Many of the Australian animals most at risk of extinction are extremely tough to track down. That’s because they live in small pockets of disappearing nature, such as rare grasslands or ancient forests, in worryingly low numbers.
One of the most obscure is the Victorian grassland earless dragon (Tympanocryptis pinguicolla). These lizards can be identified by the three white stripes that run along their light brown bodies. But their minuscule size, with a body about the length of your pinky finger, makes them difficult to spot. This allows them to be creative with where they sleep – their favourite location being the wolf spider’s tiny burrows.
The Victorian grassland earless dragon currently wears the heavy crown of Australia’s most imperiled reptile. The destruction of their native grasslands is a major reason why.
But after evading detection for more than 50 years, this lizard was rediscovered in a west Victorian sheep paddock in 2023. This remains the only known population in the world.
This new study, led by La Toya Jamieson from Zoos Victoria, investigated whether wildlife detection dogs could help us protect these little dragons – by first finding their poo.
The Victorian grassland earless dragon is quite an elusive creature.Rick Hammond/Zoos Victoria
Conservation’s best friend
Wildlife detection dogs use their sense of smell to locate plants, animals and fungi in their natural environment. These dogs play a pivotal role in conservation efforts across the globe – all for the reward of a toy, cuddle or handful of treats.
But to detect a critically endangered animal species, you don’t always need to find the actual animal. Sometimes, just their poo will do.
Samples of animal poo – also known as scat – can provide valuable information about the health, diet and distribution of a specific animal or an entire population. They can also confirm whether a species is present in a certain area.
Detection dog teams search for the signs of various animals such as quoll poo on rocky slopes and cliffs, orca scat floating in the ocean and even the tiny droppings of the Oregon silverwing butterfly.
Sugar and Moss are part of a specialist team of dragon dogs.Rick Hammond/Zoos Victoria
Since 2023, Zoos Victoria’s Wildlife Detection Dog Squad has worked with specialist herpetologists – scientists who study reptiles and amphibians – to train a team of “dragon dogs”.
To date, seven dragon dogs have been trained and deployed to detect grassland earless dragons. They come from a variety of backgrounds and breeds, including border collies, labradors, kelpies and even a lagotto romagnolo.
Each has its unique strengths, but all were chosen because they had personality traits that made them ideal dragon detectors. These include being motivated to search in exchange for rewards and work safely around animals.
Our latest research spotlights the work of two dragon dogs, a German shorthaired pointer cross named Sugar and Moss, a labrador retriever. Both were given the job of finding dragon poo, which resembles a brown, crumbly grain of rice. In many ways, finding a needle in a haystack is an easier ask.
Both Sugar and Moss were able to reliably smell the differences between Victorian grassland earless dragon poo and other similar-sized reptile scat. The dogs’ noses were so sensitive they even distinguished between the scat of captive and wild dragons.
The real challenge was finding scats in grassland environments. But the reason may surprise you.
A sample of Victorian grassland earless dragon scat.Rick Hammond/Zoos Victoria
Poo pinchers
Before tracking down scat, Sugar and Moss don their orange search vests and get the cue to search – their handler saying the word “dracarys”, inspired by the Game of Thrones TV series.
However, our dragon dogs encountered a problem: scats often disappeared before the dogs even started looking. After conducting more than 100 field surveys in areas known to have dragons, they detected only one scat. So where was all the poo?
To solve the mystery of the vanishing scats, we developed a study to measure how long these samples persist in grasslands. We also investigated what factors may cause scat to disappear, such as weather.
We collected 44 scat samples from captive dragons at Melbourne Zoo. But even before we placed them in the grassland where the species was rediscovered, we noticed some being carried away by ants. In the next 24 hours, more than a third of available scats were scavenged, likely by ants and other insects.
This poo pinching, combined with an overall low density of dragons, means very few tiny dragon scats remained long enough for detection dogs to find them.
Detection dogs use their keen sense of smell to locate specific plants and animals.Rick Hammond/Zoos Victoria
Not just about the nose
The success of detection dogs depends not only on how well they recognise and detect their target, but also how long poo remains available to be detected. After all, dogs can’t find scat that isn’t there.
In light of this research, we now train our dragon dogs to safely locate the dragons themselves, including in wolf spider burrows and grassy tussocks. Their efforts are vital to protecting these elusive lizards and the grasslands where they live.
This article was co-written with La Toya Jamieson from Zoos Victoria, who was the lead author of the study.
Naomi Hodgens receives funding from the National Environmental Science Program's Resilient Landscapes Hub. Naomi wrote this article with La Toya Jamieson from Zoos Victoria, who led this research project.
In George Orwell’s 1945 allegorical novella Animal Farm, pigs coach the other revolutionary farm animals in their new creed of Animalism using the memorable maxim: four legs good, two legs bad.
In Australia, there’s a parallel mantra: native animals good, introduced animals bad. Australians learn from an early age to distinguish between these groups. A sighting of a koala or kangaroo is good and natural, but seeing rabbits amid eucalypts or flocks of starlings in the sky is bad and wrong.
As an environmental historian, I’m interested in how we come to make these decisions, and the impact they have.
Every Australian knows common myna birds are bad, rabbits are worse and feral cats kill native animals unchecked.
But how do we decide what makes an introduced species “good” or “bad” – and will we ever concede that some species are here to stay?
Our new series on invasive species explores these questions.
How do we decide?
In our official and unofficial categorisations, some introduced animals are denigrated further as “invasives” – species labelled pests that threaten some native animals and more favoured introduced species. If these invasive species were once domesticated, they are deemed “feral” or “wild”.
The ecologists of Australia’s Threatened Species Recovery Hub consider the worst invasive animal species to be European rabbits and foxes, black rats, feral pigs, cats, goats and cattle, while the federal Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry adds feral deer and wild dogs to this list. Other authorities include camels.
Except for stowaway rats, all of these animals were deliberately introduced to Australia by settler colonists. Breeding populations were kept alive during perilous sea voyages and cared for while they adapted.
Each species established itself on the new continent as planned. But they became too successful and have been vilified for it.
Goats were introduced for meat and milk. But once they escaped human control, they became referred to as a pest.Ken Griffiths/Getty
No species is intrinsically evil. Rather, some humans decide a given animal is good or bad based on how they affect our interests. Australia’s deliberately introduced species were lauded at first. They had jobs such as eating pests, carrying heavy loads, providing sport or furnishing meat. When they stopped serving this purpose and began to serve themselves, their presence became a betrayal.
Unwanted impacts are used to justify the routine shooting of free living pigs, deer and goats. Traps and poison sprays target feral cats. Continental-scale fences were built to keep rabbits out, while lethal viruses suppress their numbers.
That the problem is with how they live rather than what they are can be seen clearly in the case of cattle. Cows grazing in a field are seen as entirely acceptable – even an affirmation of a long-established way of life.
But even within fences, both cattle and sheep eat plants down to their roots, cause erosion and produce methane that adds to climate change. To feed them, native grasses are replaced with introduced ones able to withstand heavy grazing. Wild dogs are killed to protect flocks and herds.
Outside of the fences, the harms done by wild cattle have earned them a place in the top ten invasive species in Australia.
Animals good, animals bad
Other animals are more firmly placed in the negative category – even if it took them time to get there.
Domesticated rabbits bred for meat or fur were repeatedly brought into Australia from 1788 onward, but only began to flourish after free-living rabbits were introduced in 1859.
What changed? These new rabbits were adaptive and highly fertile. But pastoralists had also made things better for them by killing off predators, such as dingoes and wedge tailed eagles, and degrading the habitat of competitors like burrowing bettongs and bandicoots.
From the 1860s, one-humped dromedary camels were introduced to Australia after the explorers Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills realised they were well-suited to moving people and goods through Australia’s dry interior.
The domesticated camel population peaked at almost 13,000 in 1917 before they were progressively replaced by cars and trucks. The remaining camels were released to fend for themselves.
They did well: about one million camels now roam Australia – the world’s largest free-living population. Australian camels are exported to the Middle East, valued for their genetic diversity. Those remaining are considered pests.
Camels were brought to Australia to carry people and cargo through the dry interior. There are now about one million of them roaming freely.Paws and Prints/Unsplash, CC BY-NC-ND
Even native species can be invasive
The term “invasive” refers to species found outside their ecological bioregions, rather than being related to arbitrary national boundaries. This means animals native to Australia are not immune from the label of being invasive.
Kookaburras from the eastern states were brought to Western Australia in the 1890s to control snakes. Once there, these large kingfishers established themselves and began eating many smaller birds and reptiles.
Some species needed no human help.
The ubiquitous Australian white ibis was a rare visitor to the nation’s coasts until the 1980s. But when interior waterways were diverted for irrigation, the wetlands on which ibises relied dried up.
Soon, winged scouts discovered what human cities had to offer – drains, ponds, landfill sites and rubbish bins. These adaptable “bin chickens” draw responses from irritation to admiration. Authorities issue reminders they are native and cannot be harmed.
Species out of balance
In Animal Farm, power soon goes to the heads of the revolutionary pigs. Their original commandment – that all animals are equal – is amended to say that some are more equal than others. This holds in Australia in the present. With a few exceptions, domesticated and native species are more equal than other animals.
That’s not to downplay the damage some non-domestic species can do. That cats and foxes have driven significant declines in some native species is just one instance of genuine harm.
But could we approach this issue differently?
Almost 20 years ago, free-roaming camels were fouling water sources, driving away kangaroos and eating food plants in Central Australia. But First Nations groups did not blame the camels.
As Pitjantjatjara informants told anthropologist Petronella Vaarzon-Morel, the issue was that camels had no Dreaming. They were strangers on Country without a fixed set of relationships and without knowledge of how they should behave.
In response, First Nations groups opted for selective removal of live animals, hunting for food and interventions by rangers. Pintupi hunters in Central Australia’s Gibson Desert have pursued a similar response to free-living cats.
Rather than moral judgements, finely tuned actions like these could begin to address the problems associated with species not currently in good relations with the other animals – both human and more than human – with whom they now share this continent.
This article draws on Nancy Cushing’s forthcoming book, A New History of Australia in 15 Animals, which examines the shared histories of humans, rabbits, camels, ibises and other animals.
Nancy Cushing has received past funding from the State Library of New South Wales Fellowship Program. She is a member of the Australian Historical Association and the Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand Environmental History Network.
Our new research examines the reasons why El Niño is changing, and how this climate pattern may evolve if we reach our net zero goals. Our findings suggest extreme El Niños will become more common if we remain reliant on fossil fuels, but reaching net zero earlier should limit how often they occur.
Shaping global weather
El Niño has long influenced weather across the globe by driving variations in temperature and rainfall beyond the Pacific Ocean. Here are several exceptional examples.
In 1982, a strong El Niño dumped vast volumes of rain on South America, with some rivers in Peru filled with 1,000 times more water than usual. On Kiritimati island (part of Kiribati in the central Pacific), heavy rainfall flooded seabird nests and caused entire colonies to vanish. Meanwhile, southeast Australia was crippled by drought, culminating in the Ash Wednesday fires that claimed 75 lives.
The El Niño of 1998 carried enough rain to fill a new lake three metres deep in Peru’s Sechura Desert, one of the driest places on Earth. With it came record numbers of mosquitoes and widespread malaria. In Indonesia, months of severe drought allowed devastating forest fires to burn for weeks.
In 2016, a strong El Niño coupled with already warming oceans triggered the bleaching of more than two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef.
The current El Niño forming in the tropical Pacific is expected to be among the strongest on record, with its effects lasting well into 2027. For Australia, this could heighten the risk of hot, dry conditions and a fierce bushfire season. Its presence is already being felt across the globe, slowing the shipping of goods through the Panama Canal and forcing fish to migrate to cooler waters.
Scientists have always understood El Niño to be a phenomenon that temporarily alters global weather, with conditions returning to “normal” when it dissipates. However, climate change is expected to change what “normal” looks like.
As the planet warms, extreme El Niño years are likely to become more common. Our research suggests the tropical Pacific could remain in an El Niño-like state for centuries – even if the world reaches net zero carbon emissions – and extreme El Niño years would occur more often.
We used climate models to test two possible climate futures: one in which carbon emissions continue to rise, and the other in which the world meets its net zero goals. To see if timing matters, we also examined what would happen if we curb emissions at different points during this century.
Sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific during normal conditions and an extreme El Niño.CC BY-NC-ND
A warning from the Pacific
The Pacific Ocean covers about a third of the planet, stretching along the equator from Indonesia to South America.
Its western side is normally several degrees warmer than its eastern side. This temperature difference is linked with the trade winds that blow from east to west and pull cold water up from the deep eastern ocean. During an El Niño, this temperature gap shrinks, causing the easterly trade winds to slacken and rainfall to shift east, away from Australia.
Under continued warming, climate models show the eastern Pacific warming faster than the west, reducing this temperature difference. Scientists are yet to observe this happening, with the eastern Pacific even cooling in recent decades.
El Niño-like changes in the tropical Pacific persist long after emissions stop. The high-emissions scenario was run only to 2300.CC BY-NC-ND
However, this warming trend is expected to emerge if the world keeps burning fossil fuels. Once it does, our findings suggest this west-to-east temperature difference will be reduced for centuries after emissions reach net zero, rather than recovering.
This is because oceans are slower to respond to warming. Research suggests global temperatures would stop rising soon after the world meets its net zero target. By contrast, ocean temperatures would keep rising for centuries.
This means the world’s oceans, particularly the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica, will keep warming long after emissions stop. This would draw tropical rain belts closer to the equator, as their position depends on the temperature contrast between the northern and southern hemispheres. This would keep the trade winds weak and the eastern Pacific warm.
Southern Ocean and deep oceans keep warming after emissions stop.CC BY-NC-ND
More extreme El Niños to come
A smaller west-to-east temperature difference would mean the eastern Pacific sits closer to El Niño conditions. Heavy tropical rain needs warm water and, with the eastern Pacific projected to warm faster than the west, it would take less of a push for rainfall to shift east. This means a larger share of El Niño events would become extreme.
Our research suggests the longer we take to reach net zero, the more extreme El Niños we will likely face. Further delay could create a less hospitable climate with more risks and higher costs for generations to come.
Aditya Sengupta receives funding from The University of Melbourne and ARC Centre of Excellence for 21st Century Weather.
Andrew King receives funding from the Australian Research Council (Future Fellowship and ARC Centre of Excellence for 21st Century Weather) and the National Environmental Science Program.
Josephine Brown receives funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence for 21st Century Weather and the National Environmental Science Program.
Mandy Freund receives funding from The University of Melbourne and ARC Centre of Excellence for 21st Century Weather.
Nicola Maher receives funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence for 21st Century Weather.
The federal Labor government is facing pressure to reconsider its housing development project at Lee Point. While some local Aboriginal Larrakia people argue the project will interfere with sacred sites, other Larrakia people say it’s an illegitimate concern.
Specialist fire ant detection dog teams have been deployed to the site in Sydney’s Enfield and a nearby area with no other nests having been discovered.
