Dory the Rescue Dog Is an Expert at Turtle Conservation

A scent-detecting dog named Dory has been sniffing out the location of sea turtle eggs on the Florida coast for the past five years or so. Researchers monitored her uncanny ability and found she was better at it than the human volunteers who normally scour the beaches.

There are five species of turtles that lay their eggs, from May to October, on beaches in the southeastern US. Every year thousands of volunteers search the sand for turtle tracks to locate the buried treasure, in part to gather data but especially to protect the clutches from predators (and tourists).

For the human volunteers there’s a lot of guesswork involved. Some female turtles leave “false crawls,” tracks in the sand but no eggs. Larger turtles, like the leatherback, leave enormous tracks so it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly where the eggs lay.

Enter Dory, a two-year-old terrier mix found wandering along a Florida highway in 2017. The pup was taken in by dog behaviorist and former police K9 handler Pepe Peruyero, who trained Dory for months on a 50-by-50 foot artificial beach. Dory was taught to seek out the scent of “cloacal mucus,” a sticky substance that coats a sea turtle’s freshly laid eggs.

No human nose could compete with that. The conservationists proved it by holding a friendly competition between Dory and human volunteers, and the latter had no chance. The terrier was able to find more nests and her searches required much less digging. Now turtle lovers are looking into training more dogs for the cause.

If the story of a rescue dog who rises from life on the streets to become an expert savior of other animal species all sounds very Disney, that’s because it is. Dory was trained at Walt Disney World Resort and made her bones, so to speak, at the company’s Vero Beach Resort.

The story of Dory’s contribution to turtle conservation is published this month in the journal PLOS ONE. The paper concludes that “dogs have the potential to outperform human surveyors in measures of success and reduced effort for locating sea turtle eggs,” but notes that the study involved only one dog and for all we know, Dory is one in a million.