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27 May 2020 Dogs can scent-match individual Eurasian beavers from their anal gland secretion
Frank Rosell, David Kniha, Milan Haviar
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Abstract

Dogs Canis lupus familiaris are increasingly being used in wildlife conservation studies, due to their extensive ofactory capabilities. Dogs are a useful tool for species detection, species discrimination (or subspecies), and scent-matching of individuals within a species. Scent-matching can reduce or eliminate the need for expensive genotyping of obtained biological samples. We investigated the potential use of dogs to scent-match individual Eurasian beavers Castor fiber via anal gland secretion (AGS) samples, in 30 double blind floor platform experiments. We hypothesised that dogs can scent-match individual beavers when presented with AGS from different beavers of both sexes. We showed that dogs were able to scent-match individual beavers with average accuracy of 88.9%, sensitivity of 66.7% and specificity of 93.3%. Our results suggest that scent-matching dogs may be used as a reliable additional method to DNA analysing of biological samples to improve accuracy of individual beaver detection, and a better alternative than live-trapping/capturing in monitoring of specific beavers in e.g. a reintroduction project.

© 2020 The Authors. This is an Open Access article This work is licensed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY). The license permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Frank Rosell, David Kniha, and Milan Haviar "Dogs can scent-match individual Eurasian beavers from their anal gland secretion," Wildlife Biology 2020(2), (27 May 2020). https://doi.org/10.2981/wlb.00658
Accepted: 26 March 2020; Published: 27 May 2020
KEYWORDS
anal gland secretion
Castor fiber
dogs
non-invasive methods
scent-matching
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