And now, a dog that tracks whale poop

My dog tracks Ms. X who has spoiled him with bones but this dog actually works for a living.

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Tracking scent of scat, unique dog may help save the whales

POSTED:   09/02/2012 12:01:00 AM MDT
UPDATED:   09/02/2012 12:11:12 AM MDTBy Kirk Johnson
The New York Times

Elizabeth Seely, dog trainer at Conservation Canines, holds Tucker as he sniffs for whale scat near San Juan Island, Wash., last month. Tucker is the world's only working dog able to find and track the scent of orca feces in open ocean water. (Matthew Ryan Williams, The New York Times)
OFF THE COAST OF SAN JUAN ISLAND, wash. —A dog named Tucker with a thumping tail and a mysterious past as a stray on the streets of Seattle has become an unexpected star in the realm of canine-assisted science. He is the world's only working dog, marine biologists say, able to find and track the scent of orca scat, or feces, in open ocean water — up to a mile away, in the smallest of specks.

Through dint of hard work and obsession with an orange ball on a rope, which he gets to play with as a reward after a successful search on the water, Tucker is an ace in finding something that most people, and perhaps most dogs, would just as soon avoid.

And it is not easy. Scat can sink or disperse in 30 minutes or less. But it is crucial in monitoring the health of the whales here, an endangered group that is among the most studied animal populations in the world.

Most of the 85 or so orcas, or killer whales, that frequent the San Juans, about two hours northwest of Seattle, have been genotyped and tracked for decades, down to their birth years and number of offspring.

And none of this could happen as easily as it does without Tucker — or the new tricks that he taught the scientists.

"Sometimes he'd just turn around and sit down and stare at me, waiting for me to figure it out," said Deborah Giles, who is completing a Ph.D. on how orcas here are affected by the thousands of whale watchers and scores of commercial whale-watch vessels

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that cluster around the animals. "He's very subtle," said Giles, sitting behind the wheel of the research vessel Moja as Tucker, an 8-year-old black Lab mix, paced at the prow on a recent afternoon.
One thing to get out of the way quickly: Orca scat does not smell that bad. Perhaps because the animals eat mostly Chinook salmon — the tastiest kind, many human seafood lovers agree — the scent is more fish than foul.

But unlike, say, a narcotics-sniffing dog that can lead its human around by a leash, the research boat itself is, in effect, Tucker's legs when he has picked up the aroma. He cannot physically go where the sample is to be found but must signal where he wants the boat to go.

Tucker might lean to one side of the boat, then another, then suddenly sink back onto his green mat with his head between his paws, the scent lost.

"The slightest twitch of his ear is important," said Elizabeth Seely, a trainer who has worked with Tucker for four years at a nonprofit group called the Conservation Canines, which specializes in dog-assisted research on behalf of endangered species.

She stood at his side on a recent scat-search session, signaling to Giles behind the wheel with tiny finger motions — a bit to the right, a bit more to the left, circle back — that Tucker was suggesting by his posture and level of attention.

The research, financed by Washington Sea Grant of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is raising new questions about how to protect the orcas.

Samuel Wasser, director of the scat project, said that when he started the project four years ago, he thought boat activity would be a crucial element of whale stress, reflected through stress hormones in their scat. But, he said, food supply was more important, with fewer salmon emerging as a main stress variable. Knowing to focus on fish supply, he said, means knowing where to focus public policy efforts on the animals' behalf.

Through the scat, biologists can tell, for example, which whale pods spend the winter off the coast of Southern California because their feces can contain higher trace elements of DDT, the pesticide that was banned in 1972. The poison still echoes through the decades in the fish the whales eat. Other orca groups have concentrations of dioxins or PCBs traced to industrial activity around Seattle.

But for all his hundreds of hours on boats, Tucker will not get wet. He hates to swim, Seely said. She is not sure why. A trauma from puppyhood, she supposes. It is one thing about which he cannot communicate.



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