SAN JUAN ISLANDS, Wash. — As Southern Resident killer whales spend less time in Puget Sound waters, researchers are turning to an unusual member of their team for help understanding the challenges facing the endangered population: an 11-year-old rescue dog named Eba.
Researchers with SeaDoc Society say Southern Resident orcas have been largely absent from local waters this year, a troubling sign as scientists continue to monitor the population’s health.
“It’s been bad multiple years now, but really bad this year,” SeaDoc Society researcher Deborah Giles said. “That’s evidenced by the fact that we’ve hardly had the Southern Residents in the waters at all.”
Giles and fellow researcher Jim Rappold spend much of their time in the Puget Sound collecting whale feces, or scat, samples. The samples provide scientists with valuable information about the whales’ health and well-being. “It can tell us things about their nutritional status. Are they getting enough to eat? We can tell how stressed out they are,” Giles said.
Finding those samples on the open water is difficult. “I always say it’s like finding a needle in a haystack, but the haystack is moving and so is the needle and so are you,” Giles said.
That’s where Eba comes in.
The dog, rescued from the streets of Sacramento when she was about 5 months old, has been trained since 2019 to locate whale scat from aboard research vessels. According to Giles, Eba can detect samples from long distances and alert researchers to their location. “She was a rescue dog found on the streets of Sacramento as a 5-month-old puppy, and now she’s working to help save an endangered species,” Giles said.
Giles said Eba is the only dog in the world trained to perform the specialized task. “She smells them. She knows they’ve been around or they are way ahead of us,” Rappold said.
When Eba picks up a scent, Giles said the dog stops and tries to pinpoint the source. “What I think she’s trying to do is lock in on where the location is,” Giles said.
Giles said Eba took to the work almost immediately during training. “She got it right away,” Giles said. “She understood what her job was: smelling that sample and then getting to play and having to work and find the sample.”
Researchers say the information gathered from scat samples is critical to understanding the factors affecting Southern Resident killer whales, including reproductive challenges within the population.
“These feces that we collect with Eba’s help allows us to understand the massive pregnancy failure rate,” Giles said.
Scientists hope the data collected with Eba’s assistance will help guide conservation efforts and provide a clearer picture of what is needed to help the endangered whales recover
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