Florida Everglades Python Invasion: Bomb-Sniffing Dogs Used To Curb Snake Presence In National Park (Huffington post)
By Barbara Liston
ORLANDO (Reuters) – Some bomb-sniffing dogs trained to help fight terrorism
are turning their olfactory attention toward a different scourge: Burmese
pythons in Florida’s Everglades National Park.
The dogs are members of “EcoDogs,” a three-year-old collaboration at Alabama’s
Auburn University between the science departments and the school’s Canine
Detection Research Institute, which trains dogs to detect explosives.
“The dogs are really, really good,” said Christina Romagosa, a biologist at
Auburn.
She said in a test of python detection in south Florida, the dogs could cover
a search area 2.5 times faster than a person.
“People can only see that the snake is there if they can see the snake. The
dogs can smell the snake even if it’s not visually apparent to us,” she said.
Todd Steury, an Auburn conservation biologist and co-founder of the project,
said many of the EcoDogs were found temperamentally unsuitable for indoor
explosives work but thrive outdoors searching for ecological targets.
Steury estimated training a new dog to detect a scent takes six to 10 weeks.
Training for each additional scent takes “about 10 minutes. You can do it by
accident if you’re not careful,” he said, by inadvertently rewarding …
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