Meet Poppy, an oil spill-sniffing dog and a scientific trailblazer

Poppy, a six-year-old springer spaniel with floppy brown ears and a tail that never seems to stop wagging, is by all accounts a very good dog.

Her white, brown speckled nose has also made her something of a trailblazer.

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In a first-of-its-kind study, Poppy was able to do something with ease that’s proven far more challenging for humans and their machines: she sniffed out an oil spill submerged in water and trapped under ice.

That’s the most amazing part, said Vince Palace, one of the scientists behind Poppy’s experiment in northern Ontario. “None of our available technologies right now are able to do that.”

While other studies have shown dogs could smell oil trapped under snow and ice chips, the latest research took it a step further, Palace said.

“This is the first time dogs have ever been used to detect oil that’s submerged or under ice,” he said.

For at least the past decade, dogs have been sniffing out oil spills in Canada, helping clean Nova Scotia’s shores of tanker oil and one of the Prairies’ most vital watersheds of a large pipeline spill.

While the practice has shown promise in the field, there’s been limited scientific evidence to back it up.

That could be because it’s generally illegal – and definitely frowned upon – to contaminate a freshwater lake to find out if a dog really can sniff out oil submerged in water or trapped under a layer of ice.

But in a small slice of northwestern Ontario, it’s encouraged.

“These types of studies can only occur at the experiment lakes area,” said Palace, head research scientist at the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s freshwater laboratory.

Set up in the late 1960s, the research area consists of 58 small lakes near Kenora and is billed by the institute as the only place where scientists can manipulate real lakes to understand human impacts on freshwater.

Poppy’s first lake experiment came in October. From her perch on the flat bow of a motorboat, she successfully used her nose to locate cooking pans coated in diluted bitumen and submerged in the lake at depths of one, three and five metres, Palace said.

Her precision varied, from either right on top of the pan to about 100 metres away, said Palace. The less accurate results, which he suggested were still “very impressive” compared to other oil spill detection methods, were likely influenced by wind direction, he said.

The next test arrived last week as a blast of arctic air swept over northern Ontario.

For this experiment, Palace and his team arranged arrays of nine small holes in the 14-inch-thick ice. They pumped oil into three holes and left the others empty, then let the holes freeze over to about three inches, creating small upside-down underwater ice bowls. Oil, which is lighter than water, stayed trapped inside, keeping it from spreading around the lake.

Freshwater ice, in theory, posed a greater challenge than sea ice would. Salty sea water creates briny channels through its ice layers that can let odours waft to the surface.

“A lot of people didn’t think it would be something that dogs would be capable of,” said Ed Owens, an environmental consultant who worked on the study.

Poppy was dressed for success in the harsh sub-zero conditions, decked out in an all-orange outfit complete with a vest, leggings, booties and goggles. With her nose to the snow, she zigzagged her way across the ice.

When she smelled oil, she sat down. When she was correct, she was rewarded with some playtime with “wubba,” her favoured chew toy, said her trainer Paul Bunker.

In the end, Poppy found every oil hole with no false positives on tests of diesel and condensate, the light gas byproduct mixed in with thick bitumen to carry it through pipelines.

Palace called the results “extremely astounding.”

The team plans to publish them in a peer-reviewed academic journal.

For half a century, researchers have been trying to find effective and reliable ways to detect oil spilled under ice in the Arctic, with limited success, said David Dickins, an environmental consultant who specializes in offshore oil exploration and is a partner on the project.

Oil spill-sniffing dogs provide a proven new tool that can overcome “many of the drawbacks of previous technology-driven solutions” and results that often provided “uncertain answers,” he said.

Research involving oil-sniffing dogs has not always been well received. Greenpeace helped push back against a 2009 industry-backed study that tested dogs’ ability to sniff out oil packed under snow and ice chips in a Norwegian fiord. Critics suggested the companies could use the results as dubious cover to pursue risky Arctic drilling plans.

More than a decade later, U.S. President Donald Trump has put Arctic drilling and fossil fuel expansion at the top of his agenda. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order aimed at boosting fossil fuel development in Alaska, an order consistent with requests by the state governor to open drilling in the pristine Arctic National Wildfire Refuge.

When reached for comment about the experimental lakes study, a spokesperson for Greenpeace Canada sent a photo of his “trusty canine companion” pictured in front of a paper that read: “no to oil spills.”

“This is like the old story of the dog who chases a car and doesn’t know what to do when he catches it. The challenge is that there’s no way to effectively clean up a spill in the Arctic, even if you can find it because the Arctic is a very big place to search by smell,” Keith Stewart wrote in a statement.

Palace, the scientist, said the study results had applications beyond the Arctic. The study was funded by a section of the U.S. Coast Guard dedicated to oil spill response research. Crossing lakes Michigan and Huron along the Straits of Mackinac is Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline, Palace noted.

“If there’s ever a breach of that pipeline in Canada in the winter, some of that oil may find its way under ice,” he said. “Locating it and removing it before it sinks, before it affects really sensitive ecosystems, which are typically on the shoreline, is an important part of oil spill remediation.”

Owens, the environmental consultant, was also pleased with Poppy’s achievement. He has helped clean up some of North America’s most consequential oil spills, including the largest in U.S. history.

“I wish I had (dogs) on Deepwater,” said Owens, who was an adviser on the shoreline cleanup when BP’s Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

A laborious part of oil spill surveys is finding where the oil isn’t, Owens said. He estimates that after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, about 10,000 pits were dug up in search of oil. In more than two-thirds of the survey area, none was found, he said.

“That’s a tremendous amount of resources that are used only to give people the confidence that there’s nothing there. A dog can clear that area in a fraction of the time,” he said.

While quick on their feet, dogs really stand out for a sense of smell that is – quite literally – superhuman. Poppy has millions more receptors in her nose and a much larger part of her brain dedicated to smell than any human.

This olfactory system – including a nose that can continuously sniff at a rate of between five and 10 times a second – has been a huge benefit for humanity.

Dogs have been trained to sniff out bombs, rubble-trapped earthquake victims and contaminated foods. They can smell a human’s stress chemicals, and they can be trained to detect when a diabetic companion’s blood sugar levels have dropped.

Few people know better how to harness that sniffing power than Bunker, Poppy’s trainer.

“There’s nothing better as a dog trainer than when your dog finds something, but it’s even better when it’s the first time in the world any dog has ever done that,” Bunker said of the study at the experimental lakes.

Bunker made a name for himself in the British military training dogs to detect landmines in the Balkans, he said. He then agreed to move to Texas and work with the U.S. military, expanding canine detection to improvised explosive devices.

His career took a turn when he met Owens, the consultant. Owens had heard about promising results out of Norway, showing dogs to be remarkably good oil trackers and the two struck up a partnership.

One of their first tests dated back to Nova Scotia in 2015, they say. That year, a tanker wreck from the 1970s, one of the largest spills on Canada’s East Coast, was found to still be leaking oil.

Not only did Bunker’s dogs find oil washed up on the shoreline from the latest leak, he suggested they tracked down some of the original oil dating back to the ’70s buried in the beach.

Bunker and Owens would collaborate again in 2016 when a Husky oil pipeline spilled hundreds of thousands of litres into the North Saskatchewan River.

With few exceptions, “I’ve used a dog on every spill I’ve been on since then,” Owens said.

In 2017, Bunker started his own dog training and consulting company, Chiron-K9, based in San Antonio. He said he’s selective about where he sends the dogs he trains, and any conservation group or law enforcement agency he works with has to give the dog a home and keep them “happy.”

Poppy is more than his business partner.

“Poppy lives with me in the house, she sleeps on the bed,” he said.

“They are pretty much like your family dog, except we spend a lot more time together, doing a lot of things, learning together … and enjoying actually working together.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 24, 2025.

Jordan Omstead, The Canadian Press