https://www.biographic.com/what-lies-beneath/
"As Raasay, a young border collie, leans over the edge of the kayak, it’s not a
ball she’s sniffing out. Rather, she’s hunting down a potential ecological
threat hidden beneath the surface. Her target during this training session: an
invasive aquatic plant, known as common cordgrass (
Spartina anglica), that
has found its way into many Australian lakes, mud flats, mangrove forests, and
salt marshes. And once established, Spartina is notorious for pushing out
native species and threatening otherwise biodiverse ecosystems. Raasay’s job is
to find the weed before it can spread.
Tracy Lyten, Raasay’s handler and one of the founders of Skylos Ecology, knows
that the most impactful conservation decisions are based on strong data. And in
her eyes, the six dogs who work at Skylos are the ultimate data collectors.
“They can tell us things that no other monitoring method can,” says Lyten.
Thanks to their acute sense of smell, estimated to be thousands of times more
sensitive than a human’s, dogs have been employed to find illicit substances,
missing people, and forensic evidence since the 19th century. Now,
conservationists are beginning to take advantage of that olfactory potential.
In addition to sniffing out invasive plants underwater, Lyten’s dogs have been
trained to find bird and bat carcasses hidden across sprawling wind farms. Some
of the canines can even locate animal scat left behind by particular animals,
clueing researchers in to where endangered species, like the tiger quoll
(
Dasyurus maculatus), are still present.
“You’ve got to pick the right dog for the right target odor based on their
personality,” says Lyten. Dogs that have shorter attention spans might have a
hard time finding plants, which have subtler scents than animal
remains—especially when the plants are underwater. On walks, Raasay’s
curiosity, patience, and urge to methodically sniff almost everything in sight
convinced Lyten that she would be a great candidate for finding invasive
weeds."
Via
Fix the News:
https://fixthenews.com/275-resurrection-notre-dame/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
