From Buzzing Bees to Sniffer Rats: Unsung Heroes of Africa's Wildlife Conservation

"The beehive fencing has been successful in smaller isolated conservation areas surrounding communities. It has played the dual role of improving the community's livelihoods through honey production. And also scared away elephants from crop raiding the farms where these pilot projects have been tried. So they are effective, but not 100 percent proof because they can only be used in smaller community areas. Kenya's landscape covers huge areas. So, in isolated community conservancies, it is applicable, and it has proved effective that elephants are equally as scared by beehives, the noise from bees. This has been replicated mostly in southern Kenya around Tsavo East National Park. And it can be replicated in similar areas. And I know there have been some replications in some southern African countries," Dr. Omondi notes.

"For many years we've been developing other applications for this new behavior of the rats and what they can do. So we figured that one possibility to do with our rats is to try to use them in combating wildlife trafficking because it is one of the major problems for wildlife and for the environment. Using the the sense of smell of the rats could be a good way. We could have some advantages compared with the technology that is around related to the cost benefit that we can have from the rats. So we start to first, testing if the rats are capable of detecting wildlife materials. We start with one of the most trafficked animals that is the pangolin. We did different tests with them that we reported in the paper that was recently published, and luckily, our data show that our rats are capable of detecting these items," Dr. Cruz says.