Will Bark For Science
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Emily meets Colette Yee and Jack. Is Jack a dog? Jack is a dog. He is a blue heeler 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 Detection 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. 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.

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, bobbins.

Bobcat. They found the scent 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 found is in this rugged, remote terrain. Wow.

And a lot of these jobs would be impossible or too resource intensive for people to do on their own. Collette 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. This field of conservation dog detection has just only really exploded in the last 25 years. Like in the 90s, there were maybe 5, 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 and

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. You're telling me Jack can smell underwater? 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. I'm Emily Kwong. I'm Burleigh McCoy. And you're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

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

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 more because he's leaning forward into the air. This seems also like a team effort. Yeah. Jack has to find the smell and then communicate it 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. Right.

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. 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 whale's back end. Oh.

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. 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 booger 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, like, this is it. Like, we just did this. They did it. It worked. It worked.

And from a boat, no less. I mean, that just goes to show you how good Jack's nose is. Right. But even so, how is he doing this? 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. Dogs and other mammals like rats and mice are considered macro-osmotic, while humans are considered micro-osmotic. 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 the spongy area in the back of their snout, which means that the scents are getting 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

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 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. Sure, sure, sure. 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 them 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 difference between the smell of recent oil and older oil. So Lauren 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 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's smell or the Tupperware container.

Oh. But he did it. I mean, Jack, he made that cognitive step.

smell-o-vision leap all on his own. He did. Even knowing how good a dog's nose is, though, 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 dog goes everywhere, and they're humans like Colette. Absolutely. Thank you for bringing us the story, Burleigh. 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 Kweisi Lee. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. And I'm Burleigh McCoy. Thanks for listening to Shorewave from NPR.

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