> Magawa retired from bomb sniffing in June 2021 owing to his old age, as is standard for APOPO's HeroRATs.<p>> He spent a number of weeks mentoring 20 newly-recruited rats before ultimately retiring to a life of "snacking on bananas and peanuts".<p>> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magawa" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magawa</a><p>End to life worthy of being envied.
I love that Magawa's wikipedia article is structured just like a human: Early Life, Career, Retirement and Death.<p>A few weeks ago when "Croatia declared free of landmines after 31 years" was posted here (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189535">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189535</a>), I rabbit holed wikipedia about landmine-sniffing animals. It's such a fascinating topic.
8 years is an extraordinarily long lifespan for a rat, isn’t it? And he got a lot done!!
How does one rat mentor another?
You can teach a kid to change a tire without saying a word. It’s the same thing. Rats are very smart and very social. Rats that were good at teaching Rathood to their little ones had more that survived.<p>Put food in a maze and I’m sure rats would teach other rats how to get it. I expect this is similar.
My guess, first they send them links to confluence wiki.
When I was young I saw a rat mentor 4 turtles!
Rats are intelligent social mammals. They teach by actions. Imagine training a dog. You have two dogs, one trained and one not. You say "sit" and the trained dog sits and you give it a treat. The non-trained dog will quickly pick up on that.
Human in the loop reinforcement learning
imitation learning is widespread among animals including many nonhuman species
RatGPT
One demining expert claims that the rats are actually no good, but the charity persists with them anyway: <a href="https://nolandmines.com/APOPO%20rats.html" rel="nofollow">https://nolandmines.com/APOPO%20rats.html</a><p>I have no expertise. His arguments sound very plausible though.
It sounds weird there is a pro-rat constituency.
This is the most technical post, and it will go almost unnoticed.<p>A cool story about a rat or a dog draws more attention than mines which were missed and maimed people years after searching the field.<p>Anyways, the author of that piece is a little mad, but in the sense that it is worth serious consideration. TLDR: the rats aren't cost effective and, worst of all, haven't scientifically proved to be effective.
Stark reminder of how precious and meaningful a life can be - of any creature, no matter how small. We should be nice to all creatures not just humans.
From "Loving-Kindness (Metta) Sutta" of the Buddhist Pali Canon:<p>In gladness and in safety,<p>May all beings be at ease.<p>Whatever living beings there may be;<p>Whether they are weak or strong, omitting none,<p>The great or the mighty, medium, short or small,<p>The seen and the unseen,<p>Those living near and far away,<p>Those born and to-be-born —<p>May all beings be at ease!
I was recently at a wet lands were there were hundreds of thousands of snow geese making the lake white and blackening the sky, crazy to see and yeah we are blessed with the ability to change the entire Earth, the other guys are just along for the ride
I agree. However, you get insane push back the second you start to mention veganism. And yes, that is a luxury and there large parts of the world where that's not an option, but if you're reading this comment you probably could survive without eating meat.
Yep. Another great example of this is any discussion where datacenter resource usage gets brought up. Mention how much water someone's ChatGPT queries takes and people will generally agree it's a problem. Mention how much water their burger takes and at best you'll get people hemming and hawing about protein or indigenous cultures or their cousin's friend who went vegan and got really sick.
Also, I personally think framing it as a binary or quasi religious decision is counterproductive.<p>I was vegetarian for some years, before ultimately deciding I just run better on an omnivore diet. But for environmental and ethical reasons I decided to make meat more of a side dish vs the center of the meal, and to mostly eat chicken vs more high environmental impact animal proteins like beef.<p>I think a lot of people that would never go full vegan can do well on this sort of less meat middle road.
Hot take: people get angry about veganism because they suspect, deep down, that vegans are right and feel guilty about eating meat. (Not taking the moral high ground here - I have put approximately zero effort into reducing meat intake at all.)
It's a really nice sentiment, but it makes me sad. We're barely even nice to humans, mostly<p>It's downright miraculous when we respect a non-human life enough to honor it like this<p>This rat will be remembered for longer than I will, that's for sure
There’s no point to be sad: even trees get remembered and honoured. Human’s humanity have no such "compassion contingent”: loving a new child doesn’t take the love out of the precedents.<p>Some vegans argue that giving more compassion to animals is a step to develop one’s compassion to others being, hence being nicer to others humans. On the opposite: accepting an horrendous practices toward non-humans animals makes ones more prone to accept horrendous practice toward humans.
If you visit Siem Reap, you can visit the APOPO visitor centre, and see the rats (and a demonstration!) for yourself. Highly recommended.<p>- <a href="http://apopo.org/support-us/apopo-visitor-center/" rel="nofollow">http://apopo.org/support-us/apopo-visitor-center/</a>
RIP Magawa. Animals are wonderful. My grandmother had seizures for the latter part of her life and her doctors were unable to determine the root cause. A Great Dane mix her and my grandfather rescued was able to sense when one a fit was coming on and would lean on her until she was lying down and safe.
Magawa cleared 1,517,711 sq.ft of land. He could work at a pace of 2,808 sq.ft (a doubles tennis court) every 20 minutes. If he maintained that pace, he worked 180.2 hours. Let's assume, with hazardous terrain, he worked 25% that speed on average. If that's the case he worked ~720 hours during a 5-6 year career. A different rat, Ronin, that found more stuff found a total of 124 explosive devices. So Magawa found no more than 1 explosive for every 5 hours and 45 minutes of searching. Or approximately one device every 17.25 tennis courts of searching.<p>Real needle in a haystack stuff, wow
I spent the last minute observing in silence, in memory of this remarkable creature. HN sheep, I command thee all, to do the same.
Finally, some excellent news that honors the contributions of a (once) living creature that made the world a better place (presumably without conflicting ulterior motives).
Land-mines, particularly anti-personnel land minds are just horrible weapons. They should be banned.
They've been banned since 1997, though Lithuania has withdrawn and Estonia, Latvia, Poland and Finland plan to.
Awesome! As soon as I saw "landmine-sniffing rat" I knew it must be Magawa!! He even has a book! <a href="https://www.albertwhitman.com/book/herorat/" rel="nofollow">https://www.albertwhitman.com/book/herorat/</a>
Sadly demand for such heros may increase in the future. Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine and Finland withdrew from the Ottawa Treaty banning personnel mines. And probably more countries will follow.
Wonder how hard it would be to train for diabetes? My under 10yo was just diagnosed with T1DM, a pocket rat sounds like fun and cheaper than a dog which is priced at unobtainium prices for us.<p>Animals are awesome, land mines are not. I hope we can avoid ever bringing that to our shores. Sadly, I know we now have air-mines (drones) so guess someone has to come up with drone sniffing pidgins or something (though obviously a parked drone probably doesn’t persist as long as a buried stationary mine and a flying drone less so).<p>War sucks.
These are the creatures we kill with poison and carry experiments on.
Those mice have a sculpture as well[0].<p>Nobody likes experimenting on animals, but it is use mice or orphans in third world countries. In silico and computational models are just not a good enough analogue for the human body.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_laboratory_mouse" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_laboratory_mou...</a>
Well it's good to be honest, and so I commend you on that.<p>So the hierarchy is<p>- our kids<p>- "third-world orphans"<p>- other species<p>For what it's worth, I'm not denying the benefit we obtain by testing on animals, nor am I suggesting that we live surrounded by rodents that we know to be vectors for multiple diseases that would affect us.<p>The comment above was merely an observation on the value of life and how little attention we pay to it.<p>We subject sentient beings to untold amounts of horror every day, and we are completely destroying the balance of life on earth with a system that is entirely devoted to serving humans--individual humans, not humanity.<p>The statue is not the point. The point is what this little creature did and how we might learn to show mercy and respect to our fellow sentient beings.
Correct. These are the creatures that will ruin your home/barn if infested with them.<p>Source: recently finished getting rid of a rat infestation in my barn. they also reproduce at a crazy rate. Some poison + getting two barn cats = problem solved.
If you're into rats, here is a playlist with 6+ hours of rats doing tricks: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGThSDBAdLEKFkcKeHc0DWsCx6zT5Hv-t" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGThSDBAdLEKFkcKeHc0D...</a><p>Rats are so awesome, we just need to GMO them to live longer.
I just can't help but imagine those long lived rats escaping and taking over our cities. We already struggle with the rat population and they only live 3 years, imagine if they lived 15.<p>Also I love rats and totally agree they're tough pets because they don't live long enough. We had many of them growing up and spent a fortune removing tumors.
What a hero. Rats are so smart. I previously asked what I think was an official account on Instagram and was relieved that the rats are apparently too light to set off the mines.
I think instead of cloning on a static meaningless statue, much better if we clone Magawa in term of functionality and cabability, and name the landmine detection machine device Magawa.<p>Japanese researchers have already successful in detecting sub-surface bamboo shoots for culinary, because young bamboo shoot underneath the ground taste better than apparent overground ones.<p>Let's invent a landmines detection robotic device namely MAGAWA for Mines Apparatus Ground Assessment Waveform Analysis.
Fever dream interview question: 100 landmines are cleared per hero rat. How many rats needed to restore peace in Eurasia?
Rats are incredible animals, and this is a well deserved honor.
I don’t like this site’s obsession with reducing everything to market opportunities, but… it’s extremely well documented that land mines, white truffles, cancer, diabetes, chemical weapons, etc can all be ‘sniffed’ by animals and it’s a mechanism that is almost always ‘better’ (cheaper, quicker, more deployable in the field) than human-engineered solutions. Surely there’s some vebture capital opportunity here for better sensors that would unarguably improve our lot more than AI, at least per dollar invested?
There has certainly been work on it, but not sure what the status is. Of course, it could be very useful.<p>From Google, 2019,<p><a href="https://research.google/blog/learning-to-smell-using-deep-learning-to-predict-the-olfactory-properties-of-molecules/" rel="nofollow">https://research.google/blog/learning-to-smell-using-deep-le...</a>
Sounds like the obsession of reinventing trains and trees. Surely training a rat is cheaper than a portable real-time NMR device, right?
RIP Magawa
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