Will Bark For Science

On their second job ever, Collette Yee and her partner were assigned a difficult job: locate transient whale poop in the ocean before it sinks. Luckily, Collette was partnered with Jack, a blue heeler mix trained to sniff out cryptic odors from things that conservation biologists have trouble collecting on their own. Producer Berly McCoy https://www.npr.org/people/985775371/berly-mccoy reports on Jack and the growing field of dog detection conservation that helps science by sniffing out everything from invasive crabs to diseased plants to endangered species. Interested in more biotech stories? Let us know by dropping a line to [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:15Speaker 00

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• 0:20Speaker 01

  OK, Jack's gonna take off and go look for the sample.

• 0:25Speaker 02

  Emily.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:26Speaker 02

  meets Colette Yee.

• 0:28Speaker 03

  And Jack.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Is Jack a dog?

• 0:31Speaker 02

  Jack is a dog. He is a blue healer mix with floppy ears and an intense love for playing with his ball. He was originally a shelter dog, but now he is employed.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Oh, what's his job?

• 0:44Speaker 02

  So Jack and Colette work for rogue detection teams based in Rice, Washington, a company that trains rescue dogs to sniff out, well, a lot of things.

• 0:54Speaker 03

  And we have a piece of bumblebee nest out right now.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Hmm, bumblebee nest.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  Finding live bumblebee nests is something Jack actually was trained to do. He helps with conservation projects. So in search of endangered bees, there was a time that Jack helped scientists learn about their habitat.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  Wow, because the nests are kind of hard to find.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  They are if you're human.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  But not for Jack.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Not for Jack.

• 1:19Speaker 03

  Good job, kid. Good job.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  And he just found the sample and I give him the stay until I get there and then he gets his ball. Good boy, Jack.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  So this is part of a training exercise. But when Jack is actually looking for his intended target, especially if it's a new job, it can be really tricky.

• 1:39Speaker 03

  It can be very cryptic odors. It can be oftentimes scat.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  So poop. Jack has found a lot of poop from all kinds of animals, from foxes, deer, lynx.

• 1:50Speaker 03

  Wolf, cougar, bobcat.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  They've found the sense of live animals, too.

• 1:55Speaker 03

  Washington ground squirrel odors, invasive European green crabs.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  And contraband.

• 2:03Speaker 03

  Ivory shark fin.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  They found carcasses. They've even found diseased plants, Emily. And a lot of what they've found is in this rugged, remote terrain.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  And a lot of these jobs would be impossible or too resource intensive for people to do on their own. Colette says conservation dogs often add a crucial missing piece of information to a conservation puzzle.

• 2:27Emily Kwong?

  What an inventive use of one of dogs' greatest superpowers, their noses.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  I know. It seems so obvious when you think about it.

• 2:35Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  But this field of conservation dog detection has just only really exploded in the last 25 years. Like, in the 90s, there were maybe five, 10 papers published about the topic in a year. And by the late 2010s, it exploded up to at least 60 a year. So these dogs are sniffing out everything from invasive plants to endangered bugs on land and in boats. So on their second job ever, Colette and Jack were assigned to a really complicated project in which they were confined to a boat.

• 3:06Emily Kwong?

  What were they looking for?

• 3:07Speaker 02

  Whale poop, Emily, for science.

• 3:10Emily Kwong?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You're telling me Jack can smell underwater?

• 3:14Speaker 02

  You'll have to wait and see. Today on the show, Jack the Conservation Doggo. How canines like Jack help conservation biologists find the hidden, hard to find and invisible, and the science of how they do it.

• 3:29Emily Kwong?

  I'm Emily Kwong.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  I'm Burleigh McCoy.

• 3:31Emily Kwong?

  And you're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

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• 5:07Emily Kwong?

  OK, Burleigh McCoy, Shorty producer. Why is Jack the dog searching for whale poop?

• 5:12Speaker 02

  Well, kind of for a lot of reasons. So this poop can tell scientists if the whale is eating enough, how stressed they are, if they are pregnant, if they've consumed toxins. The scientists who contracted them, so Colette and Jack, to do this job from the University of Washington and the nonprofit Wild Orca, they've been collecting this whale scat for years.

• 5:34Emily Kwong?

  That's amazing. And also sounds far less invasive than having to physically handle a killer whale. How does one go about asking a dog to lead them to whale poop in the ocean?

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so before they could even get on the boat, Colette had to train Jack to recognize this smell of whale scat. So first on land.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  I'm hiding killer whale scat in like trees and on top of rocks and all these places where obviously you're never going to find it in the wild. But it doesn't make a difference to him. He's just like, OK, I know this game.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  And he loves that game. So they do this on land, then they move their training to a boat. Jack stands at the front of the boat sniffing the air and Colette stands behind him.

• 6:14Emily Kwong?

  So Jack never actually gets in the water?

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Right, right. He's been trained to sniff out this whale scat from the boat.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  And we take the killer whale scat. It's just this like, it looks like a gooey booger. It's absolutely foul. And you pour it into a Tupperware and just kind of float it out into the water, into the open water and drive the boat away.

• 6:38Emily Kwong?

  Commitment to the ocean sometimes looks like this. How does Colette know, though, that Jack has picked up on a scent?

• 6:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, so he usually wags his tail and leads Colette right to the thing on land. But in a boat, he can't run to the poop. So Colette had to learn to notice these super subtle changes in Jack's demeanor.

• 7:00Speaker 03

  I would see his eyes close a little bit. I'm looking at which side of his nostril is flaring. And I can feel like the tension in the leash start to just get a little bit more because he's leaning forward into the air.

• 7:16Emily Kwong?

  This seems also like a team effort.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:18Emily Kwong?

  Jack has to find the smell and then communicate it to Colette, who has to notice that he's communicating and listen to him.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Right. And then after that, she's got to use these little hand movements to direct to the captain of the boat, so she doesn't distract Jack. And so they kind of get this down, right? They're on the boat, they're practicing. And then it's time to go out and find the real thing. Which means, Emily, they have to follow the whales.

• 7:45Emily Kwong?

  Wait, why do they have to follow the whales? Can't they just find their poop?

• 7:48Speaker 02

  They can't, because the scat breaks up or it sinks really quick, sometimes within 10 minutes of leaving the whale's back end. So they need whales to signal where to start looking, while also trying not to get too close to them, to like push them away. And Colette says you have to make this whole mental map that takes into account the whale's location, the water current and the wind, to put the boat exactly where Jack could pick up a scent.

• 8:13Emily Kwong?

  This is such a dance. Okay. And it sounds like there is a time constraint, too?

• 8:18Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So with all this, you're trying to race to get the poop before it sinks.

• 8:23Emily Kwong?

  What a magical, mystical, fleeting booger of a turd.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  Colette says it feels like really high stakes. And so she's doubting herself when they're out looking for this whale scat for the first time. And then she starts to see little specks in the water. And she thinks, this could be anything. Until she turns to the whale expert in the boat, Deborah Giles.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  She's like, got the biggest grin on her face. And I just know, like, this is it. Like, we just did this.

• 8:53Emily Kwong?

  They did it. It worked. And from a boat, no less. I mean, that just goes to show you how good Jack's noses.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 9:01Emily Kwong?

  But even so, how is he doing this?

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. So this was one of the questions that I asked Lauren DeGrief. She's a forensic chemist at Florida International University. And she studies the compounds dogs are smelling in the air when they detect things.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  Dogs and other mammals like rats and mice are considered macroasmodic, while humans are considered microasmodic. And what that means is that the inner flow paths of our, when we sniff versus breathe, are different between those two sets of animals.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  So for dogs, the air coming in through their nose goes to two separate places, their lungs and the spongy area in the back of their snout, which means that the scents are getting like collected and concentrated instead of getting diluted from the air. And then the other part of the dog nose anatomy that helps them smell better are these little slits that you've probably seen on the sides of their noses. That's where the exhales go. And when that happens, it creates this little vacuum that sucks more air into their nose, which means they can smell more with that second or third sniff.

• 10:07Speaker 03

  So all those little sniffs, as they go in and out, they're really, really reaching. It's like having little invisible hands pulling that odor towards their nose.

• 10:15Emily Kwong?

  What a delicious life, the life of a dog.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Right. And Lauren says one of the reasons dogs are able to distinguish these low amounts of an odor in these complicated environments is because dogs have a lot more receptors for different, what we call odorants, which are molecules or chemicals in the air that make up an odor, basically.

• 10:33Emily Kwong?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  And different odorants can activate multiple receptors in the dog's nose. And that translates to a kind of specific code for the dog.

• 10:42Speaker 03

  They can code more odorants and they can basically distinguish better between what you want them to find and the other things that are there.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  They're basically chemists.

• 10:51Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  But this is actually a part of what Lauren studies, trying to understand what exactly it is that a dog is smelling.

• 10:58Emily Kwong?

  Oh, from like a chemical standpoint. That's interesting because thinking about Collette's work, if you want Jack to smell whale poop, don't you just need to kind of show him the whale poop? Why do you need to know on a chemical level what's in a different target?

• 11:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you don't really need to for every case. Like, in the case with Jack, it worked to just show him whale poop.

• 11:20Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Uh, but Lauren told me about one project she's working on, helping dogs detect crude oil from oil spills after the major cleanup has already happened.

• 11:28Emily Kwong?

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  And now they're like, looking for the hidden oil in the sand or other nooks and crannies. And to do that, a dog really needs to be able to tell the difference between the smell of recent oil and older oil. So Lauren, like, needed to find out the chemical difference in oil based on how it aged or weathered.

• 11:46Emily Kwong?

  Wow.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  Uh, to be able to train the dog accordingly.

• 11:48Emily Kwong?

  Right, and is the goal that then a dog will be able to detect old oil in nature?

• 11:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, you basically figure out what makes old oil smell like old oil, and then you show that to the dog, and that basically can narrow your margin of error.

• 12:05Speaker 06

  Animals learn all the time. The question is, are they learning what you want them to learn? Or are they just learning what the environment is teaching them naturally?

• 12:13Speaker 02

  This is Ken Ramirez. He's Executive Vice President and Chief Training Officer for Care & Pryor Clicker Training. He's a biologist, a behaviorist, and a trainer of animal trainers. He does it all. He says his job is to help people understand the science behind animal training, and especially odor detection training.

• 12:31Speaker 06

  The secret of odor detection is that you don't really train that. You, the dog already knows how to smell the world around them.

• 12:40Speaker 06

  But our job as trainers is to teach them what to smell, when to smell it, and what to do when they smell it.

• 12:48Emily Kwong?

  Which makes sense, though I imagine it's hard to do in practice.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, Ken says trainers have to be really careful that they don't, like, always leave their human scent on training materials, for example. This was exactly why Colette was so nervous the first time she and Jack went out looking for wild whale scat, because Jack was gonna have to make this connection all on his own, that what he was supposed to find wouldn't have other smells from the training scat, like Colette's smell or the Tupperware container.

• 13:15Emily Kwong?

  Oh, but he did it. I mean, Jack, he made that cognitive smell-a-vision leap all on his own. His own.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  He did.

• 13:24Emily Kwong?

  Even knowing how good a dog's nose is, though, it's, it's, it is astonishing. And it just sounds like a lot of coordination on Jack and Colette's parts.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  It really is. And that's where this other component comes in, which is trust.

• 13:38Emily Kwong?

  Oh.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  Both Colette and Ken told me that these types of projects work because of the unique human-dog relationship that can form when it's built on trust, which is ultimately what Colette had to rely on when she was out in the boat with Jack.

• 13:52Emily Kwong?

  We love a conservation success story.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  We do.

• 13:55Emily Kwong?

  Tell me about what other projects conservation dogs are working on.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Ken Ramirez actually told me about his project relocating sea turtle eggs after an oil spill. He got this small team of dogs and handlers together to locate buried eggs on the beach so people could move them before they hatched and swam into the oil spill. Dogs are sniffing out beetle-infested wood and cryptic endangered stone flies. They've been trained to detect a deadly disease in bighorn sheep and used to detect poachers.

• 14:26Emily Kwong?

  Wow.

• 14:27Speaker 02

  And good to remember, like anything, using detection dogs for conservation isn't always the best method, but it can be a really powerful tool, and it's been picking up steam in the last couple of decades.

• 14:40Emily Kwong?

  Shout out to Jack and conservation doggos everywhere, and they're humans like Colette.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 14:46Emily Kwong?

  Thank you for bringing us this story, Burley.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  Thank you for listening.

• 14:51Emily Kwong?

  This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. The audio engineer was Kwesi Lee.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy.

• 15:05Emily Kwong?

  I'm Emily Kwong.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  And I'm Burley McCoy.

• 15:08Emily Kwong?

  Thanks for listening to Short Wave from NPR.

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