It's a summer Sunday and you're going to the park with friends to have a nice picnic. Everyone is sitting together, talking, laughing, playing and enjoying the sun and the warmth. As you all get hungry, containers of food turn up to share, some run to buy some chips or a currywurst. But then they appear. Suddenly wasps, flies and ants descend on us. How did they find us? How do the moths find our flour packets so that they can conquer them and fill them with their maggot children? How do cockroaches and flies find the food we throw away? How do mosquitoes find the tasty humans?
It turns out that insects can smell, and some of them are pretty good at it, much better than us humans. In fact, insects rely on their sense of smell to survive. They use it to find the food they need, to find a suitable mate, to choose a place to lay their eggs, to find their way around their nest, and to avoid predators or other dangers.
How do they do this? Odors or scents are chemical substances that are released by something and can spread through the air or water. Insects may not have a nose, but they do have thousands of tiny hairs all over their bodies and especially on their antennae, which function like our noses. These tiny hairs contain specialized nerve cells that are activated when they come into contact with chemical substances. These cells send signals to the insect's brain to decide how it should react to the odor. The perception of odors is very useful. With the help of their sense of smell, insects can recognize from afar that there is something interesting where the wind is blowing.
In our laboratory, we study how insects interact with their environment through their sense of smell. We are interested in understanding how interaction with the environment has shaped the sense of smell over millions of years of evolution. Therefore, we study many insect species. We focus on moths, ants, grasshoppers, flies and mosquitoes. We investigate which chemicals are present in their environment, how the insects' sensory cells react to odors and how these odors control feeding, mating and egg-laying behavior. We also study the structure of the insect brain and how insects learn and form memories.
We are also interested in understanding how human-induced pollution affects insects' ability to smell their environment to aid efforts to combat further environmental damage. By understanding how insects smell, we can also develop solutions to control insect pests, such as swarms of locusts that destroy entire crops or dangerous mosquitoes that transmit diseases.
We can carry out experiments and manipulations with insects that would be too difficult or even impossible with humans or other mammals. And because insects' sensory systems are complex but simpler than our own, we can learn an incredible amount about how they work by studying them.
If we understand how insects work, we can also understand how we work. We too can use scent to find food and avoid danger. We can smell when food is baking in the kitchen and even what kind of cake is in the oven. We can also smell when gas is leaking and call for help.
Visit us at our institute and experience first-hand what it's like to be an insect in a world full of smells. You will learn about research with insects, see our specimens and the experiments we carry out with them. And you can test your own sense of smell in fun competitions!
