The Dog and the Whale

Photo credit: Kelley Balcomb-Bartok Radio 4 spends a day on a motor boat with Tucker the sniffer dog and a team of zoologists in search of killer whale dung, floating in the waters off the North American Pacific coast. Tucker is a black Labrador. He is one of an elite team of detection dogs, trained to find the faeces of threatened animals in the cause of conservation. A lump of faeces is packed with information about an animal's stress levels, fertility, nutritional status and exposure to chemical pollution. There is no other way to reap this data from living whales because whales spend most of their lives underwater. It is impossible to take blood samples from them because of their thick blubber. A trained dog's nose enables researchers from the University of Washington in Seattle to find whale scat in much greater quantities than by relying on their own human senses. Tucker's work means the scientists can start to piece together an explanation for why a special population of killer whales in North America is at risk of extinction. This community of orca lives between Vancouver Island and the mainland US Pacific coast. They number about 90 individuals and in recent years they have suffered some terrible times. Two years ago, about one in ten died. Several years earlier, 20% of them were lost. Could it be the boat loads of whale-watching tourists which are fatally disturbing the animals? Or is it declining numbers of Chinook salmon - the staple food of this population of killer whales. Alternatively, could industrial and agricultural pollutants such as PCBs and DDT in the salmon be partly to blame. According to Professor Sam Wasser who leads the university's Center for Conservation Biology, the hormones and chemicals in the orcas' scats might suggest a toxic interplay of factors. The latest round of Tucker and the scientists' endeavours and investigations on the water have been funded by the Washington Sea Grant. Presenter Andrew Luck-Baker also talks to Rosalind Rolland, a whale biologist at the New England Aquarium in Boston. At Sam Wasser's suggestion, she was the first to use a detection dog to study whales through their faeces. Her species is the gigantic North Atlantic Right Whale whose numbers are also perilously low. Her best friend is a Rottweiler called Fargo who worked in the drugs squad before moving into whale conservation. So what does it take to get a dog on the high seas to find you whale dung - other than seasickness tablets and no fear of curious 50 tonne marine mammals? Producer/presenter: Andrew Luck-Baker.