The scent of a whale

In the last post, I mentioned an article in The New York Times about dogs that work sniffing out things like bedbugs and mold. Today's Boston Globe has an article about dogs trained to sniff North Atlantic right whale feces. Bob and Fargo, two whale-poop-sniffing dogs, work with scientists at the New England Aquarium who are collecting the whale scat out on the ocean surface. By analyzing the stuff, they can collect data on the existing whale population and, hopefully, figure out why there are so few of these whales these days. In their training, the dogs were rewarded with a few minutes of play with a tennis ball, which according to the article they want more than food.

Photo: Globe photo by Caleb Kenna