[Rear View] News and notes from the industry and the insect world.

Stashed: Points for Creativity
Customs officers in Amsterdam found 100 dead beetles stuffed with cocaine while examining a package from Peru, according to a Reuters report. The bugs’ bodies had been slit open and filled with about 300 grams of cocaine — worth more than $11,000 on the street. That could buy those guys a lot of microscopes. Once they get out of prison.

Sniffed: Mine-Detecting Rats
So you’ve got a problem: You need to find land mines. What do you do? Metal detectors are out — too many false positives. Bulldozers? Too expensive. Dogs? They get bored too easily. What’s left? Oh, yes: Gambian giant pouched rats.

A Belgian company named Apopo is working with the Mozambique government to clear the country of some 10,000 land mines left over from a civil war some 16 years ago. They say the rats are plentiful in Africa, better at smelling the TNT in the mines than machines and stay focused better than dogs. And, weighing in at just three pounds, they’re too light to detonate the mines they’re trying to find.

Rest assured: The rats are not sent out en masse through mined fields. They are tethered to a string held between two trainers. Moving slowly back and forth, they clear a tennis-court sized area in about half an hour. The team uses several rats to cross-check the finds, and then another team (just humans, this time) comes in to detonate the mines.

Check out a video of the rats in action at www.pctonline.tv.

Snacked: Squirrel Soufflé
Squirrels are running rampant in the United Kingdom – so much so that they’re starting to end up on people’s dinner plates. Hunters, gamekeepers and the UK equivalent of forest rangers literally cull the herd and send the meat to butchers, restaurants and the folks who make meat pies.

But it’s more complex than just squirrels reproducing too quickly. According to an article in The New York Times, it seems gray squirrels (native to North America) are overtaking the land of Britain’s indigenous red squirrel. In a sort of replay of the American Revolution, the grays are invading the red’s territory, eating all the food there, and then, to twist the knife, spreading a disease called squirrel parapox that further decimates the reds’ numbers.  It seems the taste of squirrel meat — compared to duck and rabbit — varies depending on what the critter cribbed for dinner, how old it is and the season. The meat usually appears on menus and in shops in spring, and is included in casseroles, meat pies and braised with shallots.

But, if you’re interested in noshing on Rocky, take care when catching him. You have to shoot him in the head, as a bullet anywhere else renders the meat of the tiny creature inedible.