Thursday, March 06, 2008

Lucky Louie

The Lodi News-Sentinel has a nice story about California's program to train dogs to sniff out zebra and quagga mussels along with other invasive aquatic species. The dogs are trained with tennis balls scented to match a particular invader (I smell mussels!...eww) and do an amazingly thorough job of finding things in places where humans cannot.

Sure, the ISW has featured the whole "dog catches invasive alien species" story a few times before, but who can resist a dog wearing a vest? Plus, there's a new angle this time around - when the California Department of Fish and Game's grant money runs out, the K-9 portion of this program, known as "Californians Turn in Poachers," will be relying solely on donations to keep it going. If you want to find out more about making a donation, click through to the full article.

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