Black Labrador Sgiath Wins Animal of the Year for Sniffing Out Sea Vomit

Sgiath (say it Skee-ah) started out finding people. The six-year-old black Labrador is a qualified search and rescue dog from the Scottish Highlands, trained to find people lost in the mountains. Then her handler, marine ecologist Dr Texa Sim, asked her nose to find something much smaller and much stranger: an invasive marine organism nicknamed sea vomit.

A new smell and a new way to search

The target is carpet sea squirt, Didemnum vexillum, which smothers native wildlife, threatens oyster farms and can look like little more than slime among the seaweed. Sim, who runs Conservation Detection Dogs Scotland, wondered whether a trained dog could pick it out faster than human eyes. The project has taken about 18 months. In her post announcing the award, Sim wrote that it involved "constant planning, training, testing, and trialling alongside lots of doubt, imposter syndrome, setbacks and problem solving."

Sgiath had to learn two things at once, Sim explained: "an entirely new and difficult odour (compared to the enormous scent profile of a human)" and "a new style of searching." Now she works the shoreline at low tide, nose down among the oyster cages and kelp. According to the International Fund for Animal Welfare, she is believed to be the first dog in the world trained to detect the species by scent.

From the tide line to BAFTA

On 15 October, IFAW named Sgiath its Animal of the Year at the Animal Action Awards, held at BAFTA in London. Sim had known for months. "After keeping the secret for the last few months," she wrote, she was "absolutely thrilled" to share the news, adding that the trip from their Highland home to London was "just a bit surreal." Her verdict on her dog: "She has surpassed all my expectations and truly shows that with consistent and well planned training, an old dog can most certainly learn new tricks!"

Sgiath won't be working alone for long. Sim is now training a second Labrador, three-year-old Uisge, to do the same job, so the next time someone goes looking for sea vomit on a Highland shore, there may be two noses on the case.