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It's Thursday, September 5th and just like every day, today is Science Friday. I'm Sci-Fi producer Kathleen Davis. Spotted lantern flies are an invasive nuisance. They're quick spreaders that love to chow down on certain plants, particularly fruit trees.
Scientists are training dogs to sniff out the eggs of these insects to help stop their spread. We'll talk about that story in just a minute. But first, here's guest host Rachel Feltman with new information on the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
Around 66 million years ago, an asteroid slammed into the earth, spewed dust and rock everywhere, plumbin' it the planet into cold darkness, and ended the age of dinosaurs. It might be the most famous natural disaster in our planet's history, but scientists still have plenty of questions about it. Like, what was the asteroid made of? And where did it come from?
A new study in the journal Science offers up some long awaited answers. Lead author Dr. Mario Fisher Guda is a geochemist at the University of Cologne in Germany. Welcome to Science Friday. Yeah, hi there. Many thanks for having me. So let's get into it. Were you able to figure out what the asteroid was made of?
Yes, we definitely found an answer to this because we could show with our new study that it was a carbonaceous type asteroid. That's asteroids that formed further out in the solar system, initially beyond the orbit of Jupiter. They contain like higher amounts of water, carbon and nitrogen compared to S-type asteroids, which are solutions type asteroids that are composed of silicate and metal, and they form more in the inner solar system.
And a new data show that the chick's loop impactor was a carbonaceous type asteroid. So the chick's loop impactor that killed the dinos was basically like a flaming carbon-rich ball of rock, right? Yeah, when it entered the Earth's atmosphere, of course it was already starting to to flame up. And when it smashed into the crust of rocks, then everything got vaporized at second. So is this composition pretty typical or did this asteroid stand out?
Of course, the chick's loop impact is, as you mentioned, is one of the most famous impacts. We wanted to compare this asteroid impact like to other impacts on Earth. And what our study also shows that within the last 500 million years, this chick's loop impact is really a rare case of a C type asteroid hitting the Earth because all other impact structures that we investigated, they clearly matched the compositions of S type asteroids. So this is a really unique event so far.
Wow. So the dinosaurs that taken out by like a pretty rare kind of impact, that's a lucky for them, but maybe kind of lucky for us. Mario, I'm assuming we didn't actually have chunks of the dinocaling asteroid in question at hand to study. So how did you even figure this out? Yes, when the asteroids impacted on Earth, we had a huge impact plume that developed and the particles, dust particles were dispersed into the atmosphere.
And they could distribute all around the globe, basically. And then the particles were deposited into sedimentary layers that formed exactly 66 million years ago. And these sediment layers, they can be sampled. I was not the rock hunting guy in this study that were some of my colleagues did that actually they did a great job. And they provided me with samples. Very cool. So doing nowhere in the solar system this asteroid came from.
These C type asteroids are interpreted to have formed beyond the orbit of Jupiter. And this is because they contain a lot of volatile elements. And these volatile elements could not condense closer to the sun because the temperatures in the inner solar system were too hot to allow for the condensation of, let's say water, something like that.
And I know that when we talk about space objects that are from this long ago, there's always the hope that they can tell us something about the early days of our solar system and even how it came to be. Did teachers any of those lessons in principle it's good. We have, however, we have asteroid samples, which inform of small fragments arrive on Earth as meteorites.
And this material, of course, we can study in our laboratories. And from this material, we know that the C type asteroid material is very volatile, which especially it can contain up to 20% of water.
And the basic idea is that the Earth primarily formed from delicious type asteroid material. But in order to explain our water abundance on Earth at some stage during the accretion of the Earth, we would have needed such C type asteroid material incorporated to our planet in order to explain water on Earth. By studying these asteroids, we can learn about the principle building blocks of our planets. What are there big questions you have about asteroids and what research is next for you?
So during the last 500 million years in Earth history, there were several major mass extinction events. And some of them are also thought to have been caused by an asteroid impact. One of our future research tasks will be to eventually find traces of such impact events that could have also led to major mass extinction events in earlier days of the Earth.
Another topic we will investigate at the University of Cologne is, for instance, we have a look at the moon. We see a heavily cratered surface and the lunar surface is 4.4 billion years old. So it provides a collection of asteroid material that impacted onto the moon some billion years ago. And the same material would have also hit the Earth at that time.
So we can also learn by studying these ancient lunar impact rocks. We can learn about what asteroid type was hitting the Earth in its very early days. And if this material could have delivered water to Earth. Mario, thanks so much for joining me. Yeah, many thanks for having me. Dr. Mario Fisher Goodat is a geochemist at the University of Cologne in Germany.
Support for Science Friday comes from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, working to enhance public understanding of science, technology, and economics in the modern world. Spot Atlanta and flies are an invasive pest here in the US. The adults are about an inch long, they've got striking red and black markings, and of course, spots. You've almost certainly seen them, or at least seen someone trying to stomp on one. Maybe you've even done some invasive pest control of your own.
We've gotten the green light to attack these invasive insects because of their worrisome tendency to chow down on certain crops, particularly fruit trees. But even the most enthusiastic bug smasher is no match for this invasion. So scientists are trying out a new method for identifying and getting rid of these insects, training dogs to sniff them out.
Joining me to talk about this strategy are my guests, Dr. Nathan Hall, director of the Canine Old-Faction Research and Education Laboratory at Texas Tech, and Dr. Erica Furebacher, associate professor of Applied Animal Welfare and Behavior at Virginia Tech. Welcome both of you to Science Friday. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for having us.
Nathan, I think most of us have seen drugs sniffing dogs in the airport. Is this project working with the same idea that you can train dogs to sniff out a particular object in this case a spotted lantern fly? Yeah, so for a long time, we've known that dogs have this great sense of smell, and we've been using it mostly in terms of detection of explosives and narcotics.
But recently over the last 15 to 20 years, that range has opened up a lot for a lot of conservation applications for trying to find species that are hard to detect or hard to find. USDA has been using them to find potential invasive things that might be coming in through airports. And now we're really looking at this from potential agricultural needs and agricultural services.
So what stage of insect development are the dogs trained to find? I can't help but picture them sort of leaping after the very spry adult bugs, which I assume is not what's happening.
Yeah, so right now we've been training the dogs to find these egg masses, which are these kind of brown, gloopy, I guess, egg masses that you could probably recognize on trees, but they also like to lay these on things like wood palettes or other things that you might pick up and transport to some location, that even knowing that they're there.
So instead of trying to find that like hoppy bug that you can easily see, we've been focused on those more hidden kind of egg masses that you wouldn't otherwise see, but might accidentally transport because you didn't know they were there. And Erica, how do you actually go about training a dog to sniff out a lantern fly?
Yeah, so sniffing things is certainly a natural behavior for dogs. What we really have to train them to do is to communicate to us when they found their target odor. And we do that by teaching them that when they smell a certain odor, in this case, the egg masses of spotted lantern flies that if they communicate to us, for example, sitting or staring or barking at us, that they'll get something that's highly valuable to them either food or toys usually.
So by making that odor valuable to them, they'll tell us where it is so they they can get their preferred preferred item. And how many dogs have actually managed to develop a nodes for lantern flies? So we've had a really great recruitment effort. When we went into this grant, we proposed, you know, kind of recruiting 120 teams or so.
We had over a thousand people register indicating their interest in our project. We unfortunately couldn't support that many teams, my graduate students, how you can send us all the wrangling. So she has about 180 teams that she's recruited and is working with.
But about 60 to 70% of the dogs that are participating and their handlers have passed our very specific tests they have to do, which are quite challenging. And 60 to 70% of those dogs have been passing that indicating that they can detect spotted lantern fly egg masses both in a very control setting. But also out in really applied settings, outwards busy and lots of other smells. And what does that test actually look like?
So they have three levels of testing that they go through. The first one is called the odor recognition test. And if anybody does competitive competitive network with their dogs, we've adapted those tests to our test because those are a lot of the dogs that we have recruited.
So that first test, they have a set of boxes out, many of which have distractor odors in them like latex gloves or the mesh that we encapsulate the egg masses in. And only one or none of those boxes have spotted lantern fly egg masses. And they have to pass 80% of those. So they have to correctly identify where the odor is or that there is no order on eight out of 10 of those trials. If they succeed on that, then they can go to our field evaluation test.
And they are given its outdoors kind of an alumnory yard like think of behind lows. And we put out three to five odor spaces for them with lots of distractors because it's a natural environment. They have five minutes there and again have to correctly identify 80% on that test.
And if they succeed on that, then they can go to our deployment test. And that's really interesting. Dr. Hall mentioned that they're being trained on egg masses. And we are using killed egg masses because we of course don't want to contribute to any spread. The question is, can they transfer from the killed egg masses to live egg masses and so in our deployment test, we're assessing that.
And so, the question is, can the dogs are doing really phenomenally there and have even identified egg masses that we didn't know were there. They'll they'll hit on something. Oh, wow. You have to dig around and sure enough there's an egg mass there. Very cool. So once a dog sniffs out at these live lantern fly eggs, what happens next is the idea that these egg masses get destroyed.
The thing is that these dogs could be used to detect things that are being transported across the United States and prevent the increasing encroachment of these insects across the US. So the dogs could be deployed to, you know, go out and look at lumber yards or shipments. And Nathan, another question for you. What makes dog noses particularly good for this job?
Dogs are quite interesting in that one. They have great sort of noses and compares to a lot of animals. But also they sort of have a similar sense of smell to other animals, but they're also just with us all the time. They make them super trainable.
You know, there have been studies that have been done with rats or particularly large pouch rats and they have phenomenal detection capabilities, but you're not going to be bringing those around to your lumber yard or to a variety of different checkpoints. So they're sort of bond with us, their availability, and their unique capabilities in terms of how they sniff. There's a couple of things that they do that is quite unique in comparison to how we sent around the world. One is sniffing, right?
When you think about, I'm going to take in a smell like McDonald's or a bakery probably, whatever is sent that you get, you take in this big inhale versus a dog is going to be sniffing at about five to seven hertz. So that's breathing in and out five to second seven times within a second. And that causes unique airflow patterns that you don't get when you're just doing one continuous inhale.
And then also just the way that the structure is of the dog's nose, they have a bigger sort of surface area of these olfactory receptors inside of their nose than we do. Yeah, I'm picturing having drugs and ifing rats at the airport, and it's just a very different vibe. Though in New York, we already have so many rats. I don't know. Maybe that might be a great community science project to leverage out of the rats.
Totally. Yeah, everybody wins. Well, in part of what makes spotted lantern flies such a big problem is that they spread so fast. You know, a decade ago, we didn't even have these insects in the US. And now we've got them in at least 16 states. So do you think this dog detection project can scale up enough to really slow the lantern flies down?
Well, I think there are two things. One is the spotted lantern fly. You can also think of like as a model for potential future situations where if we're developing this capacity and this capability, then we'll be so much more ready to deploy this in a future situation. But that's not to say that the spot lantern fly story is a done deal because where a lot of this spread is happening is going to be a long human transport lines.
But that means that there's a potential that if you had a detection technology to say with relatively good accuracy in the lab, we were seeing 99% detection capabilities, 97% specificity. So if you had that capabilities, then you might at least be able to substantially reduce that spread. There would then allow people, you know, because when you have things going so fast, it's hard to prepare.
Right. So if you can at least reduce that spread and put in place the things that might help prevent or at least tackle when they do come, you'd be in a much better prepared situation. Right now the comparison is human eyes. So getting like a little mirror and sort of looking underneath the wood palette and seeing if there's something there. So that's where dogs are particularly excelling is that potential capability to stop the spread or at least prevent some of that spread.
And Erica, I want to talk about the dogs in this study specifically. Are they like finished with their duties after a certain period of time? Do they get to retire off on a sunny beach afterwards? So all of our dogs are owned dogs and that's what's kind of unique about our project is that we are not selecting dogs that were purpose bread or train specifically for, you know, kind of a working career.
These are dogs that people have as companions. We have a range of breeds from little tiniens up to big ones, lots of mixed breeds. So it's really fun that anybody with a dog can participate and some of Nathan's wonderful work has shown that although I'm a German shepherd fan myself that hugs in his experiments out perform shepherd. So really any dog can do this. But we see this project is a very cool way for their owners to partner with them.
Their owners get to volunteer and contribute to their communities and the dogs get a really fun enrichment activity. A lot of our participants want to keep doing more. And so that's one of our goals in the future is how do we take these very motivated, very capable humans and dogs and make sure that they get to use their newly found expertise going forward. Awesome. Nathan, your your lab is also exploring using dogs to detect other invasive species, which ones are you most excited about?
So we recently put out a paper on dog detection of zebra muscle villagers or these little larval stages of them that might come along and things like ballast water or other water samples that you wouldn't be able to see that they're in there. But turns out the dogs are actually able to detect them. But what makes them particularly powerful is that they're real time.
They can give you an answer right now takes our dogs about 300 milliseconds to sniff something and tell us if something is present or not. Whereas other technologies require you to then go filter that and give you a 48 hour, you know, downtime processing. Think of it like your rapid versus your longtime COVID tests or PCR COVID tests.
That's all the time we have for today. But I'd like to thank my guests, Dr. Nathan Hall, director of the canine, olfaction research and education laboratory at Texas Tech and Dr. Erica Fierbacher, associate professor of applied animal welfare and behavior at Virginia Tech. Thank you both so much for joining us. Thank you so much. Thanks for having us listeners. If you want to read more about this project, you can head to our website science Friday.com slash sniff.
And that's all the time that we have for today. A lot of folks helped make the show happen, including John Denkowski, Annie Nero, Jason Rosenberg, Russia, or Eddie, Shoshana Bucksbaum. And many more tomorrow we'll talk about the biggest science stories of the week and why climate change is posing unexpected problems in schools. But for now, I'm Sci-Fi producer Kathleen Davis. We'll catch you then.