Sniffer dogs trained to search for elusive & endangered species

20/06/2010 08:10:25

EcoDogs sniffing out endangered species
June 2010. Auburn University in Alabama have come up with a novel way of searching for endangered species - Highly trained sniffer dogs. They have been trained to find endangered species so Auburn University researchers can document the location and number of the rare animals.

The question is "How do you put dogs on the trail of unusual, elusive animals that few humans have seen?" In fact, the dogs aren't looking for the animals themselves, but are trained to find where the animals have been, that is, by finding their droppings.

EcoDogs
Todd Steury, assistant professor of wildlife ecology in the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, has started a program, EcoDogs: Detection Dogs for Ecological Research, to study "greatest conservation need" species.
117 endangered species in Alabama

"Alabama is home to 117 endangered species, which is third in the United States behind Hawaii and California, and numerous other species are at risk," Steury said. "But little is known about these species, including where they are located, the habitats they occupy, and how many individuals of a species exist."

Spotted skunks and Striped skunks
Sophie, a 15-month-old black Labrador retriever, is trained to find scat from eastern spotted skunks, while Bishop, a 3-year-old black Labrador retriever, is trained to find scat from striped skunks. Both can also detect scat from black bears. The program recently added five new dogs as well.

"We are especially interested in the eastern spotted skunk," Steury said. "It is very small like a squirrel and is very susceptible to predators. Over the past two years, we have taken over 600,000 photos with game cameras and we only got two photos of eastern spotted skunks."

The goal, he says, is to find populations large enough to study with additional techniques such as trapping and attaching radio transmitter collars. "We want to find out what is reducing the populations," he said. "Is it disease? Is it predators? We need to know the reproduction rates. We then can address issues that cause animals to become endangered." 

Dogs are highly trained
"The dogs are housed at the veterinary college where we provide care and prepare them for this type of work," said Rob Gillette, director of the Animal Health Performance Program. "Our first priority is the dogs' care and making sure they are in proper condition. The dogs love doing this."

Black bears
The college has handlers who train the dogs and accompany Steury and his graduate students to the research sites. This summer they will use the dogs to study black bears in Florida to learn more about human and bear interaction near new and proposed developments. Steury also wants to count black bears in the Mobile River Basin in Alabama.

DNA sampling
"Each animal's scat contains DNA specific to that animal," he said. "By collecting scat samples, we can get a population count for a certain location. This will allow us to formulate an estimate for a much larger area."

The dogs, always teamed with a handler, can work up to four hours a day covering 12 miles in a zigzag pattern around the edges of a triangular area. Dogs usually detect the scat within 15 metres, sometimes up to 100 metres, and will sit down when they find the appropriate scent. A GPS collar allows trainers to keep up with the dog's location and it records the dog's path which can be viewed later on a computer.

"If we see sudden or irregular paths on the GPS, this can indicate where the dog detected the scent of the scat," Steury said.

Scat training
He says the training time takes three to six weeks for the first scent and then a few days for additional scents. Samples of scat are collected from zoos and other wildlife organizations.

"We try to obtain scat from 10 to 20 individual animals of the species we want to study," he said. "The dogs are exposed to those samples and rewarded for finding them. We also expose them to scat from other animals, such as deer, but we don't reward them for finding those droppings. This teaches the dogs to ignore those scents."

Long-tailed weasels
Auburn researchers are also interested in finding scat from endangered long-tailed weasels in Alabama.
"We have been able to take only one photo of a long-tailed weasel in our game camera surveys, and there have been only eight reported road kills in Alabama since 1988," Steury said. "Getting samples of its scat is a problem because only one zoo in the U.S., in North Carolina, has a long-tailed weasel in captivity. We will try to use scat from several kinds of weasel so we can create a 'weasel dog' to detect scat from any kind of weasel. Hopefully this will help lead us to a long-tailed weasel."

Mountain lions
The dogs, he says, could also help prove or disprove stories about possible mountain lion sightings in Alabama.
"We would like to train a dog to find mountain lion scat," he said. "We hear stories that mountain lions have been seen here, but Alabama is not in their range. Most likely people have seen large bobcats or even coyotes. I would be very surprised if mountain lions are found here."

Auburn"s EcoDogs program is funded by the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences and the Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station. Steury says the program can provide services to other organizations interested in ecological research.