Sniffing dogs could help fight invasive lanternflies in NYC and other US cities – UK Times

Man’s best friend could soon help us eradicate one of humanity’s most annoying pests.

Sniffing dogs have outperformed trained human searchers in the first-ever real-world hunt for the eggs of crop-decimating, invasive spotted lanternflies, Virginia Tech University said Tuesday.

The winged menaces could cost state economies millions in lost revenue, past projections show, especially those involved in the wine industry. They lay their tiny eggs on grapevines and can kill the plants by sucking on their sap. The eggs are easy for humans to miss.

But dogs are able to better detect the eggs because of their scent. That’s why the canines – including 12-year-old Xephyr, the Boston terrier – outperformed humans by more than two to one in densely vegetated areas, the university said.

“She was adamant,” Xephyr’s owner Debi Persing explained to the university following a hunt at a vineyard in Maryland. “She’s a machine at finding odor.”

In tests funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the researchers deployed 26 teams of dogs and their handlers for distance-testing exercises, and sent nine to areas where egg mass locations were not yet known.

Egg masses may contain between 30-60 eggs, according to Cornell Integrated Pest Management.

Humans were told to search for the masses first, and their dogs followed. Each search lasted for 10 minutes.

At sites that were heavily vegetated, dogs found an average of 3 egg mass locations, whereas humans only found 1.3 on average.

Notably, the dogs performed the best when masses were within 16 feet of their search path. Beyond 50 feet away, detections dropped to zero.

These measurements help to understand how the dogs should be used in the future, they said.

“The distance testing helps us understand how these dogs need to be deployed,” Erica Feuerbacher, a professor in the School of Animal Sciences, said in a statement. “Handlers need to move methodically through an area, so dogs stay close enough to detect the odor.”

“What this means is that we can turn to everyday dogs and their owners and train them as a flexible early detection force,” Feuerbacher added. “In places where the spotted lanternfly hasn’t reached yet, teams could train in advance and be ready to detect it before it becomes a major infestation.”

Now, they want to know if dogs’ super sniffers could be used to find other plant threats, such as Pierce’s disease.

Pierce’s disease is a bacterial infection that can also damage and kill grapevines.

“As we face more environmental issues, more agricultural issues – hitchhiker insects, invasive species, diseases – having a widespread network of trained dogs is exciting,” Feuerbacher said. “It really opens people’s eyes to what their dogs are capable of. Your dog, regardless of its breed, could do this.”

Still, the threat of the fast-spreading spotted lanternfly continues in 19 states across the eastern U.S. — and we’re in the throes of their season right now.

This season – peaking from May to July – is expected to be more active in East Coast states as temperatures rise, experts say.

“Unfortunately, the news is not good,” Floyd Shockley, an entomologist with the Smithsonian, told WUSA 9 in Washington, D.C. “We’re probably going to have another bad year, and we will continue to have bad years until we can kind of find something that targets them and nothing else.”

And, squishing them is no longer enough to eradicate them.

“If you really want to make a difference, you have to go where they are congregating,” Brittany Champey, with Spadefoot Design and Construction, told CBS News last summer. “The biggest impact any person can make is doing invasive species removal.”