This was such a quirky article that I left it on the shelf a while before revisiting it this morning. It remains a mystery to me WHY we need a dog to do this or when we would have the need to track down a specific beaver, but it’s pretty darn fascinating to think about the complex information beavers have at the disposal of their sniffing any given day.
Conservation dogs have been trained to locate animals both dead and alive. Given that dogs’ sense of smell is approximately 10,000 to 100,000 stronger than ours, they are excellent partners for tracking animals in the wild.
With the help of three “scent detection dogs” named Tapas, Chilli, and Shib, researchers have shown that with persistent training, this olfactory advantage could dramatically improve conservation canine handlers’ work. How? By improving upon their ability to identify animals by tracking their individual butts.
Well obviously any dog owner knows how important that sniff is to greeting a new dog. But it’s easy to overlook how much valuable information is coded in castoreum for a beaver.
Since these beavers communicate primarily through scents, they’ve invested quite a bit of evolutionary development into their anal glands. In fact, the anal glands are not the only butt-local organ that beavers use to make themselves known to their neighbors. They use two, each of which is located between the base of the tail and the pelvis: castor sacs, which produce a brown mucous called “castoreum,” and anal glads, the “true” glands which produce AGS. AGS is a “thick gray paste” in female butts and a “yellowish oily fluid” in males. AGS contains a great deal of information about an individual beaver, including species and subspecies, sex, identity, kinship/family role, age, and social status.
Read that list again, species and subspecies, age, sex, kindship or family role AND social status. I’m not even sure what that means but I guess if you’re the matriarch of a colony you smell different than just some daughter selected at random. Years ago when our mom beaver died and the kits were orphaned, dad left for a while and came back with a two year old from our family that had already launched: the one we always called GQ because we thought “he” was such a handsome beaver. The two year old stuck around, and helped raise the kits. And I always wondered how Dad found him.
Now we know.
They use two, each of which is located between the base of the tail and the pelvis: castor sacs, which produce a brown mucous called “castoreum,” and anal glads, the “true” glands which produce AGS.
After the 9-month training period was complete, the dogs’ sniffers – and the identifying potential of AGS – were put to the test: Six vials in total were lined up, including four AGS samples, one distraction scent, and one blank. Tapas, Chilli, and Shib were each subjected to ten trials. The results were stunning. Each dog showed themselves to be beyond capable of finding the precise beaver by their anal excretions alone.
Not only are these findings a clear demonstration of scent detection dogs’ ability to extract highly specific information from AGS, but it also points to the incredible reliability of the Eurasian beaver’s hind-centric olfactory communication system.
Okay good job dogs. But Better Job Beavers. For evolving this amazing classification system and making it work. Just think of the time and awkward conversations it saves. Beavers never have to ask, “Are you knew here?” They never are surprised to find out they hit on a married woman, OR discover their new love interest is their second cousin. They already knew.
23 and me has NOTHING on them.
By the way, I don’t think we guessed wrong about GQ’s gender. Because he did not stick around and dad eventually brought back a new wife that no one recognized. Apparently he agreed to help out for a while to get the kids settled and then took off in pursuit of his own future.
I’ve always wondered what it was.
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