Short Wave - Will Bark For Science

Episode Date: March 5, 2025

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 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 [e-mail] 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.See 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

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Okay, Jack's going to take off and go look for the sample. Emily meets Colette Yee and Jack. Is Jack a dog? Jack is a dog. He is a blueheeler mix with floppy ears and an intense love for playing with his ball. He was originally a shelter dog, but now he is employed. Oh, what's his job?

So Jack and Colette work for rogue detainte. teams based in Rice, Washington, a company that trains rescue dogs to sniff out, well, a lot of things. And we have a piece of bumblebee nest out right now. Hmm. Bumblebee nest. Finding live bumblebee nest 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. Wow, because the nests are kind of hard to find.

They are if you're human. But not for Jack. Not for Jack. Good job, kid. Good job. 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. 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. It can be very cryptic odors. It can be oftentimes scat. So poop. Jack has found a lot of poop from all kinds of animals, from foxes, deer, lynx. Wolf, cougar, bobcat. They've found the sense of live animals, too. Washington ground squirrel odors, invasive European green crabs.

And contraband. Ivory, shark fin. They found carcasses. They've even found diseased plants, Emily. And a lot of what they've found is in this rugged, remote terrain. 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. What an inventive use of one of dogs' greatest superpowers, their noses.

I know. It seems so obvious when you think about it. Yeah. 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, ten 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. What were they looking for?

Whale poop, Emily, for science. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, you're telling me, Jack can smell underwater? You'll have to wait and see. Today on the show, Jack the Conservation Dogo, how canines like Jack help conservation biologists find the hidden, hard to find, and invisible, and the science of how they do it. I'm Emily Huang. I'm Burley McCoy.

And you're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Okay, Burley McCoy, shortwave producer, why is Jack the dog searching for whale poop. 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. 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.

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. 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, okay, I know this game. 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. So Jack never actually gets in the water. Right, right. He's been trained to sniff out this whale's cat from the boat. And we take the killer whales cat. It's just this like, it looks like a gooey bugger. 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. Commitment to the ocean sometimes looks like this. How does Colette know, though, that Jack has picked up on a scent? 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. 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. bit more because he's leaning forward into the air.

This seems also like a team effort. Jack has to find the smell and then communicated to Colette, who has to notice that he's communicating and listen to him. 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, family, they have to follow the whales. Wait, why do they have to follow the whales? Can't they just find their poop? They can't. Because the scat breaks up or it sinks really quick, sometimes within 10 minutes of leaving the whales back end. So they need whales to signal where to start looking while also trying not to get too close to them to push them away. And Colette says you have to make this whole mental map that takes into account the whales location, the water current and the wind to put the boat exactly where Jack could pick up a scent. This is such a dance. Okay. And it sounds like there is a time constraint too. Absolutely. So with all this, you're trying to race to get the poop before it sinks. What a magical, mystical, fleeting bugger of a turd. 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. She's like, got the biggest grin on her face. And I just know, like, this is it. Like, we just did this. They did it. It worked. And from a boat, no less. I mean, that just goes to show you how good Jack's noses.

Right. But even so, how is he doing this? Yeah. So this was one of the questions that I asked Lauren DeGrieff. She's a forensic chemist at Florida International University. And she studies the compounds dogs are smelling in the air when they detect things. 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.

So for dogs, the air coming in through their nose goes to two separate places. their lungs and this 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. So all those little sniffs as they go in, in and out, they're really, really reaching. It's like having little invisible hands pulling that

odor towards their nose. What a delicious life, the life of a dog. 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. And different odorants can activate multiple receptors in the dog's nose. And that translates to a kind of specific code for the dog. 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.

They're basically chemists. Yeah. But this is actually a part of what Lauren studies, trying to understand what exactly it is that a dog is smelling. Oh, from like a chemical standpoint. That's interesting because thinking about Colette'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? 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.

Yeah. 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. 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 different. 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 to be able to train the dog accordingly. Right. And is the goal that then a dog will be able to detect old oil in nature? 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. 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? This is Ken Ramirez. He's executive vice president and chief training officer for care and prior 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. The secret of odor detection is that you don't really take. train that. The dog already knows how to smell the world around them. But our job as trainers is to

teach them what to smell, when to smell it, and what to do when they smell it. Which makes sense, though I imagine it's hard to do in practice. 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 going to 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 smell or the Tupperware container. Oh, but he did it. I mean, Jack, he made that cognitive smell of vision leap all on his own. He did.

Even knowing how good a dog's nose is, though, it's, it is astonishing. And it just sounds like a lot of coordination on Jack and Colette's parts. It really is. And that's where this other component comes in, which is trust. 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. We love a conservation success story. We do. Tell me about what other projects conservation dogs are working on.

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 stoneflies. They've been trained to detect a deadly disease in bighorn sheep and used to detect poachers. Wow. 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. Shout out to Jack.

And conservation doggos everywhere, and they're humans like Colette. Absolutely. Thank you for bringing us the story, Burley. Thank you for listening. 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 Quasi Lee. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcast.

Casting Strategy. I'm Emily Kwong, and I'm Burley McCoy. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.