From airport biosecurity lines to crime scenes, detection dogs are well known—but their most surprising role may be in protecting wildlife. Dr Romane Cristescu, co-Director and co-founder of Detection Dogs for Conservation recently made an appearance on ABC Radio National Breakfast to discuss her experiences working alongside koala detection dogs, including during the devastating 2019/20 Black Summer Bushfires.
Cristescu completed their PhD examining the responses of koalas to varying rehabilitation efforts on post-mining land1. Collecting robust information on where koalas were in the landscape was fundamental to understanding their responses to different quality thresholds of restoration. But koalas are cryptic animals, occurring at low population densities and spending almost all their time high in the canopy. Instead of spotting a koala directly, indicators of their presence in their landscape, such as their faecal pellets or scat, serves as a useful shortcut to confirming an area is used by koalas.
If you have ever dropped a pen lid in tall grass or better still into a thick layer leaf litter, you would likely know of the difficulty of spotting small objects amongst a natural tangle. Koala scats are small (less than a 10-cent coin) and yet, as Cristescu puts it “have a very large scent cone”. Luckily, dogs can be trained to smell and locate what we humans can’t see.
Cristescu works almost exclusively with rescue dogs of any breed, with the crucial factor being that they love playing all day. This love of play serves as the reward that allows the dogs to associate locating the koala scent with enjoyment. The Detection Dog team works with two different types of trained dog. The first is the Habitat Detection dogs who are trained to detect koala poo of any age – even if the scat is one years old it is still a good indicator that an area is used by koalas. Then there are the dogs trained to locate only the freshest koala scat. These newly deposited scats make it possible to examine koala population genetics and the prevalence of disease such as Chlamydia which has devasted some populations.
An experimental field-based trial using koala scats arranged in an array of known locations determined that detection dogs consistently out-performed human-only teams2. When off leash, the dog detection rate was 100%. The dog was also 19 times more efficient and 153% more accurate than human teams walking transects.
Since their formation in 2015, the Detection Dogs for Conservation have partnered with community, industry and government to track animals such as koalas, quolls and masked owls, to discover pest species, and locate threatened native plants.
In the wake of the 2019/20 Black Summer bushfires, the team played an immediate and crucial role in performing koala search and rescue. Over many months the detection dogs located injured, malnourished or isolated koalas to facilitate their transfer to rehabilitation centres. A study of koalas returned to their habitat 4-6 months post-fire found that koalas were generally healthy at time of release and when recaptured 9 months later3.
Listen to the full ABC Radio National Breakfast discussion with Dr Romane Cristescu here.
- Cristescu, R. H., Rhodes, J., Frére, C., & Banks, P. B. (2013). Is restoring flora the same as restoring fauna? Lessons learned from koalas and mining rehabilitation. Journal of Applied Ecology, 50 (2), 423-431. ↩︎
- Cristescu, R. H., Foley, E., Markula, A., Jackson, G., Jones, D., & Frere, C. (2015). Accuracy and efficiency of detection dogs: a powerful new tool for koala conservation and management. Scientific Reports, 5(1), 8349. ↩︎
- Lane, M. R., Lowe, A., Vukcevic, J., Clark, R. G., Madani, G., Higgins, D. P., … & Marsh, K. J. (2023). Health assessments of koalas after wildfire: a temporal comparison of rehabilitated and non-rescued resident individuals. Animals, 13(18), 2863. ↩︎
Image: Koala in eucalypt canopy, Stefano Borghi on Unsplash.
This article was written by Cassandra Harvey, the Healthy Ecosystems Project Officer with the Nature Conservation Council of NSW.
