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In this episode of K9 Conservationists, Kayla speaks with Naomi Hodges and Dr. Jessica Thomas about Detection Dog Kip searching for Platypus burrows within Coranderrk Creek at Healesville Sanctuary
Links Mentioned in the Episode:
Science Highlight: Conservation Detection Dogs Increase Efficacy for Prey Detection at Carnivore GPS Cluster Sites During Summer
Wildlife Detection Dog Squad
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Transcript (AI-Generated)
Kayla Fratt 0:09
Hello, and welcome to the K9conservationists podcast, where we’re positively obsessed with conservation detection dogs. Join us every other Tuesday to talk about detection training, canine welfare, conservation biology and everything in between. I’m Kayla Fratt, one of three co founders of K9Conservationists. We train dogs to detect data for researchers, NGOs and agencies. We don’t have any new reviews for the podcast today, so if you haven’t yet, please drop one into the apple podcast app or on Spotify. You can leave comments now.
Instead of reading a review, I’d love to give a shout out to our recent course graduate, Eveline. Eveline is a canine handler with the cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia, and it’s an absolute honor to help her progress as a handler and have a small impact on her journey to protect one of our favorite cats. Her team emailed us a picture alongside her canine partner with a framed Certificate of Completion, which made me cry on a train in Germany. In case you all are wondering how much it means to me to hear from all of you. So yeah, congrats, Eveline.
Today, I’m super excited to be out talking to Naomi Hodges and Dr Jessica Thomas about their detection dog Kip searching for platypus burrows with the current within the Coranderrk Creek area at Healesville Sanctuary. I am super excited to get to this interview, but before we get to it, we’re going to dive into a science highlight.
I am back on at least getting some science highlights done. We’ll see how it stacks up once the term starts. But I recently read this article titled “Conservation Detection Dogs Increase Efficacy for Prey Detection at Carnivore GPS Cluster Sites During Summer,” which was published in the Wildlife Society Bulletin in 2021 by Tyler G. Petroelje – I’m so sorry your last name has it has some unusual letter accommodations, but you did a great job on this paper, Tyler. And then six other co authors, and most of them came from SUNY Global Wildlife Conservation Center. As the title suggests, this article hypothesized that conservation detection dogs would be more efficient than human only searchers at finding kill sites at GPS clusters, so identifying the prey animal that was at a kill site can aid in Diet Analysis. This can be difficult with small prey animals or without snow cover, which generally help human searchers out. And these dog teams were trained by finite detection teams in Colorado. Basically, the team started out by using GPS collars to identify clusters of points that suggested that the collared wolves, bears, bobcats or coyotes had made a kill. They then went to these areas and searched for prey remains, human only teams split a 50 meter radius of the cluster area, and then kind of zigzagged out from the center in two different 90 degree chunks. “After navigating to the geometric cluster center with the conservation detection dog, the handler walked approximately, or at least, at least sorry, seven parallel cross sections of a cluster spaced about 15 meters apart, which again depended a little bit on habitat conditions and coursing behavior of the conservation detection dog. And the conservation detection dog was allowed to course along that path until the entire area encompassed by the 50 meter radius of the cluster was searched.” Across species, the conservation detection dog team spent 42% less time than human teams at each site, and again, to quote, the paper, “Conservation detection, dog teams detected proportionally more prey remains when considering remains, when considering both large and small prey, 1.8 times greater or small prey alone, 2.6 times greater than did technician teams.” The dog teams were not any better than human only teams for large prey, such as adult deer. All of that said, the dog teams were also more expensive than tech nation teams, and that’s always a factor when grants come into play.
So without any further ado, let’s get on to the interview with Naomi Hodges and Jessica Thomas. All right. Well, welcome to the podcast. Why don’t we start out with each of you telling us a little bit about yourself, your job, any dogs that you share your life with whether they work or not, and then we’ll get into the actual interview.
Jessica Thomas 4:04
Well, I’ll start first. My name is Jessica. I’ve been working at Hillsborough sanctuary for almost 17 years now, which I can’t quite believe. And I’ve been working with the platypus for most of that time. My job here currently is the platypus specialist keeper. So basically anything to do with platypus, that’s what I do here. So that ranges from looking after them in their day to day care, feeding them, cleaning up after them, doing their enrichment and training. But I also do a lot of research as well into lots of different things, basically, anything I have a question about, I make a research project about. I finished my PhD on them in 2018 which I think is recent, but it’s actually quite a few years ago now, but I think about it, and I do have two non detection dogs. Was that I live with two Golden Retriever puppies that are one and two years old. They are really not, not suited to the detection dog program, because they like to, you know, Chase chickens and wildlife things like that. They’d be very well suited to the media portion of it, where they could just hit packs and, you know, represent, represent dogs in general.
Kayla Fratt 5:24
I think that’s very golden retriever of them. I love that. Yes, all right. And Naomi?
Naomi Hodges 5:31
So I’m Naomi Hodges. I am employed with Zoos Victoria as a wildlife detection dog officer. I’ve been in this role for five years since the program began, and prior to that, I had a degree in wildlife biology. I have a certificate in dog training. I’ve also got a really extensive background in animal health and care, working as a vet nurse for about 17 years, but my passion has always really been for wildlife conservation and dogs. So I was lucky enough, as you are, to Kayla, to marry those two things together and find a job and employment working in that field. So pretty, pretty lucky in terms of dogs. I’ve got. I live with four dogs. So my oldest is he was my first attempt at training a detection dog, and now he retired fairly quickly for a variety of reasons, but he’s living out his life at home, and we’ve got a pet dog who’s a terrier who does her own thing all of the time. And then I’ve got two, one operational detection dog, Kip, and another one in training, Eddie, who’s just a young dog that we’re hopeful will end up in the program, but we’ll see.
Kayla Fratt 6:56
Yeah, the gosh, the young dog we’ll see is that we’re, working on a couple different podcast episodes for that stage.
Naomi Hodges 7:07
But in addition to that, we’ve obviously got a team here at hills of sanctuary too. So we’ve got our program is based around five operational dogs who work on different detection, wildlife detection projects. Gotcha.
Kayla Fratt 7:20
Oh, yeah, that’s awesome. It seems like you all have such a such a cool program down there, and it’s such a I mean, it’s not a totally unique setup, but there’s not a lot set up the same way in North America, we have much more of the setup. Like what I do, which is, like, I’ve got my dogs, I’ve got my own thing, and then I kind of show up to all of these various projects. And the idea of being kind of centered within a larger organization that has kind of the funding and the support and the ideas and like the species experts and all of that is just, it makes me drool, so I’m very excited to learn more about it. So why don’t we start out with just, you know, how did this project come to be? We’re here to talk about platypus. What for people who don’t know anything about platypus, other than the fact that they’re really weird mammals, which is, I think, about the extent of probably many of our North American listeners understanding what is their conservation and ecological significance. What do we need to know about, like the ecosystem and the study species, to kind of get ourselves up and running and ready to understand the rest of this project? I
Speaker 1 8:25
So the plot of this is really, it’s, it’s quite an evolutionarily distinct species. I guess you’d stay so they’re, they’re the only genus in the species. So there’s only one sort of them that that’s still alive today. You know, historically or prehistorically, there were several different species, but this one’s the only one that survived. They’re thought to be the very first evolution of mammal. So that’s why they’ve got, you know, they are a mammal. So they have mammary glands, which is what makes a mammal, but they also lay eggs, which has come from that common reptilian ancestry. The males are venomous, just like a snake, again, from that reptilian ancestry. And if you look at the structure of their skeleton too, they’ve got a very reptilian like sort of shoulder and hip structure, where their sort of arms and legs come out like a lizard as they move around that way. And they also have a gland in their mouths, which is the Jacobson gland. It’s sort of in in reptiles would be, I guess you’d call it pasting scent. So they still have that gland in their mouth there. We don’t really know, sort of what, what function it has for them to date, and that they are only found in Australia, and they’re dependent upon one of our most vulnerable resources, which is fresh water. So you know, Australia is no stranger to drought, particularly along the east coast and also perhaps in recent years. So their habitat is something that’s very, very front of mind, I guess as we move forward with the changing. Climate, and is certainly a species that there is nothing else on earth like, so it’s really important that we do protect them. Yeah,
Kayla Fratt 10:08
no, I just looked up their skeleton as you were talking. And it’s weird. If you’re not driving, you should pull this up and look at it. Listeners, it’s very, very odd. I had no idea. I knew they were weird, but I had no idea.
Speaker 1 10:24
Have a look at the bill, because a lot of people just think, because it looks like a duck’s bill. It sort of made the same way as a duck’s bill, which is made out of keratin, or fingernails. But in the platypus, the bill is part of the skull. So you can see there’s a the jaw bone, just like any other mammal would have, and the bill is made out of skin just again, like on any other mammal.
Kayla Fratt 10:45
Yeah. Oh, so they’re so funny. So okay, so Okay, so that’s helpful for understanding kind of who the platypus is and where they’re found. I honestly, if you had asked me which region of Australia would have had no idea I knew. I knew water. I guess I knew that much. So what? What are the dogs actually looking for? What is the need? Why? Why do we need to find platypuses? What’s what’s kind of going on with the more specifics of this project?
Speaker 1 11:13
Naomi’s been helping me out in this. I study the wild population that actually runs through the Hillsville sanctuary every year, and I radio track them to their burrows. But in order to capture them, I need to set up these specialized nets, and I need to check them every two hours, overnight, and I need to do that for many days. Um, it’s, it’s hard work to do that. And even then, you don’t catch all the animals in the population, because they see the nets. Now, just going to go around that net and you never end up catching them. And actually, it was Naomi’s first day here. I remember she showed up with Kip. And, you know, we didn’t really have any dog facilities yet, so Kip hung out in the office, and because he was a dog, and I like dogs, in fact, I like dogs more than people, so naturally, juvenile became friends straight away. And Naomi was just there, inadvertently, she ended up with me too, yeah, because you had a colleague as our new teammate. And so we just started talking one day, and I think I was saying about, you know, how hard it is to sort of look at study the population of wild platypuses. And we said, oh, maybe kid can probably find those various for you. And that’s sort of how the program started.
Naomi Hodges 12:26
Yeah. And on a side note, I remember, on my first my interview for this role, one of the questions at the end of the interview was, what species would you work on out of all the species that you could possibly do, like, what would be your passion? And I actually said, plus plentiful. So I don’t know if I’ve told you that, but told you that, so, yeah, it was, I didn’t expect that we would work on platypus. It’s very much a project that has a core here at heels of the sanctuary, which is lovely. There’s like, the species is really important to the sanctuary for a variety of reasons. But like Jessica also said, it has broader ecological implications and and hopefully the dogs will have broader applications over time. So we’re, yeah, we’re always happy to share what we learn along the way, and and hope that, you know, we can help the species in general. Yeah,
Kayla Fratt 13:20
Yeah, yeah, definitely. So the dogs are actually finding the platypus burrows, and then you’re using that to identify an active burrow and trap, or what’s kind of the next step after, after kips located a burrow. And I know we’re jumping ahead a little bit. We’ll have to go back to the training and everything in a moment.
Naomi Hodges 13:36
Yeah, yeah. So we the training goal was that we teach Kip, and now we’ve added a second dog moss to identify a platypus within a burrow. So not so where the platypus will use a variety of burrows within the waterway, and they may choose to use different ones over the course of a few nights, pregnant and wrong, just so we want, we don’t want the residual odor of blood. Of course, we want to know the active burrows. So that was part of our training plan as well. But how that feeds into what you do?
Speaker 1 14:14
Yeah, so we, you know, I think there’s a, there’s a range of applications for this, you know, it’s a, I mean, hopefully an easy population estimate too. With the if you can get to the point we can just run the dogs around the river bank and they’ll say, there’s one, there’s one, there’s one, there’s one, you know, six. Here. You don’t have to do those trapping surveys overnight. So it’ll probably pair very nicely with some other techniques that are used, like environmental DNA, which is where you take a water sample, and it tells you whether there’s a platypus there or not. So it doesn’t take how many, just that they’re there. So there’s probably a good application there. There could be another one for if there’s any sort of construction or things like that going on at a particular site. You could bring the dogs in and just say if there’s. A platypus borough there where you’re about to dig, could be another good one, or, I mean, way, way, way down the track. But if we had a particular individual as well that we wanted to relocate, say, someone who had come in through our wildlife hospital and been through rehabilitation, and we then released back to the wild, potentially, if that dog, if we could send a dog to tell us where that platypus that we’ve released is, we can catch it up and just check on it and make sure it’s going okay.
Naomi Hodges 15:31
We also had conversations about like emergency response, and particularly post Bucha, that’s been a big cause for concern about platypus habitat, and the look after a bush fire, the implications on a waterway, and the oxygen availability, nutrient availability, all those sorts of things for the platypus. So I guess a lot of our work at Zoos Victoria, within the Wildlife Conservation space is we’ve always got that at the back of their mind because of the severe bush fires and thing and droughts and things that we experience that how can the dogs also have an application of emergency response, and what would that look like? So it’s not something that we’ve explored yet, but we’ve had conversations about it, and yeah, if Yeah, we’ll see what the future holds.
Kayla Fratt 16:22
Right, yeah, it’s so nice to be ready in the event of that becoming necessary. And I love, you know, I think that pre construction monitoring is something that you all do down there a lot more than at least what I hear about up up here in North America, I’m trying to remember it must be Skylos, who was doing stuff with, was it quolls? Am I getting this right?
Naomi Hodges 16:43
They do quoll scat detection, yep, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that might have been maybe thinking about Amanda’s project on a, I think it was a wind turbine development site, and they had to do clearing, and she was finding live quolls,
Kayla Fratt 16:57
Yeah, yeah. It was something they were clearing areas before, before construction was coming in. And I know, like our wind farms here in North America, have to do that before they build the turbines, but they dothat with acoustic monitoring first, and then the dogs come in after there’s a chance of carcasses being found.
Naomi Hodges 17:13
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, this was, that was a specific site where they knew there was a population of quals living, and they needed to responsive from memory, and Amanda would be able to talk about more, but they had to remove the individuals for safety, yeah,
Kayla Fratt 17:30
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but yeah, having that kind of breadth of application of, you know, some ecological monitoring, just figuring out what they’re doing, some of that rapid response potential for The bush fires, and then some of the, you know, if it ever needed to happen, as far as construction, that’s That’s fascinating. That’s so neat. And, yeah, how lucky to be able to come in and say, you know, if I ever got to pick what I would work on, and then have that actually happen. So my next question was, how did the team members get involved? It sounds like it was just shared office space. Is there anything else to that story? Because that’s crazy,
Speaker 1 18:02
I think so. Because I keep came in and I started to treat him just like a human colleague, which really resonated with Naomi. We realized we both like platypus and we both like dogs so much. Match made in heaven.
Naomi Hodges 18:16
Yeah, yeah. So many, so many things about being here have made the project success successful and possible as well. So the fact that Jess is a specialist keeper, and is able to help us with the training, facilitate the training, and those sorts of things like it was just all of the things pointed to it being a good fit in terms of projects. So that’s yeah, it was a bit of a combination of all of our skills and knowledge and also our hopes for playtpus work. Yeah, definitely.
Kayla Fratt 18:48
Yeah. And so is there any particular skills that if everyone brings to the table? Obviously, we’ve got Jessica’s expertise. Naomi, you’re the handler, but particularly maybe on the dog side, or anyone who’s not involved here, what are they kind of bringing to the table? And what made Kip a good fit for this project as well? Because I imagine you’ve got some wet feet, you’re looking in burrows, you’ve got to avoid residual odor. Like it’s not necessarily the most straightforward sounding project.
Naomi Hodges 19:12
Yeah, Kip had a strong background in problem solving, so I foolishly as a fairly new detection dog trainer handler, took on freshwater turtle nests as one of my first projects. And that is a way more complicated project than I thought it would be, and so we had to do a bit of problem solving. He is super motivated for play, and so he was really willing to work through all of those problem solving exercises, and was really kind of resilient to things not going to plan and trying again, like he’s the kind of dog that was always really, really willing to just work, keep working with me. He didn’t mind if you know, things didn’t go quite. Right? And so the turtleneck stuff, I think, gave him a lot of those skills, and then, yeah, that resilience to then having a problem solving the creek, and those sorts of things we do laugh a little bit just because Kip, we thought that he was really comfortable in water. He’d never shown any signs of being uncomfortable in water before we started this project and we put him in the creek, and I think with the water flows at sometimes he started going, Oh, I actually don’t know if I like water all that much. Yeah. Okay, so we, we had to problem solve that too. We really and very much, gave him the option of searching from the creek banks as well as in the water. The good thing is that over the years, he’s become more and more confident in the water. So yeah, we’ve been able to build on that, which has been nice. It hasn’t gone backwards. But yeah, always give him the option to get out and and he does like to survey from the banks too. So that’s, you know, it’s an option, but we have to be careful because of snakes.
Kayla Fratt 21:07
So that’s right, yeah. And what time of year are you all surveying? Is it like? Is it nice to be in the water because it’s hot, or is it cool?
Speaker 1 21:16
Where we well, we usually piggyback this project off my other projects, so sort of one method, and then we can do lots of things with it. But I’m targeting newly emerged juveniles into the population, so within a few weeks of them being weaned. So for us, that is February, which is, of course, late summer, which is, of course, Teague, even study, you know, we I end up radio tracking them for a few months. So it does sort of tend to lead us into to May, usually by the time we finish up, and then we have the other problem is that that’s when the rains start to come and the water level rises a bit, which makes, you know, there’s safety concerns for both us in fast flowing water and the dogs as well. Yeah,
Kayla Fratt 22:08
I have a maybe dumb question, circling back to the platypus really early on. You said something Jessica about the platypuses kind of coming? Do they migrate? Do they move? Or do they have home ranges that they’re staying put. Maybe I misunderstood something.
Speaker 1 22:22
They’re very territorial, so I’ll have a home range, particularly the females, they’ll probably live most of their life in a particular area, unless conditions decline, and in which case, they’ll move to where they’re better. The adult males are also very territorial, but they actually fight with each other over breeding territories. So they just because one adult male is there one year, it might be a different one the next year, if you sort of lost ground or or something like that. So they will move and they will establish a new territory. But they tend to not just move around just for the sake of it.
Kayla Fratt 22:58
Okay, gotcha. And then you said, so this project has been going on for a couple of years. Can you tell us when did this project start?
Naomi Hodges 23:06
Trying to look back through the photos to figure that out before, I think we started in 21 does that sound right?
Speaker 1 23:12
Yeah, we were going to start 2020 and then we hit a very strong lockdown. So we thought it was safest just to wait until the following year. Yeah, that’s right, yeah.
Naomi Hodges 23:25
So we were, yes, we started in the creek in ’21 whether we did any prior training in with platypus nest boxes prior to that, I can’t quite remember. We might have had a little lead in time, but yeah, really kicked off in ’21 so Kip’s had 21, 22, 23 years. This is his fourth season. Last year was a bit of a write off because we have flooding, so we didn’t get a heap of opportunities. And then we started Moss last year as well. So Moss joined the team. He exceeded expectations, hasn’t he? Yeah, it’s been amazing. We we added Moss in. He is Labrador, and he’s tall. He has long legs, and we felt like he was a good fit in terms of being able to navigate the water.
Jessica Thomas 24:14
He liked it.
Speaker 1 24:14
He did. He does. Yeah, he enjoys the work. He enjoys the water too. Like did you? Yeah. So, yeah, he’s been a nice fit, and he’s really blown us away. So yeah, he’s it’s interesting how the different dogs process things differently. So what we’re starting to see is that moss is really, really good at pinpointing burrow entrances. So kit will kind of go, this is where the highest concentration of odor is, and moss will go, oh, this is where they actually come and go from, yeah. So they have different skills, which is really –
Kayla Fratt 24:55
Yeah, that’s great.
Naomi Hodges 24:57
yeah. So Moss is, but yeah, he’s. Been lovely to watch his progression and the jump from the few opportunities that he had last year. So he finished on a high last year where he did find the borough entrance that we didn’t know about to a borough. And then this year, he’s just come along, leapt and bound so and and often he’s catching; so Latoya is the other person that’s working on this project I haven’t mentioned yet, and she’s handling moss and and he’s catching her out every now and then, because she’s like, surely he can’t have found it, but he has. He’s like, it’s here, yeah. So she, she’s like, Oh, wow, okay, I’ve got to reward him. But the other good thing about working with Latoya is she kind of keeps us on track. So she’s very much about the structure of training and keeping track of everything in their spreadsheets. And so that’s been a really big asset where I’m a little bit more, I guess, in the moment, and flexible with the training scenarios. And so it’s been really nice having Latoya working with us as well and going, you know, let’s, let’s look at what the data says, and then we can build from there. And so that, yeah, it’s been, I think, from a team approach, it’s been really nice to add little odor and Moss as well.
Kayla Fratt 26:06
Yeah, that’s fantastic. And it’s, yeah, it is interesting to think through again, like, yeah, you’ve got wet feet, you’ve got residual odor, you’re working in burrows. Like, that’s, that’s tricky, and it’s good to know that, yeah, you’ve got another dog with other other strengths, and how they can work together as a team. Do you have to do anything kind of safety wise for the dogs? Do you have them work naked so that they can slip things more easily? Or do you have them wearing a harness that you can lift them? You know, that’s always a topic of discussion among ourselves when we’re in water in particular.
Naomi Hodges 26:38
Yeah, interesting. I’m always keen to hear other people’s thoughts. We currently work them in their harnesses so that we can we’ve got really big snags in the waterways as well. So big, massive mannegum, yeah,
Speaker 1 26:52
They’re hundreds of years old, that’ll be right across the creek, yeah,
Naomi Hodges 26:56
and they get over it, all of the sticks and vegetation. So there is some safety concern of them wearing the harnesses, but they’re working close enough to us that we can kind of maneuver them out of tricky situations, and it is really helpful to have that handle, to be able to lift them up, to get on top of those trees and stuff. We do tend to work them on a long line, just so that we can keep a really close eye on their behaviors in terms of what you know, making sure that we don’t miss anything, but also keeping them focused in a tighter space. So we do, we tend to have them in a harness and in, mostly in a long line. Sometimes, if we need, for example, this season, I remember one of Kip searches where he was ended up on a bank two or three meters above me. So he just was off, off lead at that point, and kind of we were doing directionals above my head, which was a bit of a was mind blowing for me. I never thought I’d be working that way. Yeah, so it depends on the scenario, and we’re kind of a bit flexible, but yeah, mostly, mostly in a harness.
Kayla Fratt 27:59
Yeah, that’s what we ended up doing in Alaska as well. It was the benefits of being able to lift the dog kind of outweighed, as far as we decided in that moment, having the the entanglement risk added. Yeah, we were, we were lifting dogs up and putting them down and all sorts, you know, multiple times a day,
Naomi Hodges 28:20
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does depend on the dog too. Sometimes we won’t put Moss up in those sections if we think that there’s a risk of him falling through, because he’s heavier as well.
Kayla Fratt 28:30
Right.
Naomi Hodges 28:30
So we’re selective about which dogs go where, whereas, Kip’s lighter and a bit more agile. So we’ll let him search those areas if we think it’s safe enough. Whereas we wouldn’t put Moss, probably on those snags where there’s loose vegetation and stuff.
Kayla Fratt 28:46
Sure. Yeah. And I don’t know if you mentioned what, what breed is Kip, or breed mix?
Naomi Hodges 28:51
Kelpie cross.
Speaker 1 28:54
I was gonna say we also tend to the way we get to a burrows. We actually jump in the creek and walk upstream or downstream. It’s the, usually the most efficient way to get there, because a lot of the vegetation is very thick, particularly in parts of the Coronavirus at the tail end of our property here. So and it’s a lot safer as well, without the snakes and stuff, if you just jump in the water, because you can see everything around you. So it’s perhaps less, less entanglement.
Kayla Fratt 29:21
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense, yeah.
Naomi Hodges 29:24
So the challenges are, like the water flow and deep sections of water. So that’s kind of Yeah. We can talk about it later in terms of future directions and things, but there are some tricky spots that we don’t currently access.
Kayla Fratt 29:38
Yeah, yeah. Definitely, that does seem tricky, and definitely, I’ll put a pin in that. So, yeah, I was gonna ask next, kind of, what were some of your stuff, you know? So you’ve got the idea, you’ve Jessica, you’ve met Kip. You’re like, Okay, I love this dog. I want to work with this dog. He comes with the person. She knows what she’s doing. How did we go from, okay, we’ve got this idea to now we’re out there. We’ve got two dogs. We’re finding platypuses. I imagine there was quite a bit involved in the training. And at least you’ve got, you’ve got samples right on hand for training samples. But that’s not the hardest part, generally.
Naomi Hodges 30:14
So yeah, it started with, obviously making a plan and getting our ethics in line. So we apply for animal ethics for any of our projects, and we really had to put a lot of thought into how we were going to ensure the welfare the platypus and the dogs the whole way through the project from all the different training aspects. So there was a lot of thinking, and also a lot of kind of going to see the environment that we’re going to be working in and and then having a look at how we might do the training setups and planning it that way. And then we decided that we would work with a training protocol where we have platypus within their nesting, in their artificial nesting boroughs, from some of our residents here at Hillsville sanctuary. So we Jess has her little poppy, the flood, of course, that we’re able to work with, which is pretty amazing. Um, do you want to talk a little bit about the general nest box setup and stuff?
Yeah, so the artificial setup is just a box. It’s made out of recycled plastic, and it’s a portable one too, so it detaches from the system. So they climb in, they swim around during their nighttime, they’ll go into the burrow to sleep during their daytime. Makes it a little bit more confusing for us, because we have these ones on a reverse light cycle. Day is night, as far as these animals are concerned. So it also means that first thing in the morning, when we come into work, the animals are asleep in their boxes. So what we would do is, while they’re fast asleep, is very quietly, put the door on. She very quietly lift them up. I think there’s even one, one that we had, she was really known for not waking up the whole time that we moved here. And then we would, yeah, just move them and place them. And then, obviously, I’ve got access to a lot of platypus scent. So we’d set up blank boxes that had their bedding but no platypus. And then one one of the boxes had a live platypus in it. And so we set up some nest box trials that very much line up training. Yeah. Which one has the platypus ignore the strong pledipus odor, so sometimes that the we’d leave the bedding in the blank boxes so it still had really strong residual scent to try and replicate a burrow that was empty, and the dogs picked that up pretty quickly. It all went really smoothly from the beginning until Kip decided that he was really bored of doing of this sort of lineup.
Speaker 1 33:08
His performance decreased, but we were sort of, we tried to pull apart why that was, and we just landed with he’s been doing it for a while now. It hasn’t changed a lot, and he’s sort of like whatever. Not too easy, yeah. So we would move, we moved to being placing the boxes within gardens and those sorts of things. But we’re really mindful of the duration. So the maximum amount of amount of time that we would have a platypus in a training session is 30 minutes. But to be honest, and that’s like, really, it’s down to 10 minutes of active sniffing time. So they can’t be sniffed by a dog for more than 10 minutes. So it’s like, we’re very prescriptive about ensuring the welfare of the platypus and then, so putting them out in the garden was good, but we didn’t have a lot of time to do that sort of stuff, so it was a bit limiting. The other important thing about that is that we’ve got Jess, who’s monitoring the purpose and their their behavior and making sure that they’re comfortable. And then we’re on the dog side of things, but we’re communicating the whole time, and if at any stage, Jess goes, Oh, this platypus is awake now, wants to get out of its box training stops.
Naomi Hodges 34:27
So it’s really important, and anyone that comes and watches the session can stop the session. So if anyone comes in and watches the session and they see anything that they’re not comfortable with, everyone has a right to say, stop. And we just completely stop the session and then put all the animals away and debrief. It actually never really happened, but yeah, we make sure that everyone knows that that’s possible, like they might notice something that we hadn’t or Yeah, so that that’s something that we do with all of our species. Work actually is that everyone has a right to stop a session. I think it gives everyone feel, everyone feels empowered to speak up if they have concerns. But then we sidetrack, so then we, yeah, that’s radio telemetry is the added component, and I think it’s really the key to success with this species, is having animals within the creek system that have radio trackers on so that we can confirm where they are and set the dogs up really well. I think we started off with black burrows that you knew quite well, and we were able to really pinpoint where we thought the odor would be coming from and and train that way. I think that the odor profile is pretty high with the platypus, so we did notice changes in behavior with the dogs that we could reward pretty quickly once we were in the creek, which was nice. It was a quick transition from memory.
Speaker 1 35:50
Yeah. So the challenge with the platypus Burrows is that not all burrows are the same, so then the tunnel length is different. Some will have a really short length, so the platypus will be very close to the entrance, whereas others could be meters away. The substrate is highly variable, so they’ll sleep in Earth banks, but some are more Sandy. Some of have a higher clay content. Some are behind trees and a lot of sort of thick vegetation, and then some are even in artificial structures, like concrete Stormwater drains as well, which adds another level of complexity. And a lot of the time we can’t find the entrance, even with the telemetry. Can get the signal, but the entrances are very well disguised, so we often ended up relying on the dogs to tell me where the entrance was, because
Kayla Fratt 36:46
I know it’s got to be close.
Speaker 1 36:48
I can, I can’t tell you where the signal is, but um, the dogs will detect, hopefully detect, yeah, where the entrance is a bit more, yeah,
Naomi Hodges 36:54
Yeah, yeah, um. And also, I guess that leads to as well, like we don’t know. We know where the signal comes from, but we don’t know where the highest concentration of odor necessarily comes from. So we’ve had some situations, particularly this year, where the dogs so often the burrows are associated with like a tree root system. That is, that, would you say that’s accurate? Yeah, the time and when they are it looks like the odor travels. So we’re starting to see that the dogs are actually alerting on the other side of the tree root system to where we’re getting signals. And so we start with, yeah, we’ve, we’re starting to, I guess, have questions about, How is the odor moving? And that’s something that we’ve been working with an honest student a little bit on. She’s been helping us collect some data early days. But, yeah, we’ve been working with an honors student, Kim banister this year, who a has been instrumental in radio tracking clinical so that we can do assessments. But also she’s starting to categorize some of those environmental factors, and then we can, we’re hoping to cross reference those with the detections and how the distance of detection and and what that means in terms of where the dogs might be picking up odor. Yeah, it’s kind of a long term plan, but we started that this year, which is pretty exciting. Yeah, so it can look quite different depending on on the structure and things. But yeah, the dogs seem to be really accurate, which is nice.
Kayla Fratt 38:26
Yeah, that’s fantastic. No, and I think everything you’re describing like it does sound like it went quite smooth, but it is really, I think, for listeners. I think this is a great example of how important that species specific knowledge is, and having you have so much access to materials, we it’s not infrequent for us to get messages from students or prospective handlers who have a project in mind, and maybe they’re master students, or maybe they’ve got some other sort of support behind them, and they’re interested in projects similar to this and that they’re looking for live animals, or animals in burrows, or those sorts of things. And I think really emphasizing the need to be ethical about how you’re training on the platypus, and again, realizing how much work it is to have those access to those animals. That’s something that often, when we kind of get those sorts of inquiries, that’s where we get stuck, or where we caution people to, you know, this isn’t probably something you’re going to be able to, you know, do three days of training with if that’s all you have access to these live animals, like, it’s a lot harder than scat or carcasses that you can put in your freezer.
Speaker 1 39:38
Yeah, yeah. So we’re lucky. I really don’t. I’ve thought about I’ve thought about it quite a bit in terms of how you would do this project if you weren’t based here at the sanctuary, or at least have the opportunity to come and train with the plats in their nest boxes, and then the radio transmitter is obviously the other key you. So, yeah, without those things, I don’t know how we would have been able to do it. We we played around with od capturing devices and those sorts of things. But realistically, the key to success has been having the live animals.
Naomi Hodges 40:18
Yeah, and the dogs really didn’t need that long with the live animals, did they to pick it up? I remember, remember Moss starting, and we just, you know, it was that one. He’s like, Oh, got it,
Kayla Fratt 40:27
Yeah.
Jessica Thomas 40:28
Which is part of the surprise. He did really good, see.
Naomi Hodges 40:33
I think he found his spirit animal, the platypus.
Kayla Fratt 40:37
Oh, that’s awesome. Yeah. It is funny. Sometimes watching dogs, like, just kind of be like, Oh yeah, no, I got this. This This one makes sense to me.
Naomi Hodges 40:43
Yeah, yeah. I do think that, yeah, it’s a high. Most of our projects are lower odor volatility, but I think this one is high, so it’s quite nice in that way. You know, there’s other complications, but the available odor is nice to work with.
Kayla Fratt 40:58
Yeah, yeah, that’s fantastic. And yeah, I did. I worked briefly when I was at working dogs for conservation on their black footed ferret project, which is also, you know, underground. You’ve got really complicated burrowing systems, and you want to find the correct one. We had to do some similar stuff where the dogs had access to some captured ferrets or captive bred, I can’t remember which. For some training, and then we had a lot of radio collared individuals that we could use for testing and ongoing training and kind of the next step. And I, I was on that project years ago, and I know they’ve continued it, so I’m not quite sure where they’re at with it now, but I know it was quite challenging, because they are a separate organization from the organizations that had the captive animals, and they were many hours driving apart, so trying to figure out how to make all of that work was definitely a challenge. And again, I don’t know where they ended up with it at this point, but it’s, yeah, if you’re if you’re kind of individually trying to do this, it’s a very hard, very hard thing to work.
Naomi Hodges 42:00
You’d need to work with someone who was acknowledged the time investment required and the trade off is worth it. Yeah, we, we were lucky in terms of, it’s a long term project. We, we really wanted to see it through to completion. We were all invested, rather than, you know, having, you’ve got to do it in six months time, which, yeah, which is, you know, real world for a lot of people, obviously,
Kayla Fratt 42:27
Right, yeah, that’s, I mean, we just finished up a wolf project in Canada where it was like, Okay, we’ve got 10 days to be in the field. And we were doing it as a pilot study. But, you know, we were lucky in that Barley and I had just done three months of wolf work in a very similar ecosystem, you know, just a couple hours north of there in Alaska. So we were able to say, Yeah, okay, we can be there. We can do 10 days, no problem. Like we’re operational already and we’re just switching gears, like we just have to get there. But that’s just not the case in so many in so many cases. And it’s hard when grant money is so limited, and, you know, conservation detection dogs are really expensive, so if you don’t have someone kind of on your team already, the way that you guys have it, it’s really challenging to figure out how to do those pilot studies and and the R & D side of things. You know, putting what might take months or what might never work down, it’s hard.
Naomi Hodges 43:22
And the good thing about this organization, too is that we’re, I guess, we’re not averse to taking risks to try and improve what we currently do, so where everyone is very much on board with if it didn’t work, that’s okay. But what did we learn? You know, that sort of philosophy, I think, is really important when you’re approaching things like this too. So yeah, really making sure that you’re partnering with people that are very much on the same page, who is crucial, really?
Kayla Fratt 43:52
Yeah, no, that’s fantastic. And again, I think just helpful for our listeners to keep in mind, because it does sound like this. This went shockingly smoothly, but there was a lot of things that went into making that successful. It went smoothly because you were well prepared and had the resources you needed. So the last question I’ve got for us is, what are some of the lessons you learned in areas of kind of future growth for this project, for the team, you know, just tell us what you’re what you’re what you’re thinking about, looking forward and looking back with what you know now.
Jessica Thomas 44:24
So many lessons, so many would say, Yeah, every season, we do a bit of a debrief, where we go through, sort of how it went, any challenges that we had, what were the limitations, resources? Yeah, like, we’re being quite thorough that way, I think, each year and then just prior to the season. So usually what we try and for December, but realistically it’s January, but we get around to it is make a plan for the year ahead. And certainly something we’ve been moving more towards is getting those honors students on board to help with the. Labor, particularly for the radio tracking as well. I think it’s been quite valuable. We’ve had a few now over the years, so that’s really increased. I guess it works well with your availability and with my availability to get out to as many boroughs as possible. But I’ve sort of noticed, I guess we’ve just discussed at the end of this last season, that while the the dogs were doing really well, we were a little bit biased to burrows that were, I’m calling them easily accessible. So obviously, the structure of a creek is highly variable. There’s shallow areas, there’s deep areas, there’s flat banks, and then there’s very high steep banks, there’s thick vegetation, there’s clearings, and we still weren’t we hadn’t really come up with a way to get the dogs safely and comfortably over to some of those really thick vegetated areas that maybe were up on a steep bank with a deep pool right in front of it, so you couldn’t it was hard to get to from the water, and it was hard to get to from the land. So it just means that then sort of not getting those experiences. So I think that’s sort of an area that we’re focusing on for the year ahead.
Naomi Hodges 46:18
Yeah, we’re going to explore paddle boards, and probably mostly paddle boards, just because of the way that the Creek flows, and not being able to kind of have a boat going in and out, sort of thing. So paddle boards, we think at this stage, might be easier. Um, none of us have done any training with dogs from a water craft before, so we’re probably looking at getting some external coaching. I’m setting that up really well, and, and, yeah, and getting the dogs comfortable working from a paddle board. We’ll see how, how that all looks. And, but that’s, that’s kind of one of the ways that we think we can address that issue, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, keen to be, I guess, feeding off others in the industry in terms of their experience and and what that might look like in terms of the training and then deployment side of things.
Kayla Fratt 47:09
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I spent a lot of time thinking about boats this summer and just being really impressed with the work that some of the other folks around the world are doing with the dog actually actively sniffing on the boats. It’s just, it’s cool. You know, it was all we could do to do all of our, all of our work smoothly, just with the boat being our transport vessel. But actually working off of the boat is, yeah, I mean, and especially, yeah, I don’t know the river bank stuff, I think makes a little bit more sense to me. But when I think about the work that, like Sam Wasser, his group, used to do with the orcas, and actually being out on the open sea, I’m just like, blown I don’t understand. Yeah, I’ve kind of tracked down someone who worked on one of those whale projects at some point for the show, because I just need to ask them 5000 questions. But okay, so yeah, some accessibility stuff. And I’m sure that makes a lot of sense for platypus as well, like they’re they’re so little, they’re they’re so aquatic that there’s a lot of stuff that they can access that is challenging to figure out how to access, and how to access safely and and search thoroughly.
Jessica Thomas 48:15
And once we get this year’s honors data back to I Think we’re going to take a close look at, I think we had something 80 something percent success rate, didn’t we? It was like 76 Yeah, for detections, but it’ll be looking at those ones that weren’t successful. So what were the features of those boroughs compared to the other ones? To see if they’re they may be longer or in a particular part of the habitat, what habitat feature, perhaps was associated with those and then I think that will really help drive anything else we need to work on. Yep, on for that, for that year.
Naomi Hodges 48:54
The other thing that we’re actively monitoring, and we’ll continue to do would like, a sort of a long term data set is we want to make sure that we’re not disturbing. As you know, a lot of people refer to wildlife detection dogs as like a non invasive method. I think we should acknowledge that we potentially have some impact on species behavior and so with all of our projects, but particularly platypus, we monitor post surveys and post so, for example, at the moment, we’re capturing data on did the dog search and find this burrow, and then what did the platypus do the next day? So did it go back to that burrow? Did it choose to move on? There are other variables that we measure. The students that we’re working with are measuring, like water flow and other variables that might influence the platypus behavior as well. But what we’re trying to capture from our perspective is that we’re not negatively influencing the platypus behavior by having the dogs as part of the survey method technology. So that’s long term data, but anecdotally, at this stage, it’s looking good. It seems like the water flow was more of an indicator of movement and avoidance of burrows than the dogs.
Jessica Thomas 50:15
And we’ve also got prior to you guys starting is we had, I’ve been surveying the creek since 2012 so I had, you know, good eight years worth of non dogs in the creek, data, yeah, yeah. So I can see what they do when, when we’re not searching with detection dogs, as a comparison point.
Naomi Hodges 50:36
But yeah, we think that’s important to acknowledge.
Kayla Fratt 50:39
Yeah, absolutely. I think of it. I mean, I when I was, like, a baby environmentalist, when I was at a high school and was just starting to, like, panic about climate change and biodiversity loss, I remember watching, like a couple too many of the documentaries about, you know, how screwed up our food system is, and just being like, Okay, so there’s nothing I can eat without there being an impact. And feeling very discouraged by that. And now I’m kind of coming around to, you know, okay, there are, there are lower impact things we do the best we can, you know, we work within the systems that exist. And that’s kind of how I feel about the conservation dogs as well. Like, I’m sure that the wolves are aware that Barley was walking through their territory in Alaska. I’m sure that the platypuses are aware that someone has been sniffing around their door. But is it, you know, how is, how does the trade off work out, and how? You know, it’s hard to have a impact less life in in so many different ways. But how are we making sure doing it well enough?
Speaker 1 51:42
Yeah. And a lot of the creeks that we survey, too, they’re within urban areas, so just outside of the grounds here, people walk their dogs past the creek daily, like there’s, there’s hundreds of dogs that go past and jump in the creek and have a swim and things like that. So I can’t imagine the animals in this population are being exposed to anything that they’re not normally exposed to when they leave the park. Yeah? No,
Kayla Fratt 52:07
that’s an important consideration too, though, because I can imagine there might be a different watershed somewhere else, where it’s much, much more protected and would be much more unusual for them to experience a dog coming by.
Naomi Hodges 52:18
Yeah, true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, we yeah, very, it’s very important to think about those aspects as well. And, you know, do no harm, minimal stuff as much as possible.
Kayla Fratt 52:32
Yeah, exactly, but yeah, I do love the acknowledgement that it’s not, it’s not impact less it’s, it’s, it’s less invasive,
Jessica Thomas 52:40
Yeah.
Kayla Fratt 52:42
Especially when you’re comparing I’m preparing a seminar talk right now on the history of conservation detection dogs. And you know when you’re comparing it to, gosh, some of the research that was done in the 40s, 50s, 60s was just we released a pack of beagles to chase deer to see how the deer choose to choose to evade predators. Or there was a marsh rabbit study where they used beagles to chase the rabbits and then determine the extent of home ranges. You know, you’re reading that, and you’re like, okay, that wouldn’t pass ethics anymore. We’re not going to do that.
Jessica Thomas 53:18
Yeah, exactly, yeah. Hopefully we’ve come a long way.
Kayla Fratt 53:22
Yeah, no, I think we have, so, cool. Yeah. Is there anything else that you wanted to circle back to? I think, gosh, there was something I said we were going to put a pin in on the future directions. Was that just the accessibility of the burrows or water flow?
Naomi Hodges 53:39
Yeah, yeah. So yeah, water flow and and potentially using paddle boards, etc. The other thing that we’re doing, I guess, just touched on a little bit as well in terms of future directions, is spending more time doing pre trapping surveys, trying to so the trapping is a necessary part currently of the study design, like Jess said, maybe we’ll be able to move away from that in the future, but at the moment, we are trying to assist with more guided trapping locations, for example, so we’ll spend a bit more time in the creek prior to any trapping period, and trying to provide some data on where the dogs are, saying that there are, you know, the high proportion of platypus, etc, and seeing if that, over time, assists with with trapping success, because of those limitations around being trap shy and choosing to avoid traps and those sorts of things. So, yeah, that’s another space that we’re hoping that the dogs will be able to have some influence as well.
Kayla Fratt 54:41
Yeah. Oh, that’s fantastic. And I guess I have one question that crossed my mind that I forgot to ask, is, so how confirmable alerts, and how do you choose to to interact with alerts changes to behavior? You know, what’s what does that look like at the field?
Unknown Speaker 54:57
Yeah, it’s like. And goes back to having the telemetry. So we’re able to put dogs in locations where we’ve got known platypus with radio transmitters on to build our confidence in their alerts. Kip has been in the creek for three and a half four years now, and I’ve gotten to the point this year where he did give some alerts that were not with radio transmitted platypus, but they so I’m working on strength of his alert, his commitment to the alert, as to whether I reward but it is getting to that point of going, I trust him. I trust what he’s telling me. His behavior is consistent with everything else that I’ve seen in training, and also assessments. So we’ll do the blind assessments, but we’ll have someone there, they’re single blind, so we’ll have someone there who can confirm alerts, which is nice so we can reward straight away, gives us an idea of what the behavior looks like. And so yeah, I think it’s building that confidence over time.
Naomi Hodges 56:02
But, yeah, we’ve gotten to the point with Kip now where I will reward if he gives me a strong alert, even if we can’t confirm. So we’ve, we’ve kind of built up that level of confidence in his alerts. I think Moss is we’re still very much in the let’s reward what we know, sure, yeah, phase, um, however, with Moss, I think we could be a bit more liberal, because he is, you know, you look at different personalities of dogs, and he’s really specific in his with his alerts, and he is not one to usually throw out false alert.
Speaker 1 56:37
He’s proved me wrong a couple of times. I think, oh, no, okay. I think this is the strongest, strongest signal. And he’s like, no, no, it’s over there. And I go up and I check, and I was like, he’s right.
Kayla Fratt 56:50
All right, good dog, yeah.
Naomi Hodges 56:52
So it’s that kind of balance of handler confidence, dog confidence, and then yeah, you get to a tipping point where you’re like, well, he’s done it. His platypus was there. I’m just gonna pay him, yeah? So yeah, it’s like kind of that stepping evolution of the project, but certainly we’re getting some that we’ll pay and we can’t confirm, yeah,
Kayla Fratt 57:09
Sure, yeah, yeah, that’s and I’m so glad you mentioned the difference in the dogs as well. It’s something we talk about and think about all the time here. As far as one of my dog barley is more likely to throw out false alerts. But if he dismisses something like, I really, really believe that we had a couple funny ones this summer where, you know, there’s just a lot of things that look like Wolf poop out in the environment, and we would stand there and hover and look at it and just be like, I it really. And he’d be like, Nope, it’s not, you know. He was like, okay, yeah, that’s that I trust you on. And my younger dog is much more of the if he alerts to something, even if I can’t find it, I’m much more likely to, yeah, to reward him for that, because he’s much more likely to be that specific and that precise,
Jessica Thomas 57:52
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s cool. I mean, it’s, it’s so exciting watching the different dogs and how they process things. And, yeah, we’re pretty lucky.
Kayla Fratt 58:02
Yeah, yeah, we, we are, yeah, it’s a good gig. We’ve got going, Well, yeah, okay, any, anything else, any, any other future directions you want to bring up, or other lessons learned, or are we? Are we good here
Jessica Thomas 58:17
Do you want to mention people helping you as well? So like honors students, donors.
Yeah, really well supported. Yeah, lucky. Thank you. I’ve got Hannah telling me the things I forgot to say, Yeah, we would do really need to acknowledge. I mean, we’ve talked about Kim. This year we had, she was an honors student working, providing us with heaps of her time to radio track the platypus that we’ve worked with for this season. Okay? That’s through Deakin University, yeah. Now we’ve also had students through Flinders University, which is in South Australia as well, and then we’ve got some, so we talked a little bit about the funding side of things, and the fact that we’re lucky we’re in a kind of a position of employment, but that comes with support from philanthropic donors. So we still do kind of that fundraising side of things. We we engage with donors who support our program. So yeah, we always acknowledge supporters of the program. Specifically, I think you have one.
Naomi Hodges 58:21
Yes, Helen Wilson, who funds my position here, and we couldn’t do this without her support, because she basically provides the time that I need to be able to do all of that trapping every year. And what’s even nice is she gets to come out. She comes out with us each year as well. So it’s nice to sort of be able to share that sort of where support is going as well.
Jessica Thomas 59:40
Yeah, the organization as a whole has some incredible philanthropic donors, both anonymous and not anonymous, but they really, particularly the conservation side of things. They really make it work. So we couldn’t do a lot of, overall, the threatened species work that we do. Without those generous donations. So yeah, we always have to acknowledge those amazing people out there that are invested in our work. Yeah, yeah,
Kayla Fratt 1:00:08
Yeah. No, this wouldn’t work without them. Well, great. Is there anywhere that people can go to keep abreast of the work that you’re all doing? Is it Zoos Vic online, or does do the dogs have their own their own pages as well?
Naomi Hodges 1:00:22
We do have the general so we’ve got the zoo’s Victoria website. And then the detection dog squad has their own page. It’s fairly kind of it’s a bit of an overview of the program and how we operate. And then our media team do a great job of sharing stories about how projects progress as we go so they’re the main things. There’s a YouTube channel, I think that people can go and look at. There’s probably some previous, plentiful work on there from bank may.
Jessica Thomas 1:00:51
Yeah, I can send Kayla a bunch of links if you like, yeah.
Kayla Fratt 1:00:54
That would be great. Yeah, I’ll put them in the show notes. Awesome. Yeah? Okay. Well, thank you both so much for coming on. I learned a lot and really enjoyed this. You know, maybe one day I’ll get to see a platypus in the wild, or maybe not, who knows, but yeah, I know, yeah, it’s, it’s a little bit of a flight, but I guess now that I’m on the West Coast, it’s a bit closer. So yeah again, but thank you both so much for coming on. I’ve been wanting to talk to you all about all of your various projects for a long time. It’s amazing how small this field is, and yet how long the list of people to interview gets.
Naomi Hodges 1:01:32
Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Thank you appreciate being able to share some of our stories.
Kayla Fratt 1:01:38
Yeah, yeah. No, definitely. And for anyone who, yeah, again, wants to learn more, we’ll share those links in the show notes and on our website, which is k9conservationists.org. You can find an AI transcript of our talk as well, if you want to just skim and find any particular notes. And all that, again, is that k9conservationists.org I hope you learned a lot and you feeling inspired to go outside and be a canine conservationist in whatever way suits your questions and skill set. We’ll be back in a couple weeks, bye!