Effect of carcass storage condition on searcher efficiency trials for conservation detection dogs

Abstract

Conservation detection dogs are frequently deployed at renewable energy facilities to assist with bird and bat fatality monitoring because they can achieve higher searcher efficiencies than human surveyors. When calculating fatality estimates, the number of carcasses found is adjusted by several factors, including searcher efficiency, which makes carcass odor an important consideration when designing searcher efficiency trials for detection dogs who rely primarily on olfaction rather than vision to locate carcasses. We investigated the influence of storage condition on carcass odor by using gas chromatography‐mass spectrometry to examine the volatile organic compound profiles from 15 eastern red bat ( Lasiurus borealis ) carcasses from 4 storage conditions: not stored, bagged‐cooled, frozen‐thawed, and dehydrated. Additionally, we tested the detectability of 3 of these carcass storage conditions (not stored, bagged‐cooled, and frozen‐thawed) through searcher efficiency trials with 5 conservation detection dogs at wind energy facilities in Missouri, USA. Only 20% of the 44 detectable known compounds observed in the odor profiles were common across all 4 carcass storage conditions. Searcher efficiency by dog team ranged from 0.75 to 0.94 and was not statistically different across carcass storage conditions, which ranged from 0.83 for not stored carcasses to 0.88 for bagged‐cooled carcasses. Our results provide evidence that any of the bat carcass storage conditions evaluated here are suitable for use in searcher efficiency trials when detection dogs initially train with dehydrated bat carcasses and are appropriately trained to generalize across dissimilar carcass odor profiles.