Sidebar: Scat Sniffing
by Robin Meadows
Smithsonian’s National Zoo zoologist Katherine Ralls and University of Washington graduate student Deborah Smith are using scat dogs to study the endangered San Joaquin kit fox in California’s Central Valley. Ralls has studied kit foxes there for several years and thought that scat sniffing might be a better way to collect data. “I always like to use new techniques because you often discover new things; that’s generally true in science,” she says.
The dogs must distinguish kit-fox scat from the coyote, skunk, and badger scats in the study area. Ralls and Smith have found that scat dogs are remarkably accurate—Smith’s German shepherd correctly picked out more than 300 kit-fox scats. Jesus Maldonado, a former Zoo scientist now at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., identified individuals from scat using DNA analysis. Ralls and Smith also found that dogs find considerably more kit-fox scats than experienced people—three times more on roads and nine times more in the scrublands where the foxes live.
Now Ralls and Smith are comparing scat sniffing with radiotracking, which is part of a separate study by Brian Cypher of the California State University at Stanislaus’ Endangered Species Recovery Program. “It’s looking good,” says Ralls. “We found 963 scats in about a month and have analyzed 62, and already the scat locations are matching up well with the radiotracking locations for the same individual.” Besides providing reliable information about the kit-fox population, using scat dogs is efficient. “Once trained, scat dogs take less time than trapping and radiotracking,” says Smith. The downside is that the scat-dog study is more expensive due to the cost of analyzing the DNA, which runs about $100 per sample. However, Ralls expects the cost of their scat research to become competitive with radiotracking as DNA analysis gets cheaper. “It’s such a competitive field and everybody’s pushing to improve the technology—it’s the trickle-down effect of the emphasis on human genome sequencing,” she says.
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ZooGoer 31(5)
2002. Copyright 2002 Friends of the National Zoo.
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