These dogs have a nose for doo-doo

Ally has a nose for wolves. Gator can sniff out grizzlies. And Tucker really knows his orcas. Or rather, what they’ve left behind.

Among the growing number of scat-detection dogs used to track wildlife by land or by sea, the canines employed by the University of Washington’s Center for Conservation Biology are showing that no technology can yet outdo their know-how for doo-doo.

Samuel Wasser, the center’s director, said feces is the easiest part of an animal to collect and a “treasure trove” of vital information. Apart from diet, scat can reveal the species, sex and identity of an individual through DNA, while released hormones can record an animal’s nutritional state, reproductive status and stress levels.

Dogs possess such an extraordinary sense of smell that they can distinguish among the feces of 18 species at once, Wasser said, making them ideal tracking aids for conservation biologists hoping to cover a lot of ground. Or water. Beyond helping document grizzly and black bear behavior in Alberta’s vast Jasper National Park, the dogs have located floating feces from endangered North Atlantic right whales in Canada’s Bay of Fundy and from the Pacific Northwest’s declining orca population. Remarkably, some of the poop snoopers perched on the bows of research vessels have tracked down whale scat more than one nautical mile away.

Wasser, who has embraced his nickname of “the guru of doo-doo,” highlighted his team’s findings and new ways to tap the domestic dog’s incredible nose during a recent conference organized by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. Some canines, he said, can match one scat sample to all others belonging to the same individual, a super-sensitivity that has proven invaluable in studying animals such as California’s minklike fishers and Brazil’s maned wolves – and a method that he said has out-performed even DNA tests.

For whales, he said researchers could examine the effects of Navy sonar tests by collecting scat before and after the underwater tests and looking for differences in the marine mammals’ stress hormone levels. In a subsequent telephone interview, Wasser also confirmed that his team expects to begin using detection dogs to identify pellets from spotted owls in the Pacific Northwest to help document remaining habitats.

The high-energy dogs used by his team, Wasser said, possess an insatiable desire to play fetch. Many were rescued from animal shelters – often because their obsessive personalities weren’t tolerated by previous owners. The excessive drive to play motivates the dogs to cover large distances in search of feces with the expectation of a 90-second period of play after each success. Wasser’s team works mainly with Labrador retrievers, but the researchers have trained breeds ranging from rottweilers to dachshunds.

“I wouldn’t want to own one because they’re obsessive-compulsive dogs. They want to play with a Frisbee 24 hours a day,” said Katherine Ralls, a conservation biologist with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C. But as trackers, she said, scat-detecting dogs are a good fit. “They love to do it. They’re happy campers out there.”

For their research on California’s endangered San Joaquin kit fox, Ralls and former University of Washington graduate student Deborah Smith (independent of Wasser’s group) found that detection dogs were unbiased in their sampling and perfect in distinguishing nearly 1,300 kit fox scat samples.

“All were 100 percent accurate. They never made a mistake,” Ralls said, a success certified by extracting telltale mitochondrial DNA from the feces samples and matching it to San Joaquin kit fox-specific DNA.

Although using dogs to track wildlife can be laborious and expensive, Ralls said the technique is especially useful for studying reclusive animals or minimizing contact with endangered species. And for conservation biologists, the scat samples can readily translate into key findings. From the grizzly and black bear feces collected in and around Jasper National Park in the Canadian Rockies, for example, Wasser’s team learned that both species congregate beyond the park in areas altered by human activity.

In the Jasper region, he said, logging is often accompanied by roads edged with clover to prevent erosion.

“It kind of creates a salad bar for the bears,” Wasser said. The clover also provides a temporary food source for bear prey. “The bears in those areas are fatter and they conceive faster, but they are also poached more,” he said. Based on their results, the researchers recommended reducing off-road vehicle access to mitigate the poaching.

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