How Golden Retriever Helps Rescue Hermit Beetles

Dog is a friend of beetles

The standard method for detecting hermit beetles is to sample wood mold. This is not only inefficient and time-consuming, but also destructive both for the beetle colonies themselves and for their habitat. In search of an alternative, Italian scientists, led by Dr. Fabio Mosconi of the Italian Agricultural Research Council, suggested that specially trained dogs could help save hermit beetles. Now, such four-legged specialists are widely used in the search for mammals, reptiles, and birds and have already shown their benefit in detecting a number of invertebrates.

When choosing a breed of dog, scientists settled on a golden retriever - a hunting breed widely used to search for biological targets. Theseus was chosen for the experiment - the cutest six-month-old puppy, whose ancestors have established themselves as experienced and efficient trackers.

Theseus in the maze of odors

Theseus's training began with an “introductory course” - teaching simple teams, search games and maneuverability. The next step was to teach the dog to distinguish between different types of smells, because hermit beetles are able to emit different smells depending on the environment - fungi, sawdust and other organic materials. When Theseus learned to choose the right one from several proposed smells, specialists calculated the effectiveness of the environmental dog compared to human specialists.

Theseus found the probability of detecting a tree inhabited by larvae was 73%, unlike the two people who conduct traditional collection of wood mold samples with an efficiency of only 34-50%. In addition, the dog will be able to cover a specific area in a very short time compared to the traditional method: on average, it takes 6 minutes 50 seconds to take a tree, while operators using a selection of wood mold would need up to an hour and a half. In addition, the search for larvae with dogs is not dangerous for insects or other organisms that can live on trees.