Scat-savvy dogs helping scientists

KENMORE, Wash. – 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 now 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.

Most of the dogs in Gator’s research 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. Gator also is trained to match – to link samples with producers.

“If 20 samples are all from the 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.