"Some bomb-sniffing dogs trained to help fight terrorism are turning their olfactory attention toward a different scourge: Burmese pythons in Florida's Everglades National Park."

"The dogs are members of 'EcoDogs,' a three-year-old collaboration at Alabama's Auburn University between the science departments and the school's Canine Detection Research Institute, which trains dogs to detect explosives.

'The dogs are really, really good,' said Christina Romagosa, a biologist at Auburn.

She said in a test of python detection in south Florida, the dogs could cover a search area 2.5 times faster than a person.

'People can only see that the snake is there if they can see the snake. The dogs can smell the snake even if it's not visually apparent to us,' she said."

Barbara Liston reports for Reuters May 1, 2012. [2]