need to kill them, just fool them into thinking the sprayed area was deadly. So you could spray it into areas containing food items. As someone who recently had a pest infestation, I'd welcome this. (Double infestation, actually. Termites which were only found when we called an exterminator to examine the beetle larvae we found all over our house. Those wound up being pantry pests.)
Another thought occurs though, if the "death mix" becomes commonly applied in a pest control setting, how long until the bugs learn that the "death mix" in human households doesn't mean actual death? Would the death mix's effectiveness decrease? Bugs with a lesser "death mix" aversion might actually gain a survival advantage (more exclusive access to food sources) and thus multiply more. Would our commercializing the "death mix" result in evolution rendering it ineffective?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
My guess would be that these compounds which repel the insects probably decay after a few hours or days? At which point,the other roaches come back and chow down?
The very high degree of conservation of this trait across species suggests that there are already strong selective pressures to maintain it. Selective use of this stuff is not likely to counter that. Also most evolution happens through frequency shifts of alleles already present in the population, not through creation of new alleles by mutation. Given the long evolutionary history, there may not be many non-functioning alleles for this trait to promote. Mutations are random and infrequent, and most are lethal. It could be many, many years before a suitable mutation arises.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Dry Land?
All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.
Isn't it cute to note that so many /. geeks are now also apparently insect experts
Bollocks. Can you provide a single reference to a shark repellent which was proved or convincingly demonstrated to be effective and any evidence of a subsequent mutation that caused that species to be immune?
This demonstration is pretty darn convincing. Right? And sure enough, a later mutation came along with immunity. One day science will give us* bat-catshark repellent, but until then, I'm staying clear of any body of water larger than I can comfortably drink.
* And by "us" I mean "those of us who dress up light a creature of the night to strike fear into the hearts of criminals".
Fatty acids? That is great news for all the overweight junkies, now they will be paid to do drugs and given free acid while on work at the farms! ;P
Carbon based humanoid in training.
isn't a "cold" actually a virus?
Yeah, enteroviruses. The cold used to be from rhinoviruses, but they got merged.* It's likely her doctor was concerned about opportunistic infections - such as pneumonia - and gave her antibiotics preventative-like. (In my opinion, doing so is usually overreacting, but I'm not a medical-type doctor and, if I were, I don't know anything about your sister. So do what the nice doctor tells you.)
* The recession impacts everything. I definitely didn't expect it, but then I never studied microeconomics.
Great, finally there's a way to get these damn lobsters off my crops!
When I was very young I lived on a house with a cockroaches problem (the memory of the sound when you step over a crock without shoes is never going to go away). I could without a doubt tell if a drawer had a dead crock in it. The odor was very strong and repugnant to me. I don't remember smelling the same odor ever as an adult so the capacity to detect it may go away as you age.
All bugs emit a certain smell when they die. Some bugs find that smell repulsive, some don't.
One of those two will remove themselves from the "death area" and later have offspring.
It is not the trait that they smell bad when they die that is transmitted, but the trait that said smell is repulsive.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I thought that crushed wasps and hornets, for example, give off a smell that causes their brothers (wait- actually sisters, right?) to go into attack mode.
- AJ
'It was amazing to find that the cockroaches avoided places treated with these extracts like the plague,' says Rollo
I worry about what will happen if we all do actually get the plague. Where will these health-conscious cockroaches go?
- Alaska Jack
I learned this while watching an episode of Nova... An individual who had spent the better part of his long career researching ants applied oleic acid to a living ant. Surrounding ants swarmed it and began to carry it toward the nest (as ants supposedly do with their dead). If this is the case, this obviously isn't the end-all solution to repelling insects that the summary makes it out to be. I also imagine ants aren't the only insects that come back for their dead. I found some supportive information of my claim here.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
Well you're sort of right. It's not "any advantage" it generally has to be a fairly substantial advantage simply because there's usually a whole hell of a lot more of any species without a new mutation than with a new mutation. Survival rates have to be a noticeable improvement to overcome that disparity.
So for instance, sharks are very unlikely to ever evolve to be resistant to repellent because while eating humans would be better than not if the shark was hungry, humans are not a major part of the shark diet even as is so there probably will never be a large enough survival increase from having that mutation.
On the other hand, human food is a fairly large part of the diets of household cockroaches. Not having access to this food source would probably drastically decrease the cockroach's lifespan. This would mean that if a mutation occurs it might provide enough pressure to evolve the species itself. Presuming of course that the disadvantages of losing this aversion(which presumably has a very strong survival benefit since it is universal) don't overcome the survival advantages of human food, and of course that the right mutation happens to happen.
If you play WoW for more than 12 hours straight, your body begins to emit the same odor.
Will it work on bed bugs? On mosquitoes? Houseflies?
http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/usfeatures/midges/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceratopogonidae
Most species of predators target live prey. It might be an evolutionary tactic to avoid diseased prey. There are scavenger species in nature but they are fewer in number and not many for insects. Typically scavenging insects are left for things like molds, fungi, etc due to scale.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Not just in Canada. All over the North American continent. I was recently in Rocky Mountain National Park and the rangers told me that it's an epidemic in all the national parks but there wasn't much they could do about it.
Incidentally there was a strategy that they were trying to develop that involved other scents. Apparently when a pine beetle first attacks a tree they emit a pheromone that attracts other beetles. After the population reaches a certain point on a tree, the beetles stop emitting that pheromone and instead emit a repels other beetles to signal that the tree is fully occupied.
Unfortunately that strategy was only in infancy stages and there wasn't enough production of such pheromones to implement widely.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The scent of a dead cockroach might repel other cockroaches. But throw a dead hooker in a ditch and see how fast the bugs congregate.
Have gnu, will travel.
Results are repellent-insensitive mosquitoes, sharks impervious to ultrasound etc.
That is not how evolution works. If the process doesn't kill or prevent the species from passing on their genes or gives the resistant ones an edge over the non-resistant then it does not cause the resistance to become species wide.
The reason we see resistant bacteria is because we are basically performing complete genocide in the process and therefore only the resistant ones survive.
If made a shark repellent that killed all the sharks in the ocean, then yeah... The only sharks left would be resistant to that.
But if a repellent doesn't kill sharks then its not going to cause such a thing.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
What no CSI:Caveman edition? How primitive!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
A friend of mine would kill one roach, and stick it on a toothpick (or a "pike" as he called it) and stood it up on a bottle-cork at the entrance to a hole -- as an "example to the others!" He swore it worked.
Your engaging anecdote has inspired me to make an illustrated example.
-kgj
This reminds me of the "human repellent" of Count Dracul. (The source of the Dracula and Vampire legends. You can thank him for Twilight.)
He just put a huge load of humans or heads on poles around his castle.
But just like the cockroaches will get used to it, and learn the difference (albeit slowly) between real dead and fake dead bugs, so did the humans in Romania.
Dracul's dead was not pretty. Not even by his standards. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
That is very cool, does it run on windows?
She has an ear infection too, heard that rumor floatin' around earlier.
Plain old kerosene and other hydrocarbons are very effective repellants, also being very toxic to the critters. One wonders if this "discovery" was compared for relative effectiveness of these cheap substances. Uncle Al Schwartz has talked about this bug-death-smell-as-repellant for years.