Outfitted in a sturdy working harness over his sleek chocolate-and-white coat, Frost, a male springer spaniel mix, stands poised and alert in the Wyoming sagebrush, his amber eyes bright and his pink tongue lolling in the sun. His nose flawless. 

Well, nearly flawless. Trained to sniff out winter tick larvae (Dermacentor albipictus) in the Jackson Hole valley, Frost has proven very good at his job. 

Ticks are tiny—but they carry pathogens that affect the health of humans, wildlife, and livestock. The winter tick is particularly infamous for infesting large mammals like moose and elk – in extreme cases, infestations can cause anemia, hair loss, and even death. Scientists are increasingly concerned that climate change is allowing the winter tick to expand into new areas by lengthening the seasons they are active – creating more time and opportunity for them to spread. 

Tracking tiny ticks across vast landscapes is not easy. In a recent study, a team of scientists including researchers from the National CASC and the Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center, tested whether scent detection dogs like Frost could outperform traditional methods, such as the “tick drag,” which involves pulling a cloth along vegetation to collect ticks. 

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After Frost was taught to recognize the scent of winter tick larvae, he was tested in training simulations: In indoor trials, Frost wasn’t just good at detecting ticks, he was perfect. In field trials, he was still over 90% accurate and developed a gentle search pattern that didn't disturb or damage the plants he was examining. 

These trials demonstrated that Frost could do the job. Even so, the researchers wanted to know whether Frost’s survey team was better at detecting ticks than a human-only team. It turned out that both teams found similar numbers of tick larval clusters across a variety of habitats in the Jackson Hole valley – from low elevation cottonwood riparian zones to high elevation spruce-fir forests. Where Frost excelled was in speed: his team surveyed 250-meter transects in 24 minutes compared to 53 minutes for the human-only team conducting tick drags. 

Training a scent detection dog, however, comes with higher up-front investment. Each surveyed transect cost 40 USD compared to 26 USD for the human-only team, due to the added expenses of training, handler salaries, and dog health insurance. Since dogs don’t need to be re-trained for each new survey, researchers expect that this cost could decrease over time.  

While humans are still essential for fieldwork (and handing out treats), Frost’s performance suggests that scent-detection dogs can play a key role in scaling up tick surveillance across larger areas– especially in areas where ticks are at low abundance, widely scattered, or in areas that are hard to reach with cloth drag techniques.  

Efficient surveillance is essential for managing the spread of winter ticks into new areas and reducing the risk of disease in humans and wildlife. As these ticks continue to threaten large ungulates like moose and elk, scent detection dogs may provide wildlife managers a faster, more flexible approach for early tick detection.  

The full citation of the published article in Parasites & Vectors: 

Koser, T., Hurt, A., Thompson, L., Courtemanch, A., Wise, B., & P. Cross. Scent detection dogs detect a species of hard tick, Dermacentor albipictus, with comparable accuracy and efficiency to traditional tick drag surveys. Parasites Vectors 18, 126 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13071-024-06519-8