“I HOPE we get a poop today,” says Rosalind Rolland, a conservationist at the New England Aquarium, pouring her morning tea. “Just one.”
“Maybe two,” says her colleague Scott Kraus. “If you follow something long enough, it’ll poop.”
Researchers from the aquarium’s right whale research project in the hill town of Lubec, Maine, describe their field base – with its shared bathrooms, long boarding house table and “kegerator”, a fridge with a beer tap through the door – as summer camp for adults. Judging by their early morning conversation it could easily be summer camp for toddlers.
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I turn to their colleague Fargo, but having dedicated over half his life to the subject, he is even more enthusiastic than they are. Fargo is one of an elite corps of whale-scat sniffer dogs, and he may be the most important member of the research team. Today I am going to join them in their collective quest to sniff out whale poop.
Whales may be the biggest creatures on the planet, but they also swim fast and dive deep, so are notoriously difficult to study. Fortunately, you can tell a lot about an animal by studying what it leaves behind. In faeces, researchers can find clues about an animal’s distribution, abundance, sex and reproductive status. Measurements of faecal glucocorticoid hormones reveal stress levels, and parasites and toxins give an overall indication of health and vitality. In whales this is almost impossible to study any other way.
Spotting scat samples, which hang just below the sea’s surface before they break apart, is far more difficult than finding the animals themselves, and that’s where dogs like Fargo come in. With years of training and more than 200 million olfactory receptors – compared with humans’ mere 5 million – dogs can ramp up the number of samples collected and locate endangered species in areas where no one is sure they even exist.
The approach has been widely used on land: the first concrete proof that there were grizzly bears surviving in Washington State was a faecal sample located by a detector dog in 1997. Sam Wasser at the University of Washington in Seattle got the idea to train dogs for wildlife missions when hound hunting was banned in the state. The hunters were looking for another use for their dogs, and it hit him: “We can use them for scat.” Wasser, along with Barbara Davenport, a dog trainer with the Washington State Department of Corrections, began training dogs to do the detection. They soon decided that air-sniffing dogs – trained to find explosives and narcotics – would do better.
Detector dogs are now employed to help conserve elusive creatures such as mountain lions and grizzly bears in the Rocky Mountains, bobcats and lynx in New England, maned wolves and jaguars in Brazil, kit foxes in California, and caribou, moose and wolves in Canada. Fargo is special though: he is one of the first sniffer dogs to work the open sea.
A 6-year-old, 40-kilogram Rottweiler, Fargo began his career as a companion for an elderly woman in Washington, but when she went into full-time care he found himself out of a job. He soon met Davenport and retrained to become a drug sniffer, specialising in cocaine and narcotics, before moving on to fieldwork. He has been a wildlife researcher for the past four years. Besides his seasons at sea, he has worked on bear scat in the Rockies, been trained to find illegal elephant tusks and ivory, and spent time as an instructor for new handlers on a desert tortoise project in the Mojave Desert. Many a tenured professor would be proud to have his resumé.
Before we head out to the Bay of Fundy on the nearby Canadian coast, Rolland, a veterinarian, administers 25 milligrams of Benadryl to Fargo to prevent nausea. Fargo’s one weakness is seasickness, but it’s a minor flaw. His former partner, a mutt named Bob, was burdened with a fear of whales and would curl up in the bottom of the research boat whenever he saw one nearby.
“Fargo’s former partner, a mutt called Bob, had a fear of whales and would curl up in the bottom of the boat”
Most importantly, according to Davenport, Fargo has “an obsessive-compulsive attitude regarding the ball”. His dogged focus on this green bouncy reward makes him a tireless researcher.
Though the northern Atlantic right whale population is down to a mere 350, the team knows where to go, and we soon find whales. Like the whalers who hunted rights before them, to these researchers humpbacks are humpbacks, fins are fins, but only right whales are “whales”. Not because they used to be considered the right ones to hunt, which is how they got their name, but because they have been the focus of 27 years of study by this research team here on the Bay of Fundy and down south off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, where females go to calve.
Throughout the ride, Fargo has been curled up in a green fleece at the stern. As we approach the whales, Rolland brings him up forward. In his orange life vest, or “Fido Float”, he leaps eagerly onto the brown rubber pad spread across the bow. “Good boy,” Rolland coaxes, “let’s find it.”
The 6-metre boat has a broad prow that makes an ideal platform for a detector dog. When dogs work on land, they sally back and forth in a “scent cone”, reversing course when they lose a scent, narrowing in on the target as the odour gets stronger. It can be tricky though, because scents can drop out behind thick vegetation or in rough terrain. “It’s much easier on open water,” Davenport says. “There are no dead spots.” Easier for the dog perhaps, but at sea it requires the skill, experience and intuition of the handler to read canine body language – lots of nose pointing, tail wagging, and posturing – to know which direction to go.
Upwind of a few whales, Fargo drops his snout. “He’s got a wiggle,” says Rolland. “He’s got scent.” Fargo paces back and forth across the bow, wagging his stump of a tail – which one visitor christened “the happy inch”. His head is low to the water, close to the scent drifting just above the surface.
We approach a glass-still patch of water about the size of a small swimming pool. Kraus backs off: “I don’t want to get in that fluke print.” It’s the wake from a V-shaped tail the size of a small car.
The happy inch stops moving. Fargo has lost the scent. “It might have been a big fart,” Rolland concedes. Rolland and Kraus are undeterred, however. If you follow something long enough…
We break for lunch as a group of whales to the east of us are diving to feed. I ask Rolland about how the project began. “I started out looking at what was going on with right whale reproduction in the late 90s,” she says. In 1999, there were only four new calves in the population, and just one was born in 2000. That’s one birth for the entire population of 350 – a single offspring for a species that once swam the coastlines of both sides of the North Atlantic in the tens of thousands.
Some observers forecasted the demise of the species in less than two centuries, and researchers were desperate to know why the whales had stopped reproducing. Were there too few individuals? Were the whales starving, or suffering from inbreeding? The possibilities were numerous, and the tools to study these 40-tonne animals few.
“Researchers were desperate to know why the whales had stopped reproducing”
Rolland figured that faecal sampling would help her narrow it down – perhaps pollution by hormone disruptors was affecting their reproductive capacity, or maybe detergents or antifouling agents, which had been shown to cause reproductive problems in aquatic reptiles, molluscs and fish, were to blame? Perhaps, she thought, faecal samples could be used to test reproductive hormones, as had been done in primates and other animals.
The scats Rolland and the team collected during the first summer field season showed that it was possible to determine sex, hormone levels and even individual genotypes from faeces, but the sample sizes weren’t nearly large enough. Wasser, who was analysing hormones from whale faeces, visited the project one summer and declared it perfect for sniffer dogs. It sounded interesting to Rolland, and crazy. “Who the hell was going to fund this?” she says. Fortunately Phil Clapham at the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration loved the idea and provided an early grant. “Part of my enthusiasm,” he admits, “was the amusing thought of being able to tell people that I was the one who funded poop-sniffing dogs.” He had no idea they would be so successful.
Since the project began in 2003, dogs have increased the number of samples fourfold. On average, dogs collect about a scat an hour – a rate Rolland refers to as “poops per unit effort” – while researchers might gather one or two a day. Opportunistic collecting confirmed the value of faecal studies, but dogs provide sufficient numbers for statistical analysis, allowing the researchers to do the math.
After we finish lunch, Fargo gets a strong scent from a nearby courtship group. We soon get a whiff for ourselves. Though it requires the sharp nose of a dog to track whale scat at a nautical mile, directly downwind of floating faeces even humans can pick up the complex combination of oil, crushed crustaceans, a hint of sourness and, well, whale.
Kraus soon spots the scat ahead and steers us towards the courtship group, while Fargo finally gets his pay in the shape of a bright green tennis ball. It instantly disappears behind two formidable rows of sharp white teeth.
The poo is surprisingly modest, the size of a small brick. Research assistant Cindy Browning scoops it up with a fine-meshed plankton net. In spring, scats can be bright red, because of the whales’ diet of lipid-rich copepods – a type of crustacean found off the Great South Channel (see Map). The colours change with the season and the fat content of the prey. This sample is deep reddish brown, a shade or two darker than the sandstone cliffs that line the Bay of Fundy.
Rolland and Browning carefully store the faeces in palm-size plastic jars. Once the scat is brought on board, the smell is overwhelming. “If you spill it on your clothes,” Rolland warns, “you want to throw those clothes away.”
“The smell is overwhelming. If you spill it on your clothes, you want to throw those clothes away”
Back at the field station, Browning and Rolland prepare the samples to be shipped all over the continent. A lab in South Carolina will look for marine biotoxins from harmful algal blooms, on the rise as the climate warms. Researchers in Colorado test for protozoan parasites, hormone levels are measured in Washington state, and geneticists in Ontario amplify the DNA from sloughed off intestinal cells, to match the faecal samples with individual whales. In North Carolina, lipid levels provide information on the nutritional status of each whale.
The samples are proving invaluable. Rolland and her colleagues have shown that paralytic shellfish poisoning, caused by eating shellfish contaminated with toxic algae, may be contributing to the right whale’s failure to recover from centuries of hunting. Levels of the neurotoxins, which are ingested through their main prey, Calanus copepods, are so high in some right whales that they exceed those considered safe for human consumption.Perhaps even more troubling is the presence of domoic acid in right whales. Produced by diatoms, this toxin has several neurological effects, including seizures and coma, and has been responsible for the death of hundreds of sea lions in the Pacific. So far it’s unclear just how the toxin is affecting right whales and their reproduction, but long-term studies may provide a link between toxins and reproductive success.
Waste not want not
Protozoan parasites could also be causing problems. Almost three-quarters of the whales analysed so far have Giardia, and about a quarter Cryptosporidium, a prevalence that far exceeds that found in bowhead and beluga whales. Both of these parasites have been associated with severe diarrhoeal disease in land mammals, and the blame may lie with humans. Right whales spend much of their lives close to big cities, feeding in Cape Cod Bay near Boston, migrating back and forth each year past New York, Philadelphia and Charleston, and raising their young off Jacksonville, Florida, and coastal Georgia. They may be picking up these parasites from human or domestic animal waste dumped in the ocean.
Hormone studies, by contrast, have brought some good news. By looking at levels of progestogens and oestrogens, researchers have been able to estimate the reproductive status of females, and many are doing well. That’s backed up by the reality: there were 19 calves born into the population last winter, the third good year in a row.
With the success of the right whale project, Wasser has started a study of killer whale scat in Washington’s Puget Sound. Killer whale populations have declined by about 20 per cent in recent years, and it isn’t clear whether this is related to the downturn of their main prey, Chinook salmon; the result of increased boat traffic and noise; or diseases and toxins, such as PCBs, in sewage. “These whales have the highest PCB levels ever recorded in any mammal,” Wasser says.
He can also track disturbance caused by boat traffic with measurements of the stress hormone cortisol and measure nutritional stress with a combination of thyroid hormones and cortisol. He can then gauge the impacts of the different variables so that conservation efforts can target the right areas. “And, of course, to look at all those variables, you really need a good sample size,” says Wasser. “That’s where the dogs are important.”
Killer whale faeces, for the record, is a snotty greenish brown, and it’s less buoyant than right whale scat and difficult to spot from a boat. Still, if you follow an orca long enough… Wasser has collected 33 samples this year.
Back in Lubec, strong winds, fog banks and rain kept us ashore for the rest of the week. The water was too choppy, the winds too strong for sniffer dogs. It’s too bad for the researchers, but the foul weather and thick fog that is so common here may have helped save the whales from extinction in earlier centuries. Whalers perhaps missed this last known feeding ground.
Fair weather or foul, the oceans are becoming a dangerous place for many organisms, from tiny molluscs to mighty cetaceans. “Animals that inhabit coastal zones are exposed to multiple stressors,” Rolland says. “It probably isn’t just one factor, it’s more the cumulative impact of lots of stressors that is affecting these whales.”
Since the summer, Fargo has moved on to new projects. He recently trained new handlers to locate seven species of bats in the Mojave Desert, and Davenport is testing his ability to find invasive plants. His enthusiasm for conservation, it seems, is undiminished.
Back in New England, Rolland reflects on the the huge amount of work still to be done to protect the whales. “I thought I’d be into something else now,” she says, “But I’ve just gotten deeper into it.”
