Poppy, a six-year-old springer spaniel with floppy brown ears and a tail that never seems to hang around, is by all accounts a very good dog.
His white, brown nose also made him a trailblazer.
In a first-of-its-kind study, Poppy was able to do something with ease that would prove more challenging to humans and their machines: She submerged herself in water and smelled oil spills trapped under ice.
Vince Pales, one of the scientists behind the poppy experiment in northern Ontario, said it was a very surprising piece.
“None of our available technologies right now are capable of doing that.”
While other studies have shown that dogs can smell oil trapped under snow and ice chips, the latest research takes it a step further, Pales said.
“This is the first time dogs have been used to detect oil that is submerged or under ice,” he said.
For at least the past decade, dogs have been sniffing out oil spills in Canada, helping clean up tanker oil spills off the coast of Nova Scotia and a major pipeline spill in one of the Prairies’ most important watersheds.
While the practice has shown promise in the field, there is limited scientific evidence to back it up.
That may be because it’s generally illegal — and certainly frowned upon — to contaminate a freshwater lake, whether or not a dog actually sinks into the water or can smell oil trapped under a layer of ice.
But in a small slice of northwestern Ontario, it’s been encouraged.
“Studies like this can only be done in the experimental lakes area,” said Payles, head research scientist at the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s Freshwater Laboratory.
In the late 1960s, the research area consisted of 58 small ponds near Kenora and was the only place the institute held where scientists could manipulate real ponds to understand human impacts on freshwater.
Poppy’s first pond experiment came in October. From her perch on the motorboat’s flat bow, she successfully used her nose to drop cooking pans coated in thin bitumen and submerged in the lake at depths of one, three and five meters, Peles said.
Its precision varies, either to about 100 meters above the pan, Pales said. The less accurate results, which he suggested were still “very impressive” compared to other oil spill detection methods, were influenced by wind direction, he said.
The next test came last week as arctic air blasted over northern Ontario.
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For this experiment, Palace and his team set up an array of nine tiny holes in 14-inch-thick ice. They pumped oil into three holes and left the others empty, then let the holes freeze over to about three inches, creating small upside-down underwater ice bowls. Oil, which is lighter than water, prevents it from spreading around the pond.
Freshwater ice, in theory, poses a greater challenge than sea ice. Salty seawater creates luminous channels through its ice layers that allow odors to float to the surface.
“A lot of people didn’t think it was something that dogs would be capable of,” said Ed Owens, an environmental consultant who worked on the study.
Poppy was dressed for success in the harsh sub-zero conditions, decked out in a full-orange outfit complete with vest, leggings, booties and goggles. With his nose to the ice, he zigzagged his way across the ice.
When she smelled the oil, she sat down. When she was correct, she was rewarded with some playtime with the chew toy “Wubba” as a favor, said her trainer Paul Bunker.
In the end, Poppy found every oil hole, not a false positive on tests for diesel and condensate, the light gas byproduct mixed with the thick bitumen it carries through pipelines.
Palace called the results “extremely surprising”.
The team plans to publish them in a peer-reviewed academic journal.
For half a century, researchers have been trying to find effective and reliable ways to find oil beneath the Arctic ice, said David Dickins, an environmental consultant who specializes in offshore oil exploration and is a partner on the project.
Oil spill-sniffing dogs offer a proven new tool that can overcome “many of the shortcomings of previous technology-based solutions” and results that often provide “inconclusive answers.”
Research involving oil-sniffing dogs has not always been well received. Greenpeace helped push a 2009 industry-backed study that tested the dogs’ ability to sniff out oil buried under snow and ice chips in a Norwegian fjord. Critics suggested the companies could use the results as questionable cover to advance risky Arctic drilling plans.
More than a decade later, US President Donald Trump has put Arctic drilling and fossil fuel expansion at the top of his agenda. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order aimed at expanding fossil fuel development in Alaska, coinciding with requests by the state’s governor to open drilling in the pristine Arctic National Wildfire Refuge.
When reached for comment about the experimental Lex study, a Greenpeace Canada spokesperson posted a photo of his “trusty canine companion” in front of a piece of paper that read: “No oil spills.”
“It’s like the old story of the dog that chases the car and doesn’t know what to do when it catches up. The challenge is that there’s no way to effectively clean up a spill in the Arctic, even if you could detect it because the Arctic is too big a place to detect by smell,” Keith Stewart wrote in a statement.
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Pales, the scientist, said the study’s results had applications beyond the Arctic. The study was conducted by the US Center for Oil Spill Response Research. Funding was provided by a division of the Coast Guard. Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline is the Michigan and Huron crossing along the Straits of Mackinac, Palace noted.
“If that pipeline breaks in Canada in the winter, some of that oil could find its way under the ice.” “Finding it and removing it before it sinks, before it affects really sensitive ecosystems, which are usually on shore, is an important part of oil spill remediation.”
Owens, an environmental consultant, was also pleased with Poppy’s achievement. He has helped clean up some of North America’s most consequential oil spills, including the largest in US history.
“I wish I was on (the dogs) at Deepwater,” said Owens, who is a consultant on the cleanup ashore after BP’s Deepwater Horizon sh offshore oil rig spilled in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
Owens said a labor part of the oil spill survey is finding out where the oil isn’t. He estimates that after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, about 10,000 wells were dug in search of oil. In more than two-thirds of the survey area, nothing was found, he said.
“It’s a tremendous amount of resources that are used just to make people believe that there is nothing. A dog can clear that area in a fraction of that time,” he said.
Despite being quick on their feet, dogs have a truly — quite literally — superhuman sense of smell. A poppy has millions more receptors in its nose and a larger part of its brain is devoted to smell than any human.
This olfactory system—which includes a nose that can continuously smell five to 10 times faster—has been a huge boon to humanity.
Dogs have been trained to sniff out bombs, debris-trapped earthquake victims and contaminated food. They can smell a person’s stress chemicals, and can be trained to detect when a diabetic companion’s blood sugar level has dropped.
Few people know better how to harness that sniffing power than Bunker, Poppy’s trainer.
“There’s nothing better as a dog trainer than when your dog gets something, but it’s the first time in the world that a dog has ever done it,” Bunker said of the experimental ponds study.
He said Bunker had made a name for himself among the British military training dogs to detect landmines in the Balkans. After that he moved to Texas and US. Agreed to work with the military, expanding canine detection to improvised explosive devices.
His career took a turn when he met Owens, a consultant. Owens had heard about promising results outside of Norway, showing dogs to be remarkably good oil trackers, and the two formed a partnership.
One of his first tests in Nova Scotia in 2015, he says. That year, a tanker wreck, one of the largest spills off Canada’s east coast since the 1970s, was found to still be leaking oil.
Bunker dogs not only found oil washed ashore from the latest leak, they suggested they discovered some of the original oil from the 70s buried on the beach.
Bunker and Owens would collaborate again in 2016 when the Husky oil pipeline released hundreds of thousands of liters into the North Saskatchewan River.
With few exceptions, “I’ve used a dog on every spill I’ve had since,” Owens said.
In 2017, Bunker started his own dog training and consulting company, Chiron-K9, based in San Antonio. He said he sends the dogs where he trains, and any conservation group or law enforcement agency he works with has to house the dogs and keep them “happy.”
Poppy is more than her business partner.
“Poppy lives in the house with me, he sleeps on the couch.”
“They’re a lot like your family dog, except we spend a lot more time together, do a lot of things, learn together… and really enjoy working together.”
