In the latest episode of the SciStarter podcast, we celebrate National Dog Day (August 26th) with some canine citizen science.
Scientists would like to learn about dog personalities and genetics; what traits help them perform well as service animals; and how environmental factors could affect their health. If you have a canine companion, you have the perfect lab partner!
SciStarter Podcast: Dog Days of Summer
Projects featured in the podcast include:
C-BARQ
https://scistarter.org/c-barq-and-fe-barq
Darwin’s Ark
https://scistarter.org/darwins-ark
Also, check out this study from Darwin’s Ark, published in the journal Science, based on data provided by citizen scientists!
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0639
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
Citizen Science: Stories of Science We Can Do Together
Season 3, Episode 8: Dog Days of Science
[THEME MUSIC]
Host: Bob Hirshon
Welcome to Citizen Science: Stories of Science We Can Do Together, coming to you from SciStarter’s Virtual World Headquarters. This month we’re going to the dogs with some canine-based science projects you can do with your best friend.
We already know a great deal about our animal pets. For example, if you were suddenly a fraction of the size of your cat or dog, they would kill you, but in different ways: your cat would bat you around the room for a while, eat you, then find the most valuable textile in your home on which to barf up your hair. Your dog on the other hand would either drown you in affectionate slobber or crush you by eagerly fetching your pickup truck-sized slippers and dropping them onto your head. It would then howl inconsolably for days until its new owner held up a tennis ball.
This we know. And yet, there is still so much to learn! In this podcast episode, we focus on dogs. Do different dog breeds really have different temperaments? What traits correspond to the best service dogs? And what can disorders common in dogs tell us about human health? Answering these questions requires help from you, the citizen scientist, and projects like C-BARQ, short for Canine Behavioral Assessment and Research Questionnaire. James Serpell directs the project.
Hi, Dr. Serpell, thanks for being with us.
James Serpell
Good to be here.
Bob
So this is such a cool project and very relatable, I think, for a lot of folks. What are you hoping to get from C-BARQ? What are the goals of the project?
James
Well, the original goals were to try and get a decent estimate of how common behavior problems were in the dog population, or sort of the pet dog population. And really, the only way to do that is through an online type of survey, and hope for large numbers of people to complete it. And our results have kind of exceeded our expectations in the sense that a lot of people have shown an interest in this. It’s not, it takes about 10 or 15 minutes of a person’s time to fill in the survey. At the end of it, they get a little chart on our website that shows them where their dog is relative to other dogs in the population in terms of 14 different behavioral problems, or areas of problems that are common in dogs. And, but more to the point, what all of this is contributing to is this massive database. So we now have nearly 80,000 records for dogs from all over the world. We’ve even got to the point of being able to do comparisons between breeds, between males and females, between neutered and unneutered, we’ve been able to look at some of the environmental factors that contribute to the development of behavior problems in dogs. The whole thing has taken on a life of its own, and it’s become an enormously valuable scientific resource. Now this database, and frankly, we, the more dogs we have in it, the better it is. There’s no limit to the numbers, you know, we can use. We want more dogs, especially if you have a rare breed of dog or an unusual breed of dog. We need those more than the more common breeds because we have, for example, many 1000s of Labradors and many 1000s of French bulldogs, but we have very few of some breeds just because they’re a bit unusual. If a person has an unusual dog breed, we’d really be thrilled if they would go online and complete the C-BARQ. And like I say, the more the merrier. We can’t get enough. We’ve now, I think the C-BARQ already has been used– or C-BARQ data has been used– in about 130 published scientific studies. So it’s generated this huge amount of interest and huge amount of scientific output.
Bob
Is there anything that stands out? Anything as far as the scientific results that either surprised you or was, you know, especially interesting?
James
Um, yes. I mean, a lot of things, actually, almost everything. But one of the more interesting things that emerged recently is the relationship between genetics and behavior in dogs. And that’s become really interesting. There’s been one study that showed a very high level of what they call heritability in these behavioral traits when you compare different breeds, and that strongly reinforces the notion that these different breeds have very different lineages that relate to the different uses dogs were, you know – the different uses that dogs acquired during their history. So we have, like herding breeds all share certain behavioral characteristics in common and retrieving breeds are similar, that type of thing. So it’s really interesting.
Bob
Well, that’s funny. I thought you were going to say the opposite because there was that Science paper recently where they stressed that a lot of things weren’t that heritable. That basically temperament within breeds varied as much as temperament from breed to breed. At least that’s the way it was in the media, it was, it was stressed.
James
Yeah. And to some, to some degree, that’s true in the sense that there’s a lot of variation within breeds. But when you look at these groups of related breeds, it turns out that they share a lot of behavioral traits in common. And, and you can trace these lineages back through time, to sort of, the sort of the real sort of ancestral types of dogs that we use for different purposes.
Bob
Oh, okay. So it’s more of the purpose more than the exact breed. So “retrievers” versus “this particular Labrador versus this Irish setter” or something like that. Okay, so how do people get involved?
James
They can go into SciStarter, and follow the links to the C-BARQ website. Everything’s pretty much self-explanatory, they just have to, you know, create a little profile for themselves, just a username and a password. And then they get taken to a page that asks them various things about their dog. So its name, its age, its breed, this kind of thing. And a bit of its history. And then they get taken to this behavioral survey, which consists of 100 questions that just ask them to describe how their dog responds to different things in its environment. And that could be something like, you know, how it responds when the doorbell rings in the house, or how it responds when it sees a cat running in front of it, or something like that. And the owner, then completes their– the questions are all designed in this little sort of five-point rating scale. So you say from “the dog, you know, never shows the behavior” to “the dog always shows the behavior” or “almost always shows the behavior” or something like that. And then they, once they’ve completed the survey, they finish, and then they can go and look at the dog scores, which are represented as a little kind of chart–
Bob
– like a Myers Briggs?
James
– kind of like a Myers Briggs, a little chart that shows… it’s color coded, so it shows their own dog scores, and it shows the average scores for dogs of the same breed. And also the average scores for dogs in general. And if their dog is sort of, very far from the average, it might be color coded as red or green, depending on whether it’s much less than average or much more than average. So they get a sense of, you know, how their dog is doing relative to other dogs in the population.
Bob
Uh huh. Now, do you have any new projects coming out? Or any new questionnaires or anything else? Or are you just going to continue with this pretty much as it is?
James
We’ve been developing a new survey specifically for working dogs, detection dogs, dogs that are used to you know, sniff things out. And it could be search and rescue dogs or dogs that find wildlife or dogs that detect explosives, that kind of thing. That’s based on the original C-BARQ but it has some new components and new dimensions that are sort of particularly relevant to those types of working dogs. We have studies that are looking at other working dogs like guide dogs and service dogs that are going on. We, I mean, I know this show is about dogs, but we also have one for cats, and we’re going to be doing more and more for cats. We always feel cats get left behind a bit.
Bob
Is that C-MEOW?
James
No, it’s called Fe-BARQ, short for Feline Behavioral Assessment Research Questionnaire.
Bob
Because it would be hard to get “MEOW” into an acronym that would work. For the working dogs, are you trying to get certain categories, like the way you were looking for unusual breeds? Like do you want, you know, truffle-sniffing dogs or, you know, things that might be out of the ordinary? Or is it mostly guide dogs, maybe cancer-sniffing dogs and explosives or something like that?
James
Well, it would certainly be interesting, for example, to be able to relate a dog’s scores to its actual performance, sort of how successful it is, as a working dog. So some of the dogs that are trained are, you know, super-duper, doing what they’ve been asked to do. Others are okay, and others aren’t so good. And it’d be really nice to be able to look at the dog’s scores on the C-BARQ and see whether you can predict from those scores, which dogs are going to do best at a particular type of task. So for example, if you found that a truffle hound has certain traits, which, you know, distinguish it from a dog that’s used for search and rescue work, for example. In other words, it has a different type of personality or a different set of traits. That would be really useful to know because it would help users of truffle hounds or users of search and rescue dogs to select for the best kinds of dogs for that specific working role.
Bob
Okay. All right. Well, thanks so much for joining us, and good luck with the research.
James
Thank you. My pleasure.
Bob
Detailed questionnaires are a great way to study behavioral differences and similarities in dogs. But combining that data with genetic information is even more powerful. That’s what Darwin’s Ark is all about. Researcher Kathleen Morrill is a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts and a scientist at Darwin’s Ark. She and her colleagues also published a study on canine behavior in the journal Science. Hi, Kathleen, thanks for joining us!
Kathleen
Happy to be here. Yeah.
Bob
So could you tell us a little bit about your canine research? You know, before we get specifically into Darwin’s Ark? What sort of things are you studying?
Kathleen
Yeah, so I’m a PhD student at UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts. And my dissertation is all about behavioral disorders in pet dogs, such as compulsive disorders, and differences in behavior across dogs and what we can find in their DNA that might explain some of these differences.
Bob
Oh, okay. All right. And not to diminish the importance of pet health, but I guess dogs have a lot of the same issues regarding this as humans do, right?
Kathleen
Yeah, both us and our dogs, we have a lot in common in terms of our health, and, importantly, our genomes, too. So the entire collection of our DNA. And the genome, both our genome and dog genomes hold a lot of mysteries that scientists haven’t solved yet that explain a lot of the differences in our health outcomes, in allergies we develop, and behaviors that we struggle with.
Bob
And now how does the contribution from, you know, from non-scientists help with this?
Kathleen
So we took the perspective where we want to know from the owner’s viewpoint, what their dog is, like, they’re kind of the constant observers of their dog’s behavior. So they’re kind of the perfect source of information for learning more about the dog’s day to day life, not just one time visiting the clinic, but what are they like, every week? What are the things that you know, trigger them or cause them stress? And the owner is going to be most intimately familiar with those details about a dog’s life. So our citizen scientists, they kind of hold all that information. So you want to know from them.
Bob
Now, is it skewed? Or do you worry? Because I know some people, you know, say, “Oh, my dog’s not aggressive. He’s just loyal”, and, you know, lively and then someone else says, “No, it’s a vicious dog!” He chases– the mail carrier might have a different opinion of the dog than the owner.
Kathleen
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, our dogs are our babies, in a sense, too. So we expect that kind of bias to influence the degree people rate their dog on questions. But our hope is that across dogs, and when we’re serving 1000s and 1000s of people, we can work out kind of the directionality of the dog’s behavior, even if they’re underrating them to some degree across dogs. Our study is a population wide study. So we’re working out the noise in the data from the bias using informatics.
Bob
Okay, and you’re also collecting genetic information, too?
Kathleen
Yes, yes. So for a lot of dogs, we collect saliva swabs. Owners can also help donate and fund their dog’s own genome sequencing and we’ll return information like their ancestry. And that helps us perform genome wide association studies. So trying to find differences in the DNA that explain differences in behavior or in allergies or in health.
Bob
Okay, so how does that work? So there’s like a free version, and then there’s a medium version, and then there’s a super donor version?
Kathleen
Yeah, they’re kind of like three levels. The first level tier is the free version. If you answer all the survey questions about your dog, you’ll be put on the waitlist for a DNA swab, that we send you to your house and swab your dog’s saliva. And we’ll bank that and sequence it on kind of a grant-funded basis. So as we get more funding in, we’ll sequence more dogs. And that’s kind of just a priority list, as people fill out surveys. It can take a while because of the grant funding aspect. The second tier is the donation tier where you donate to fund your dog’s sample. And if you’ve answered all the survey questions, that funding should only be $99, it’s at cost. So that will put your dog in the next sequencing batch for certain, and you’ll receive a saliva swab just as usual. And basically the same outcome as the free level kit. It’s low coverage, DNA sequencing, where we take a pass of the genome and ascertain the genetic markers on the scale of millions of markers, compared to commercial tests, that test somewhere between 10,000 and 200,000. Because we need that level of information for discovery. The third tier, which is kind of like the big-time tier is our Trailblazer kit, where we’re doing what we call 30x whole genome coverage of a dog, which is kind of like the gold standard in human genomics. Getting a whole genome usually cost on the scale of $1,000, I forget exactly what the level cost of the kit is for the Trailblazer kit on our website, but it gives basically the most high-depth information about your dog’s genome, we’ll send you a package in the mail with a kind of a booklet explaining all about your dog from that. And that information is actually super valuable from a research perspective. And it kind of drives the canine genomics field forward more, because it covers the highest level of detail about a dog’s DNA.
Bob
That’s amazing, because it hasn’t been that long, at least it doesn’t seem to me, the first whole human genome was done at, you know, I guess a cost of many millions or billion dollars or whatever. So is this similar to that, when you sequence an entire individual animal?
Kathleen
It’s kind of similar to that. So it’s not an it’s not what we call an assembly de novo, which is reassembling a species genome from scratch, which is what the human genome project did. Or when there are projects, actually, to sequence new species from scratch that have never been sequenced before, that’s a bigger challenge. Because we already have the dog genome assembled, we can take your dog’s information and map it to that genome. And we know a little bit already. It’s really hard to do a genome from scratch, and it takes a lot of upfront investment.
Bob
So it’s what makes your dog unique among other dogs, as opposed to what makes your dog genetically unique among all living things.
Kathleen
Yes, among all living things, yeah, exactly. Finding out how the chromosomes are assembled.
Bob
So what are you finding with personalities of dogs versus their breeds? What are the connections?
Kathleen
It’s very much a complicated relationship. It’s not all or nothing like, we like to think that dog breeds are this perfect constellation of personality traits that if you get a dog breed, you’ll predict precisely how well they’ll fall out on how friendly they are with other dogs, how friendly they are with people, what kind of behavioral disorders they might experience. But we found the relationships a lot more subtle than that. For a lot of what we think of as personality traits, dogs breed doesn’t predict a lot. For certain breeds, it predicts a great deal for one type of personality trait. So a lot of livestock guardian breeds, they’re a lot more, you know, chill, they’ll lay around, we see that, but for other aspects of their personality, breed doesn’t tell us a lot. We’ve kind of uncovered the more subtle details of that relationship between breed and behavior in a recent study published in Science.
Bob
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that genetics doesn’t play a role in personality.
Kathleen
Yeah, so we can try to decouple that actually, thanks to a lot of the mixed breed dogs enrolled in our study. There’s this aspect to breed that isn’t just a genetic ancestry type of aspect, but also just you know, people who get breeds, like that breed, they might train their breed in a certain way. And by looking at mixed breed dogs who have might have ancestry from those breeds, but it might not be perceivable to the owner that adopts them. You start to kind of peel away those layers of social expectations and training to get at what’s the real genetic relationship between breed and behavior. And are there other aspects of the genome that influence behavior apart from breed? The other aspect is we saw that size wasn’t as impactful on behavior as we would have thought as well. So when you account for breed, and when you account for ancestry, size’s impact on behavior is pretty minimal, which was surprising to us too, because we’d expect that to influence the dog’s environment a lot, maybe more so than breed in some cases, but we didn’t quite see that.
Bob
Hmm. Is there anything you’re working on now, or you’re looking forward to in the future that you want to highlight or talk about? Where’s this sort of going now?
Kathleen
Yeah, so our initial focus was to find genes that are involved in behavioral disorders like compulsive behavior, or separation anxiety in companion dogs. And we’ve since expanded into studying the behavior and performance of working dogs, too. So if your dog has a job, be it a guide dog, scent detection dog, even just a therapy dog, we want to know about it. We also expanded to studying food allergies in dogs because food allergies in dogs present somewhat differently than they do in people. It’s not usually an anaphylactic shock response. But usually, it’s kind of dermatologic, like skin problems that come about with food allergies, and owners are usually pretty familiar with what kind of foods trigger their dogs. And we’ve just launched a new portal on cancer in dogs. And we’ll be trialing an environmental sampling study, basically a small silicone tag that gets attached to your dog’s collar and passively collects chemicals from their local environment. And that’s something that we’ll be launching fairly soon.
Bob
Oh, wow. That’s so cool. Well, is there anything else you want to share about the project or anything I haven’t asked you about?
Kathleen
Yeah, I mean, those are the things that we like, seek out to study. What we find most interesting are the, how the data that the citizen science has provided us that they lead to interesting questions, and surprising things about dogs, too. So our big study on behavior in dog breeds and in mutts is one example of that. So we knew that we had to look at the relationship between the dog’s breed and their behavior. But we didn’t anticipate how complicated that relationship would be, and how many rabbit holes we’d end up going down in analyzing this data. So for many of the analyses that we included in that article, we didn’t want to just consider what the geneticists would be interested in knowing. But we also wanted to consider what our citizen scientists and the general public might want to ask. And I think that’s really important for projects like ours to consider what’s valued by the people contributing data to our research. And doubly so when it involves dogs because we want to do what’s best by the dogs as well.
Bob
Great. Well, thank you so much. It’s really, really interesting. And I assume you need more volunteers?
Kathleen
Always! Always recruiting.
Bob
Great. All right. Thanks so much.
Kathleen
Thank you, Bob.
Bob
If you’d like to learn more about canine citizen science, join SciStarter for a webinar on the topic on Tuesday, August 23rd at 2 pm US Eastern Daylight Time. That’s August 23rd, 2022. There’s a link to the webinar right on the info page of this podcast. And if you’re listening to this after August 23rd, don’t worry; you can still go to the web page and watch the recorded webinar in its entirety. By the way, the very next Friday, August 26th, is National Dog Day, and you want to be all ready for that. It’s also International Dog Day, for all you German Shepherds, French Poodles and others out there.
Well, that’s all we’ve got for you this time. I’m Bob Hirshon; thanks for listening.
[Outro theme]
This podcast is brought to you each month by SciStarter, where you will find thousands of citizen science projects, events and tools! It’s all at SciStarter.org, that’s S-C-I-S-T-A-R-T-E-R dot ORG. SciStarter’s founder is Darlene Cavalier. And thanks so much to you, the listener and the citizen scientist for getting involved and making a difference. If you have any ideas that you want to share with us, and any things you want to hear on this podcast, get in touch with us at info@scistarter.org. Once again, our email address is info@scistarter.org. Thanks again and I’ll see you next time!
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