Zoos Victoria is training sniffer dogs to detect live platypus in their burrows as part of a research project to determine how the monotremes look after their young.
The dogs were taught to recognise the odour of a platypus using scent-capturing polymer tubes which absorbed the smell of platypus sleeping in their nest boxes at Healesville Sanctuary. The tubes were then placed in the field for dogs to find.
If the detection method works, it will give scientists a way to collect much-needed data on wild platypus populations, without disturbing or interacting with the wild animals.
“One of the challenges with studying the platypus and why we still know very little about them is we as humans are not well designed to see them in their natural environment,” says Healesville Sanctuary platypus keeper Dr Jessica Thomas. “They are a little brown animal and they live in a brown habitat and they spend most of their time either swimming underwater or asleep underground in a burrow. And they’re nocturnal. Quite often they either may be there or they may not be there but you can’t see them.
“Part of the detection dog project is it will be a very easy and efficient way of counting how many platypus there are within a particular area without ever disturbing them.”
Wildlife detection dog officer Naomi Hodgens has been working with Kip, a six-year-old kelpie cross, to detect the scent of a live platypus.
The training methods are similar to those used on drug detection dogs, with two important differences: wildlife detection dogs need to be able to work in challenging and distracting environments, like a mountain stream, and they need to be safe and non-threatening toward any wildlife they encounter.
It’s the latter that takes the most training, says Hodgens. Working out of Healesville Sanctuary provides the dogs with frequent opportunities to learn to studiously avoid any wildlife they encounter.
She recommends that non-professional wildlife dogs be kept on a lead when in natural environments unless their recall skills are very strong – and even then a lead is safer.
Kip’s wildlife avoidance skills are one of the reasons he has been nominated to lead the platypus program.
“He’s got a lot of experience and his temperament is really well suited. He’s great around water, he’s really comfortable navigating quite tricky environments and he’s super resilient so he keeps trying even when things get a little bit challenging,” Hodgens says.
Kip has been trained to detect the scent of a live platypus, not just scent markers on their burrows. Platypus often use multiple burrows, so Kip has been tasked with finding out which one is currently occupied. Once he finds the scent, he is trained to sit a safe distance away and point until released by his handler, and then he gets a reward.
Zoos Victoria also has a three-year-old labrador named Moss and a five-year-old lagotto romagnolo named Daisy – a truffle-hunting dog – on their wildlife detection team.
All are trained to recognise multiple odours including the critically endangered Baw Baw frog. All were selected for their calm temperaments and desire to work for their chosen reward – a treat, toy or tennis ball. “The dogs really think it’s a big game,” says Hodgens.
Dogs have been used in weed detection, to find bats and birds struck down by the blades of a wind turbine, and to detect estrus and lactation in Tasmanian devil scat, but this is the first time they have been used in Australia to aid wildlife survey efforts.
Kip has so far been finding scent markers placed by Hodgens in a training environment. In April he will get to test his skills in the field.
Thomas and her team will go to Coranderrk Creek to trap and place radio collars on wild platypus. Hodgens and Kip will then search along the banks and cross-reference Kip’s finds with the radio collars.
“The idea is that we’re going to make sure the dogs can detect all the platypus with the transmitters, and that will give us an indication of a success rate,” Thomas says. “If we can say that the dogs have detected 100% of the animals with transmitters on them, that will give us a lot of confidence that the dogs know what they’re doing.”
If successful, the dog project will provide researchers with a reliable way to measure the current platypus population of a given waterway. Used in conjunction with environmental DNA sampling – which involves taking a sample of water to detect whether there are platypus living in the area – it could provide accurate and relatively fast survey results.
Environmental DNA testing “doesn’t tell you how many – you still have to go out and survey them,” Thomas says. “So this will be a really nice complement to that technique because you can take a water sample and go, yes, there are platypus there, bring in a detection dog, run around up and down the river, and the detection dog will tell you how many live platypus there are in that area and the platypus will be none the wiser.”
The Victorian government listed the platypus as vulnerable on its threatened species list in January 2021 but conservation efforts are constrained by a lack of population data. Despite being one of the most recognisable Australian animals, we know very little about the monotremes.
“It’s hard to believe that we don’t even really know how long incubation is because we’ve never seen a platypus lay an egg,” says Thomas. “Something as basic as that – there are not many other species that are so data deficient in Australia.”
