New York Times News Service
Tucker the dog may
help save whales
New York Times News Service
OFF THE COAST OF SAN JUAN ISLAND, Wash. — A dog named Tucker with a thumping tail and a mysterious past as a stray on the streets of Seattle has become an unexpected star in the realm of canine-assisted science. He is the world’s only working dog, marine biologists say, able to find and track the scent of orca scat, or feces, in open ocean water — up to a mile away, in the smallest of specks.
Through dint of hard work and obsession with an orange ball on a rope, which he gets to play with as a reward after a successful search on the water, Tucker is an ace in finding something that most people, and perhaps most dogs, would just as soon avoid.
“Sometimes he’d just turn around and sit down and stare at me, waiting for me to figure it out,” said Deborah A. Giles, who is completing a Ph.D. on how orcas here are affected by the thousands of whale watchers and scores of commercial whale-watch vessels in the area.
“He’s very subtle,” said Giles, sitting behind the wheel of the research vessel Moja as Tucker, an 8-year-old black Lab mix, paced at the prow.
The research is raising new questions about how to protect orcas.
Samuel K. Wasser, the director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington and the director of the orca scat research project, said that when he started the project four years ago, he thought boat activity would be a crucial element of whale stress, reflected through stress hormones in their scat. But it turned out, he said, that food supply was more important, with fewer salmon — because of overfishing by humans or habitat degradation or both — emerging as a main stress variable.
Knowing to focus on fish supply, he said, means knowing where to focus public policy efforts on the animals’ behalf.
Through the scat, biologists can tell, for example, which whale pods spend the winter off the coast of Southern California, because their feces can contain higher trace elements of DDT, the pesticide that was banned in 1972. The poison still echoes through the decades in the fish the whales eat before returning north. Other orca groups have concentrations of dioxins or PCBs traced to industrial activity around Seattle.