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Sally Dickinson

Researcher and former search-and-rescue canine handler at Virginia Tech's School of Animal Sciences, leading citizen-science research training pet dogs to detect spotted lanternfly egg masses.

Sep 30, 2026

25:17
So tell us a little bit more about that.
25:19
Yeah, so that range of detection study was sort of one half of the second part of the project.
25:25
The other half was kind of putting this into real-world context.
25:30
And the way we did that was almost to pit the human visual searches against the dogs and say, okay, you know, you're saying that Dogs are fine, but we can also visually search this without the hassle of having to have this dog and this other research and all that comes along with that.
25:48
So asking people, even our own plant pathologists that was on our team to go out and search areas to find spotted Latin fly egg masses, other extension personnel that have been trained and go out and do eradication processes to investigate half acre, sectors of the environment, and that varied between some partially managed woodland to sort of wasteland areas.
26:17
We had one site in Rhode Island that was sort of tucked in behind a solar farm and a yard waste sort of dump site for the city, and go out there and log and GPS all of the sites.
26:30
And each one of those human sort of searches did that independently, and then we sent the dogs out.

7 MINS LATER

33:38
Who's the best dog?

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