In southern Australia, a government agency is trialing the assistance of hardworking detection dogs to help locate a protected python species for improved conservation efforts, ABC News Australia reported.

These detection dogs, trained by Skylos Ecology, have been taught to detect target scents, including animal scat of certain threatened and elusive species.

"What we train is a lot of positive enforcement, so it is pairing the target odor with a reward," explained Fiona Jackson, Skylos Ecology director and a conservation dog handler, per ABC News Australia.

In the past, the Skylos Ecology detection dogs successfully alerted researchers to scat samples of the tiger quoll and the kowari, two carnivorous marsupials whose population numbers in Australia have been on the decline. These detection efforts have helped scientists better understand the species' sex, health, and population estimates, per Skylos Ecology.

Detection dogs are great tools for endangered species research, as their powerful sense of smell can locate endangered species even more accurately than human spotters can. Leveraging this advantage to support endangered species conservation, environmental agencies, and conservation groups can better protect and prevent wildlife species from going extinct — an event that would cause cascading effects and imbalances on the entire rest of the ecosystem.

Wondering if these dogs could perform similar breakthroughs for the Murray-Darling carpet python, an elusive snake with a conservation status of "rare" that lives in southeastern Australia's river margins, the Murraylands and Riverland Landscape Board enlisted the help of Skylos Ecology's detection dogs and captive-bred pythons from Animals Anonymous for trial runs.

"We're really interested in learning about the critical habitat that could help them persist in the environment," said Melissa Burford, MRLB threatened fauna ecologist, per ABC News Australia. "They're a notoriously difficult species to survey for."

The Skylos Ecology team put its two most experienced dogs, Oakley and Rex, on the mission. However, the dogs needed new training to help minimize their risk of danger and stress while alerting to a python that could potentially get aggressive in defense.

The trial runs with the captive-bred pythons from Animals Anonymous have been promising.

"We've been doing some blind trials with the captive pythons and [the dogs] can quite confidently locate them," Burford said, per ABC News Australia.

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The next phase, which will pick up in October when the weather is warmer, will see if the training and trials pan out in the wild to locate the Murray-Darling carpet pythons in their natural habitats.

Australia has also used detection dogs to detect Phytophthora dieback, a plant disease that has wiped out an alarming amount of native flora. In Phoenix, detection dogs have sniffed out and located rare and endangered orchids.

"Using dogs with the conservation application was absolutely fascinating," said Animals Anonymous owner Adrian Sherriff, per ABC News Australia. "I think it will really lead into some great conservation outcomes … using these animals to work with other threatened species."

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