Dog Training Tips

Maya the Border Collie cross was a rescue dog from the RSPCA and is now in training as the world’s second koala detection dog and will be based on North Stradbroke Island.

After great success with the field trails of Oscar the first Koala Detection dog, Maya will continue Oscar’s work on the island assisting the  dedicated people working hard to help this great little Australian. Below is some infomation and links to Koala websites written by koala researcher Romane Cristescu.

Koala populations in decline

The situation of the koala is becoming rapidly critical. The scientists have recognize it, and created the Koala Research Network www.gpem.uq.edu.au to bring together all koala researchers to collaborate to protect koalas. The federal government has realised it too, and is as I write conducting a Senate Inquiry on: “The status, health and sustainability of Australia’s koala population” www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/ec_ctte/koalas/index.htm. Obviously, a lot of citizens, many organisations (for instance, the Australian Koala Foundation:  www.savethekoala.com and local councils have also been aware of the worrying koala situation (see Koala Central from the Redland City Council at www.koalacentral.com.au.

Why is everybody worried? Because they know that everywhere the koala populations are monitored they show dramatic declines, for instance:

-          51% decline in less than three years in the Koala Coast (data from 2008)

-          80% decline in 13 years in the Mulga Lands region (data from 2009)

-          95% in other parts of Central Queensland

-          Localised extinctions in NSW

Incredibly, more and faster decline is to fear, because the threats to koalas are increasing:

-          Habitat destruction and fragmentation that impact on koala strongholds in Qld and NSW, with steady increase of urbanisation and the collateral threats from cars and dogs, and new arising threat from extraction industries

-          Diseases that decrease the ability of koalas to cope with disturbance and recover population size (Chlamydia can prevent 70% of female koalas from having young)

-          Uncertain future changes, including climate change and increase climate instability (droughts have been responsible for koala population crashes) and increase carbon level that changes leaf chemistry (koala food might become less nutritive)

 

On the difficulty of finding koalas

To make the problem worse, it is notoriously hard to find (and see) koalas. It is very hard to find koalas in many regions of their distribution because they often occur at very low density. This means that in koala habitats, it is not unusual to have only one koala in a 1000 hectares zone. So if you are surveying this habitat, walking 10 km a day and looking up for koalas (say you’re waking following a line and looking left and right and checking a 10meter strip) it could take you… 100 days to actually find the koala! The consequence is that it is very easy to wrongly classify a koala habitat as not occupied.

The second difficulty for surveying koalas is that they are sometime extremely hard to spot! Believe it or not, you may well be sitting under a tree with a koala and never know about it. Koalas are just incredibly clever at hiding: their colour act as a nice camouflage, they won’t move or make any noise that would attract your attention, they can be very high in trees and sit in a clump of very dense foliage. Personally, after years of koala research, they still fool me very often!

 

Why we need to be able to find koalas

Despite these difficulties, we need to be able to accurately survey koalas:

-          Before a piece of land is developed, we must ensure it is not an important piece of koala habitat

-          Koala population evolution (up or down) must be monitored otherwise no one will know if a population is in trouble or even threaten with extinction

-          When solutions are implemented to improve koala habitat, we need to survey the number of koalas to measure the efficiency of the chosen management actions

 

Here’s come our koala sniffer dog to the rescue!

Many professionals (police, army, border security…) have realised that dogs can outperform human beings in many situations. Could a human being follow the smell of a criminal? Explosives? Drugs? An apple? A disease? Dogs can do all of that. Their world is mostly a patchwork of smells (whereas humans rely mostly on their eyesight), and dogs have an incredibly powerful sense of smell (probably thousands time better than human beings).

Dogs have become more and more used in research for this reason: they will succeed where we failed. Where it would take weeks for humans to know if koalas are present at low density or absent from a site (with even the potentiality to make a mistake), a dog could answer this question in a day!

Now for the tricky part: it’s not because the dog knows a koala is in this tree that it will tell you automatically; and that’s where Gary comes in the picture!  His job is to actually train the dog to tell us what he knows… And considering Gary’s experience and success with other research dogs (already in action for the detection of quolls, toads and turtles); this is as good as done.

With the help of koala sniffer dogs, I believe we can answer research questions more accurately, more rapidly and with more certainty. And this is not coming one bit too early to help our iconic koalas!

Romane Cristescu, koala researcher.

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