Auburn University researchers have found a new tool in the fight against giant snakes that have infested the Florida Everglades: a couple of bouncy black Labs.

The dogs are trained to sniff out Burmese pythons, which have moved into the swamps after being released from captivity and pose a threat to the delicate ecosystem there. In a pilot study, two dogs found 19 wild snakes, including one that was 12 feet long and another that was carrying 19 eggs.

It's the first scientific approach to training dogs to find the snakes, said Christina Romagosa, a research fellow at Auburn's Center for Forest Sustainability in the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, who led the study and announced the results this week.

"We'd like to think that this is just the beginning of something," Romagosa said.

Burmese pythons, African rock pythons and other non-native snakes first appeared in the south Florida swamps about 30 years ago, most likely when careless owners released their too-large pets into the wild.

The pythons -- which can get up to 20 feet long and 200 pounds in their native Asian habitat -- have bred and spread even into the suburbs, where they're often found in backyards and pose a threat to pets and people.

But biologists' biggest worry is their impact on wildlife, especially in Everglades National Park.

In a separate study published last week, Romagosa and others reported that pythons seem to be reducing the population of mammals in the park. That paper, which appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found there were as many as 99 percent fewer raccoons spotted in areas with pythons since 2000, and fewer sightings of every kind of mammal present in the park -- probably because the snakes are eating them.

"It's not conclusive, but it points toward the pythons having an impact," Romagosa said.

While Romagosa was studying the Everglades pythons, a member of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers asked whether Auburn might be able to teach its bomb-sniffing dogs to find the snakes.

On the hunt

The university's EcoDogs program already uses dogs to find wild animals for biologists, including bears and deer. Its canines have also uncovered an invasive tree fungus that otherwise can be found only through soil samples.

The trainers taught two black Labs named Jake and Ivy to find the pythons. First, they used coffee filters that wildlife scientists rubbed on captive snakes. Once the dogs could find the filters in the Alabama woods, trainers took them to Florida and trained them first on snakes in bags and then on free-roaming snakes that were tagged with radio collars so they could be tracked at all times, said handler Bart Rogers.

For the study, the team had people and dogs look for tagged snakes in equal-sized plots about 50 feet long and wide. The dogs were 2A1/2 times faster than people in searching, and also did a better job finding the smallest snakes, although humans had an edge in humid weather, when the dogs' panting slowed them down.

When Jake and Ivy hunted in open areas alongside canals -- the place pythons are likely to be found in the wild -- they found 92 percent of the snakes, while people found 64 percent. The dogs could even spot pythons in the water and underground.

"The dogs blew the people out of the water," Rogers said.

The dogs were taught to sit about 15 feet away from a snake when they found one. Even with that clue, the human trackers still struggled to find their prey.

"Their camoflauge is so good, the snake would basically have to move or stick its head up at us before we knew it was there," Rogers said.

Then the scientists would step in to bag the snake and remove it. Some will be used in further research in the Everglades, and the rest were killed; two were sent in formaldahyde to Auburn, which hopes to eventually put them on display.

Romagosa said the dogs might be used to help manage the pythons in the Everglades or, more likely, control them on Key Largo, where they've recently been found to be eating at least one endangered species. But until more funding is supplied, snake hunting's on hold.

Meanwhile, they may look into other tasks for the dogs to tackle.

"They're just now starting to scratch the surface of what these dogs can do," Rogers said.

Join the conversation by clicking to comment or email Wolfson at hwolfson@bhamnews.com.