Countless approaches have been tried for cockroach control down through the ages, and all have fallen short of being ideal. Either they were insufficiently deadly to the vermin or they were poisonous to desirable creatures.

This new approach is totally harmless to everything except cockroaches.

The Belgian team spent three years figuring out how to artificially simulate a cockroach so the cockroaches believe it. Their “InsBot” resembles a pencil sharpener. However, it smells like a cockroach and that’s what matters. It’s loaded with cockroach pheromones.

According to Dr. Jean-Louis Deneubourg, director of the laboratory, this experiment has far greater ramifications than pest control: “We know very little about how decentralised communities of beings, like cockroaches or ants, reach collective decisions.”

Cockroaches seek to congregate. Considering that they have probably outlived all current higher-order organisms, they’re arguably the ultimate party animals…

When one cockroach goes somewhere and stays there, eventually a second will come along. If the first doesn’t move on odds are good that the second will stick around. This creates a congregational effect.

That simple fact explains the success of InsBot. Deneubourg reports, “…We found that if the InsBot went to one hole and stayed there for 10 or 15 seconds, it would soon be joined by another roach. The longer the two roaches stayed in the hole, the more chance there was of them being joined by others.”

By gathering large numbers of cockroaches in one predictable place, they can easily be exterminated via poison or even mechanical means. While dealing with cockroaches may not seem especially significant, the discovery may have application to all kinds of “herd mentality” creatures.

Some of it is quite expensive.

For example, sheep display a lemming-like tendency to jump off cliffs after one of them has leaped to escape a predator. (A friend of mine quipped that this is proof that sheep are barely smarter than vegetables.) Ants, wasps and bees are believed to engage in hive behavior by transmission of signals both olfactory and visual.

An InsBot designed to deal with other kinds of insects might increase honey production, or help deal with the northward-creeping problems of fire ants and wild bees. Further, a larger version might help with the control of cattle.

Speculating a little bit, animal findings based on this technology may eventually give us insights into ourselves. While people are generally not thought of as “herd” creatures, during certain circumstances we display herd-like behavior. (Just consider the dot-com bubble, or crowd behavior at a sports stadium.)

The researchers plan to develop a new kind of “roach motel” based on the robotic discovery.

I don’t know where this discovery is going in the world of finance, but I am confident that a way to stimulate or control herd behavior robotically will prove useful. We’ll see who acquires the rights to these robotic chameleons.

To your profitable future,
Jonathan Kolber
October 9, 2007

P.S.: On a much different note, scientists have figured out how to stop one of the world’s deadliest diseases, Alzheimer’s. Here’s the kicker: The company that owns the rights to this new technology isn’t a Big Pharma company. It’s a small biotech. You probably haven’t read about it in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal…yet. But you will soon. I gave my readers an opportunity to invest now, before Wall Street gets its hands on it.

Emerging Technology was originally featured in the Penny Sleuth.