Smells Like ScienceHow a student trained her dogs to sniff out critical ecology data.

Barley the border collie mix quivers, barely breathing. His handler, Oregon State doctoral student Kayla Fratt, whispers the magic word — “search” — and he speeds into the forest with his nose to the ground, moving methodically. When he catches a whiff of the scent he seeks, his nose hooks, as if magnetized to something upwind. His tail begins circling. When he gets close to the scent, his nose pinpoints the source while the rest of his body sidesteps like a crab. Barley drops to his belly, bracketing his discovery — wolf scat — between his paws. His eyes widen as Fratt rewards him with his beloved ball.

Barley is a conservation detection dog, and while his life’s pursuit is earning his favorite toy, he’s also advancing science by loca­ting wolf scat samples for Fratt’s doctoral research on Southeastern Alaska’s wolves. Fratt’s research is in collaboration with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Conservation detection dogs have risen in importance over the past few decades, after it became possible to use genetic fingerprinting to identify individual animals from scat samples.

LEFT: Alaska team members pick their way through the brush. RIGHT: Fratt and Barley hot on a trail. BOTTOM: Barley earns his beloved ball. LEFT and BOTTOM photos by Kayla Fratt. RIGHT photo by Toni Proescholdt

More recently, techniques like metabarcoding have also let scientists analyze animal droppings to gain detailed insights into diet, parasites and other ecological factors. Fratt’s advisor, Associate Professor Taal Levi, has been on the forefront of using this tool to solve fishery, wildlife ecology and conservation mysteries around the world.

“Our lab does among the most fecal DNA metabarcoding in the world because, in addition to our landscape-scale projects, we process samples for researchers and multiple state, federal and tribal agencies,” Levi says.

“One of the biggest reasons I was excited to join Taal’s lab is because it’s on the cutting edge of using fecal DNA to learn about animal species,” says Fratt, who started at Oregon State University in 2023. “In the lab I am learning from the best of the best about analysis of fecal DNA — that’s why I’m getting a Ph.D.”

Fratt’s dissertation will also focus on the science of working with detection dogs, and she hopes it will improve how they’re trained and used in the field.

The Levi Lab’s ongoing research on Alaskan wolves has documented the world’s first case of wolves living largely off of sea otters instead of their usual diet of deer.

Fratt is expanding the research’s scope to study a group of Southeastern Alaskan islands that the Alexander Archipelago wolf subspecies swims between. She boats from island to island with Barley and her other dog, Niffler (any Harry Potter fans?), to collect wolf scat — they scored 779 samples in their first field season.

Fratt tubes the scats, freezes them, and then takes them back to Corvallis to the lab to be thawed before she and technicians extract the DNA. So far, she sees signs of sea otter in the wolf scat she collects, which supports previous diet observations.

“The fact that wolves have diversified their diet in the areas we’re studying suggests more resilience that may help the species persist long-term in the face of environmental change,” Levi says.

As a keystone species, wolves play an outsized role in ecosystems, and changes to their diets influence a vast web of species. Fratt’s research will likely provide the first-ever wolf count on these islands, informing decisions on whether they merit protection under the Endangered Species Act.

While [Barley’s] life’s pursuit is earning his favorite toy, he’s also advancing science.

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The Alaska Department of Fish and Game needs to know how many wolves live in this area to set regulations for how many wolves can be hunted. Limiting the quota is controversial in Alaskan communities because many hunters view wolves as competition for the deer that fill their freezers, in a state with the second-highest grocery prices in the country. The fall 2025 hunting season could be the first informed by Fratt’s work.

Before starting her doctoral studies at Oregon State, Fratt was living out of a Sprinter van with Barley, Niffler and her cat, Norbert, on the long drive down the Pan-American Highway to Patagonia. Along the way, she found out she’d won a prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Instead of heading south, she’d be getting her Ph.D.

A former dog trainer who is passionate about conservation biology, Fratt first realized she wanted to spend her life training dogs to sniff out data for ecologists years ago, when she heard about dogs trained to detect Orca feces in Washington.

Barley’s been by her side since 2017, when he was adopted from a shelter where he had been surrendered. As Fratt learned when she trained Barley, dogs like him have an insatiable obsession with play and a high drive for fetching toys — qualities that keep them motivated during long workdays but, too often, mean they’re rejected by families for being “too much dog.”

Fratt cut her teeth working for a professional conservation detection dog company and co-founded a nonprofit, K9 Conservationists. In 2020, she added Niffler to her pack. She and the dogs have hunted jaguar scat in Guatemala, as well as bird and bat carcasses on wind farms. She hopes to secure funding to expand her research to detect signs of puma recolonization in El Salvador.

Fratt and Barley with about 800 wolf scat samples ready to be shipped to OSU for genetic analysis. Photo by Toni Proescholdt

On a typical day of fieldwork in Alaska, Barley disembarks from a boat, scrambles over wet rocks and then proceeds to comb miles of thickly forested landscape, hopping over downed trees and splashing through muskeg. It’s demanding work for an 11-year-old dog, requiring Fratt to keep Barley on a rigorous regimen of physical therapy, preventative fitness, doggy yoga and rest under the guidance of a sports medicine veterinarian — as well as fluffy dog beds.

“Barley is one injury away from retirement,” she says. As a result, this is Barley’s last big project. Then he’ll pass the torch to Niffler.

“The worst part of this job is how deep this bond becomes and how much you grow to trust and work fluidly with a dog as your coworker, confidante and best friend, and then how comparatively short their careers and lives ultimately are,” Fratt says.

“But I am so grateful for the time we’ve had together. I’m so grateful to routinely have the experience of him teaching me about the world — showing me something like how odor moves, something about the world that we cannot see but know is still true and exists.”