Bronco, The Lanternfly Sniffer Dog
Last fall, at a construction site in Ohio, Bronco marched down rows of heavy equipment, hunting a killer. His target eggs of the spotted lanternfly, an invasive insect that's harmless to humans but a menace to more than 70 plant species, fruit crops especially.
Spotted lanternfly
Lanternfly eggs are tough to spot. They usually appear as white, tan, or gray patches about the size of a small Band-Aid on the trunks of plants or undersides of branches. They're also excellent hitchhikers that travel throughout the East Coast by sticking to vehicles, outdoor equipment, or shipping supplies humans move from one state to the next. For farmers, these sneaky superspreaders can spell financial doom. In 2019, researchers in Pennsylvania estimated that lanternflies could cost the state roughly $325 million annually in crop, timber, and labour losses if they were to spread statewide. That's why some scientists are sending in the dogs.
Credit: Paige Malone
Bronco a 6-year-old Cardigan Welsh Corgi is one of roughly 180 dogs nationwide that are part of the Canine Citizen Science Study, an initiative that's training dogs to sniff out lanternfly eggs before they hatch and wreak havoc.
The project is a collaboration between Virginia Tech University, which is running the study, and the Texas Tech University Canine Olfaction Lab, which conducts research aimed at uncovering the potential (and limits) of dogs' sensitive snouts and finding new methods of leveraging them. In addition to lanternfly eggs, Canine Olfaction Lab researchers have trained dogs to detect explosives and invasive aquatic larvae. In the process, they're upending some long-held beliefs about how dogs detect and identify scents.
Bronco is part of that mission. Years before he began hunting insect eggs, Bronco's handler, Paige Malone, trained him for sport scent work-recreational competitions wherein dogs race to find hidden cotton swabs laced with essential oils, usually clove, birch, anise, or cypress scents. While Bronco would slow down near a scent, he wouldn't stop and hold his nose in the swab's exact location - a move that alerts the handler that a desired smell has been found.
Malone knew that Bronco could track odours despite being a middling competitor, so when she spotted a Facebook post about the citizen science project in February of 2023, she signed up. So did more than 1,500 dog handlers nationwide, including her mother. Together, they formed part of the study's Ohio team-five dogs and five handlers eager to see if their pups could learn to find eggs like professional lanternfly detection dogs that are used by a handful of local and state agencies along the East Coast.
Soon, a package containing tiny mesh pouches with frozen, non-viable lanternfly eggs arrived. Malone spent 10 minutes a day over a few months training Bronco to identify the eggs. Then it was time to test.
That summer, the Ohio team waited outside an empty conference room while inside, team leaders placed six boxes-each containing egg masses, other distracting smells, both, or nothing at all-on the floor. Each dog had 90 seconds to identify which boxes held eggs, then repeated the exercise nine more times with boxes, eggs, and smells rearranged after each trial. Bronco breezed right through it, Malone says, adding that when he smelled eggs, the dog immediately struck the point-and-freeze position he couldn't do in scent competitions. "It was a really big surprise for me."
And Bronco kept breezing through it, when Virginia Tech researchers hid frozen eggs at a muddy construction site, when they ran a modified box test outside using live eggs, and in a local forest where Bronco successfully distinguished between areas where researchers had planted no eggs, just a few, or many to represent a full infestation.
Found on Facebook
07.10.2024
