Will Bark For Science
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Conductor Robert Frahn says a good melody captures our attention.
And then it moves you through time. Music is architecture in time. If you engage in the moment with what you're listening to, you do lose a sense of the time around you.
How we experience time.
That's on the TED Radio Hour from NPR. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Okay, Jack's going to take off and go look for the sample. 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. 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. Good boy, Jack. 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, bobcat. They've found the scents 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. And a lot of these jobs would be impossible or too resource intensive for people to do on their own. Colette 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 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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