快猫短视频

Great crested newts are threatened amphibians that live in lowland areas of England, but their underground lifestyle makes them tricky to find. 快猫短视频s have now trained a dog to sniff out the threatened newts even when they are far away or deep below the soil, which could boost conservation efforts.

Because great crested newts (Triturus cristatus) nest in underground burrows and rocky crevices as adults, they are incredibly challenging to find. As a result, researchers know a lot about the amphibian鈥檚 aquatic life stage, but less about their time on land. That makes it difficult to know where the newts are and if they need to be relocated before, say, a land development project begins.

鈥淎t the moment, we don鈥檛 have any tools to detect amphibians below ground,鈥� says at the University of Salford in the UK. 鈥淲e have to put a lot of resources into finding great crested newts.鈥�

Glover and her colleagues were curious if dogs could be used to seek out the elusive species. Detection dogs are invaluable conservation tools that, together with their handler, can find invasive plants and insects, track illegally smuggled animals or detect environmental contaminants such as gas leaks.

Starting in 2018, the researchers trained Glover鈥檚 2-year-old English springer spaniel named Freya for about two years. They channelled the scent of live newts through open pipes of varying lengths, from which Freya could take a sniff to learn the odour. They also put newts in breathable tubes that they buried beneath 20 centimetres of sandy or clay soil. Some of the soil samples had small ventilation holes, which mimics newt nesting burrows.

Freya was able to detect the newts with high accuracy in both experiments. When sniffing the newts above ground in pipes between 25 centimetres and 2 metres long, Freya had an 87 per cent success rate. In the 128 soil tests, Freya was able to detect newts in both sandy and clay soil with an 88 per cent success rate. She was the fastest at detecting newts through clay soil with ventilation.

鈥淒ogs are the only way to detect newts in hot summers and during hibernation [when the amphibians spend time underground],鈥� says at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany who wasn鈥檛 involved in the work. She says that with the newt-finding dogs, we can learn much more about the terrestrial part of their life than we ever did before.

Though Glover has been working with Freya since she adopted her as a puppy, she suspects this is a task many dogs could be trained to do. Glover is now testing the newt-sniffing abilities of her other dog, an adult rescue, and she says he is performing even better than Freya did.

Both of Glover鈥檚 dogs are now searching for the amphibians in the field, and she says they have already saved the lives of countless little newts.