KENMORE
- Deep in the woods, Gator is learning to find wolverine scat. Since
there aren't any wolverines within a couple hundred miles, samples
are planted in the brush.
The 8-year-old blue heeler has a very educated nose. The former
drug-sniffing dog can find marijuana, heroin and cocaine. Now he
tracks poop from grizzly and black bear, cougar, jaguar and maned
wolf in Brazil, fisher, bobcat, lynx and wolverine.
University of Washington biologist Sam Wasser figures Gator can
help determine if the wolverine found recently in north-central
Washington is the only one there.
"Find it!" says handler Heath Smith, turning him loose.
Gator charges down the trail and zeros in on the first sample. He
sits and looks back at Smith, his handler and best pal: Score!
Smith tosses him a tennis ball.
Most of the dogs in the program are rescued from the pound, said
Wasser, who developed the program as director of the University of
Washington's Center for Conservation Biology.
At the shelters, he or one of the handlers bounce a tennis ball.
The dogs whose heads bob up and down, tracking the ball, make the
first cut.
"If they stop to pee and drop the ball, then they're out because
they're not obsessed enough with the ball," he said.
Breed is not an issue. "All dogs have good noses," Wasser said.
"Anything that has a high ball drive is what you want."
Busy Gator finds all four samples. If there were feces from any
of the other species he's mastered, he'd find them, too. Anything to
get the ball.
So - once the dog finds it, what good is a pile of animal scat?
Wasser, who holds the endowed chair in conservation biology at
the UW, has been working more than 20 years to figure that out. The
answer is, plenty - and more all the time.
Science has long used scat to determine what animals eat. Now,
with advances in DNA and other technology, feces provide information
about nutrition, reproduction, disease and stress. The keys are
hormones and other indicators, such as DNA from intestinal cells
that slough off during digestion.
And it's a noninvasive way to collect information, especially
important with endangered species - and sometimes the only way. For
example, a Rottweiler was trained to detect right-whale feces off
the East Coast for the New England Aquarium in 2001.
"It was pretty stinky and it was bright orange," Wasser recalled.
And live whales won't hold still for a physical.
The dog-handler relationship is critical, he said.
"That's why you can have a whale dog on a boat. ... The dog is
playing a game of hot and cold," and the handler is reading its
signals.
Gator also is trained to match - to link samples with producers.
"If 20 samples are all from same individual, you have the dog
tell you that and then you just need one" for expensive genetic
testing, Wasser said.
"This whole program ... is really aimed at maximizing the amount
of information we can acquire from as large an area as possible as
cheaply as possible," he said. "If you don't have to capture the
animal or even see it, you can gather the information a lot
quicker."
The program's eight resident dog-trainer teams are moving this
year from a house in town to tailor-made kennels and housing at Pack
Forest, an experimental forestry station and UW conference center
that borders more than 4,000 acres of woods - an ideal training
site.
Wasser's career began with research on baboons in Tanzania,
studying competition among females. That led him to a Finnish
researcher who used human feces to study links among estrogen, fiber
and colon cancer - a project that increased Wasser's awareness of
the vast information in feces.
The goal is a comprehensive health panel, like the range of tests
a doctor would perform on a blood draw. Results could help
scientists set priorities for endangered populations, Wasser said.
Whether scientists are trapping animals or collecting scat, some
are more likely than others to enter traps or to defecate in the
open, which creates a sampling bias.
"Then it occurred to me that one of best ways to reduce this bias
would be doing something analogous to what they do with narcotics
dogs," Wasser said.
So in 1997 he began three years of work with Barbara Davenport
with the state Corrections Department at McNeil Island, who trains
virtually all the region's narcotics dogs.
Davenport also worked with Wasser and the New England Aquarium's
Roz Rolland on the right-whale project.
"That was the dry run that showed us this could work on killer
whales," said Wasser, who plans a trial in the San Juan Islands this
summer with a dog trained to find orca scat.
Federal wildlife biologist Brad Hanson of the Northwest Fisheries
Science Center said he had sent orca samples for training to Wasser,
from the wild and from San Diego's Sea World.
"I am optimistic that the dogs would be able to detect it better
than we can," said Hanson, who said 200 hours on the water last
summer produced about a dozen samples. "We're going to try to get at
least a pilot project off this summer."
Longtime whale researcher Ken Balcomb at the Center for Whale
Research in Friday Harbor said he's agreed to give Wasser's scat
dogs a try.
"If Sam is successful with these dogs ... we'd have a lot more
information about diet and hormones and stuff," Balcomb said. "Some
of it's kind of magic and wishy but we don't want to pooh-pooh
him."
