A very good dog hunts very bad ants
Tobias is a Labrador retriever with one job: sniffing out invasive Argentine ants wherever they hide. He’s really good at it, and with his help, a fragile island ecosystem may be spared a repeat inundation by the pests.
Santa Cruz Island is 25 miles off the coast of Southern California, part of Channel Islands National Park. The island’s rich, rugged environment — which includes more than 1,000 kinds of plants and animals, including the bald eagle and the island fox — is threatened by Argentine ants, one of the world’s most successful and wily invasive species.
The ants are one in a long line of threats that The Nature Conservancy has worked to overcome since it bought most of the island in 1978. In one section, the ants chased away flower-pollinating bees, native ants, spiders and other insects crucial to local ecology.
They are nearly impossible to get rid of; it had never been done with an infestation as large as Santa Cruz’s. But Christina Boser, an ecologist who leads the conservancy’s ant eradication project, devised an aerial assault, dropping tiny sugar water beads spiked with diluted poison from helicopters.
The campaign, largely in 2015 and 2016, appears to have killed off the ants. Still, if even one colony has survived, this elaborate effort might have been wasted.
That’s where Tobias comes in. Once he pinpoints the faint pheromone scent left by this particular species of ant — and no other — he will sit down and look at his handler with the excited expectation of a child on Christmas morning. Tobias’ reward is his “wubba,” a soft blue ball.
“We have developed a really special bond,” said Kyren Zimmerman, a handler with the nonprofit Working Dogs for Conservation, headquartered in Bozeman, Mont.
Dogs are renowned for their scenting skills, whether they’re detecting narcotics, bedbugs, bombs or tumors. Increasingly, since the 1990s, scientists have trained them to aid in conservation.
It is a rare package of traits that suit some dogs to this kind of work, the most important being a fanatical toy obsession and high energy. This is a personality that can be difficult for pet owners, which may be why Tobias and others in the Working Dogs for Conservation “pack” were found in shelters.
“They love what they do. They just needed that purpose and direction,” said the group’s co-founder, Deborah Woollett.
In March, Tobias and Zimmerman underwent weeks of basic Argentine ant training. Then they took a choppy ferry ride to the island and got to work.
By summer’s end, the pair hadn’t found any new ant colonies in all their hiking and bushwhacking — a great sign that the eradication really worked.
Boser believes there’s no other dog in the world trained like Tobias to detect Argentine ants in a wild landscape. Importantly, he is both cheaper and more effective than other search methods.
Boser and Woollett are now working to publish their training methodology. With Argentine ants a major pest on six continents, they believe that dogs with Tobias’ skills could be in demand.
“It’s an emerging science, but it’s actually a very needed science,” Boser said.
Monitoring will continue, but with the ants seemingly gone, the area’s ecology has already improved.
“Being able to put your towel down on the beach and watch the sunset is nice,” Boser said. “You can do that now without having ants crawl all over you.”
Tobias, however, has been happier since leaving in September. He’s moved to nearby San Clemente Island, where he’s helping scientists find Argentine ants in areas that are still infested.
It’s a little closer to an ant-sniffing dog’s vision of heaven.
“He’s getting a lot more of his favorite wubba time now,” Zimmerman said.