Will Work for Chew Toys
Tucker doesn't care about saving the whales. The 7-year-old lab-retriever mix is concerned solely with his ball, a bright-orange chew toy and his main motivator in life. "You want a dog that's so obsessed with the ball, he'll work all day," says Sam Wasser, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington, in Seattle, and the founder of its Conservation Canines program. Sure enough, on this July morning, Tucker is hard at it, tirelessly sniffing the winds of Puget Sound to find whale scat before all of the genetic and biological information it contains sinks in the inky blue waters of the Pacific. If he finds some, he gets his toy.
Wasser's 14-year-old program uses dogs with high "play drive" to find poop, which he and his research team then mine for genetic and physiological details including hormone and toxin levels. Using noses that have evolved to sniff out prey to locate feces isn't just low cost and noninvasive; it's also an incredibly efficient way to determine the environmental pressures confronting a population. Scat-detection dogs can find samples from multiple species simultaneously across large, remote areas and are more effective than traditional wildlife detection methods such as radio-collaring, trapping, and photographing with remote cameras. By analyzing the scat, Wasser and his team can ascertain everything from a species' abundance and distribution to its use of resources.
Here in the San Juan Islands, Tucker and the crew are catching up with a few of the region's endangered Southern Resident Killer Whales, which were last spotted heading north. As the boat bisects the orcas' path about half a mile downwind of the pod, Tucker paces across the bow, poised to locate the "scent cone" of the feces, as his handler, Elizabeth Seely, shouts directions to the driver.
As endearing as the sight of Tucker is -- his neck and head outstretched over the prow of the boat like the figurehead of a galleon -- he is a no-nonsense, 76-pound smelling machine. Dogs have up to 40 times as many olfactory receptors as do humans, and that's not taking into consideration the maze of ridged bones in their snouts that increases the surface area on which scent particles are trapped. Plus they can sniff the air at an amazingly fast rate. All of which helps explain how Tucker has managed to track orca scat from more than a mile away. "It has allowed us to establish some of the causes of the decline of killer whales that began in the late 1990s," says Wasser, who has also done extensive conservation work in Africa. (The main culprit appears to be the lack of fish: the whales feed mostly on chinook salmon, whose numbers have diminished in recent decades thanks to a combination of increased marine pollutants, overfishing, and dams that disrupt their habitat.)
Wasser's dogs are so toy-fixated, he says, that "you can literally take a ball and throw it in a bag of dog food and they'll take the ball and not the food." Today the program has 12 dogs and five handlers deployed worldwide. The canines have sniffed out jaguars and pumas in southern Mexico and tigers and leopards in the wilds of Cambodia. In the species-rich savanna of Brazil's Cerrado region, they tracked the scat of five different species. Tucker himself has tracked the feces of grey wolves, moose, wolverines, woodland caribou, and green iguanas, but it's his work on the water, in search of orca poop, that has earned him the most attention. Passing boaters and whale-watching outfits will often radio in to check on his progress. "He's definitely the star of the show," says Jessica Lundin, an environmental toxicology graduate student who regularly accompanies the dog on his outings and uses the scat that he finds in her research.
Back on the boat, Tucker appears to be closing in on something good. Seely calls out directions over the canine's whines and whimpers as the driver's zigzagging gets tighter and tighter. "It's white!" she finally shouts to the crew. "Silver-dollar size!" The group erupts into cheers and whistles ("Good boy, Tuck!"), but their hero is oblivious to it all. His jowls stretched wide from the g-forces, he whips his head back and forth, the orange ball locked in his slavering mouth. He dances in the wind, an ecstatic black blur silhouetted against the morning sky.