Good dog, great cause: Help Moose sniff out endangered wildlife

Detailed summary

For some of Australia’s hardest-to-find threatened species, locating them is the first step towards conserving them. And sometimes the best tool for that has four legs, a tail and an extraordinary nose.

For Michael Vella, conservation specialist at Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary on Queensland’s Gold Coast, a typical workday can involve two very different kinds of wildlife. On the spring morning I spoke to him, he and Moose, a specially trained cocker spaniel, had been out with the sanctuary’s koala research team. Moose helped locate two wild koalas, including one that needed to be vaccinated for chlamydia. Then in the afternoon, Michael donned a jumper to work in the Frog Lab, which is kept to a cool 12°C. There he’s involved with a breed-for-release program for the critically endangered Kroombit tinker frog (Taudactylus pleione).

Michael has worked with wildlife for more than 25 years, much of that time with species so elusive that simply finding them can be one of the greatest obstacles to conserving them.

The Kroombit tinker frog is a perfect example. A male can be located by the species’ distinctive call; researchers triangulate the sound to pinpoint its location. Females, however, don’t vocalise. “Finding females is like a needle in a haystack,” Michael says. “We’ve spent many hours crawling around on the rainforest floor, just flipping rocks and leaves, hoping that we’ll come across female frogs.”

For a species that dwindled to an estimated 150 individuals before conservation intervention began, finding females and introducing new genetic diversity into the sanctuary’s breeding program is critically important. Yet despite decades of ecological research, the eggs and tadpoles of the Kroombit tinker frog have never been found in the wild.

Locating these hidden early-life stages presents an extraordinary challenge for researchers – but it can be the perfect job for a highly trained conservation detection dog.

Michael’s interest in detection dogs was sparked after he attended a conference presentation about them. He knew they were already being used for their remarkable sense of smell to detect everything from contraband to missing people.

“I could see the merits that…

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