Tim Gottwald, a senior scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Horticultural Research Laboratory in Fort Pierce received a $50,000 grant to oversee a feasibility study for canine canker detection.Citrus Canker is a very big problem in Florida because one diseased tree can infect the entire Citrus crop of a producer. The Canker if not caught quickly enough can spread to neighboring Citrus Groves as well.
Early results show this is a promising concept. In early testing the dogs have proven to be 97 to 99 percent accurate detecting canker in fields with randomized, potted trees in the ground and can sniff out trees with even the start of the disease. USDA research into canine canker detection began as early as 1999, but the work was interrupted when the Sept. 11, 2001. Security at airports, seaports and other locations took precedence, and every dog that could be drafted for the effort was rushed into service.
Now that the citrus research has resumed as a result of the USDA grant in 2010, three dogs have been going through training and testing in a variety of settings at a citrus research site in north Florida and in Fort Pierce. In the field tests, researchers have been transporting the dogs in training with grove vehicles in order to mimic conditions they would be under when scenting a field. The trucks move slowly through the field while the dogs sniff the air.
Government officials and citrus growers are excited about the early outcome. They would like to see a safe natural test available some would even be willing to purchase a canker sniffing dog to use between growers in their community. The problem they see though is that you would need a lot of dogs” to cover even a fraction of Florida’s more than 540,000 acres of citrus trees. Therefore the three dogs currently being trained would need to be joined by quite a few others before the program would be able to be viable in the real world. Plus the
Research has found that the dogs report more false positives for canker than false negatives. And in at least some cases of false positives—dogs indicating canker when the test-tree was known to be disease free—researchers later determined that a canker-infected tree was once on the site. Scientists are not sure if the dogs are picking up something in the soil around the tree but somehow the area where a Canker infected tree had to be removed is testing positive for disease. In citrus packing facilities, the dogs have been even more successful to the point where they can detect even an individual piece of fruit that has canker.
