Fencing animals in or out isn’t really our forte.
Tiny flies zoom right through screens meant to keep them out.
Mice find itty-bitty cracks in our walls.
An average of five crafty creatures escape from American zoos each year.
And wascally wabbits proved that Australia’s rabbit-proof fence... wasn’t.
If we looked at these fences from a fly’s or rabbit’s perspective, we might have realized
that these barriers weren’t barriers at all.
But our human-centric view of the world makes it hard to put ourselves in another animal’s...
shoes, paws, wings, or exoskeleton.
And that’s precisely the trick to building a critter-proof fence: knowing the critter
well enough to find a simple way to stop it.
In East Africa, for example, farmers are building beehive fences to keep out crop-raiding elephants.
Nothing, it turns out, makes these five-ton behemoths turn and run faster than a buzzing
bee.
Nobody likes a bee in their nose - and elephants have the biggest noses.
Nobody likes pee in their nose, either - especially when you’re a wolf and it’s pee from a
rival pack.
So to keep wolves from wolfing down ranchers’ sheep, scientists in Idaho are sprinkling
the ground with pee and poop from other wolf packs, creating biological borders whose smelly
signal tells wolves that the territory is already taken.
We’ve even figured out how to fence out some invisible invaders, like the virus that
was decimating Hawaiian papaya crops in the 1990s.
Scientists first genetically modified some papaya plants so they were immune to the virus.
These disease-resistant papaya were then planted as a live fence around the non-genetically
modified papaya, keeping the fruit virus- (and controversy)- free.
The beauty of these biologically-inspired fences is that they target a specific species
without restricting the comings and goings of other plants and animals in the ecosystem
- it's all about knowing your target’s biological kryptonite.
Maybe that's why they say: knowledge is the best defense!