Ronin the rat sets new landmine-sniffing record
A landmine-detecting rat in Cambodia has set a new world record to become the first rodent to uncover more than 100 mines and other deadly war remnants.
Ronin, an African giant pouched rat, has uncovered 109 landmines and 15 items of unexploded ordnance since 2021, charity Apopo, which trains the animals, said in a statement.
Cambodia remains littered with millions of unexploded munitions following about 20 years of civil war that ended in 1998.
The Guinness Book of World Records said that Ronin's "crucial work" is making a real difference to people who have had to live with the "fear that one misstep while going about their day-to-day lives could be their last."
Apopo, which is based in Tanzania, currently has 104 rodent recruits, or HeroRATS, as the non-profit likes to call them.
The rats are trained to sniff out chemicals that are found in landmines and other weapons abandoned on battlefields. Because of their small size, the rats are not heavy enough to detonate the mines.
The rats can check an area the size of a tennis court in about 30 minutes, the charity says, whereas a human with a metal detector might take four days to clear the same land.
They can also detect tuberculosis, an infectious disease that commonly affects the lungs, far quicker than it would be found in a lab using conventional microscopy, Apopo says.
Ronin's impressive work in Cambodia's northern Preah Vihear province has surpassed the previous record held Magawa, a rat who sniffed out 71 mines and was presented with a gold medal for his heroism in 2020.
Since Apopo's work began 25 years ago, the organisation has cleared 169,713 landmines and other explosives worldwide - more than 52,000 have been in Cambodia. The charity also works in other countries affected by war, including Ukraine, South Sudan and Azerbaijan.
There are still an estimated four to six million landmines and other exploded munitions buried in Cambodia, according to the Landmine Monitor.
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The cast of the skull of Nigersaurus. The fossil skull of Nigersaurus was one of the first dinosaur skulls to be digitally reconstructed from CT scans. Photograph by Ira Block, Nat Geo Image Collection What dinosaur has 500 teeth and replaced each and every one of them every 14 days? With 15 times more teeth than the human set of 32, Nigersaurus taqueti hacked through low-lying vegetation with choppers like a lawn mower, paleontologist and National Geographic Explorer Paul Sereno told National Geographic just years after he and colleagues first described and named the dinosaur. About as heavy as an adult African forest elephant, this dinosaur would have weighed about two tons and stretched about 30 feet long from nose to the tip of its tail. The herbivore wandered lowlands of western Africa about 105 million years ago in what's now the Republic of Niger. Nigersaurus was one of the most effective plant-eating creatures to have ever evolved. 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