(Editor's Note: This story has been altered from its original version to include names of the project leaders and the source of funding.)

Gator was having a rough Monday morning. The day before he had taken his first boat ride in preparation for a new assignment -- sniffing out the poop of orcas, a task scientists hope will help save the endangered marine mammals.

But as the Australian cattle dog getting his sea legs perched on the bow of a 13-foot Boston Whaler, he didn't realize the significance of a boat roaring past.

"He was pretty happy until a big wave came over and all of a sudden -- whoosh," the wave swamped him, University of Washington researcher Sam Wasser said. "Gator wasn't too happy."

Then, somewhere in his travels that Sunday, poor Gator scraped up his paw pad. So by Monday morning, Gator was not quite as spunky as usual. But as handler Heath Smith put on Gator's working vest for a test finding wolverine scat, the dog was still eager to go. Anything for his buddy Smith -- but mostly for a chance to play with his beloved ball.

Scientists hope that Gator will soon be on the front lines of saving orcas. He would apparently be the first dog in the world to sniff out orca droppings, which can tell scientists about the physical condition of the killer whales.

"It's a fantastic way, without seeing any animals at all, to get comprehensive health information," Wasser said.

Wasser, Smith and the rest of Wasser's team at UW's Center for Conservation Biology have perfected the art of using dogs to find the scat of rare animals. To qualify, the dogs must have keen sniffers and a pathologically powerful drive to play with a ball -- and they only get the ball when they locate the right kind of dung.

Like some dogs in the program, Gator is a dropout from the state Department of Corrections school that trains drug-sniffing dogs (he was judged to have an unacceptable gait). "He does heroin, marijuana, crack cocaine," Wasser said, and now has learned to detect the droppings of grizzly bears, black bears, jaguars, wolverines, bobcats, cougars and other animals.

To be chosen, the dogs must show an unbelievably strong drive for their ball -- "really obsessed," Wasser explained. Dogs that nutso aren't likely to make good pets -- which is why they're available for this work at all.

"They all come from the pound. They're maniac dogs that otherwise were going to be blue-juiced," Wasser said. To find them, Wasser's team members walk through the pound, bouncing a ball and looking for dogs that go crazy for it.

At a recent conference of orca researchers, Wasser showed how he had used dogs to locate the excreta of right whales, an endangered species, off Nova Scotia. The project is led by Rosalind Rolland of the New England Aquarium, aided by Barbara Davenport of PackLeader Dog Training in Gig Harbor, and funded by the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The technique has wide applicability to many kinds of wildlife because, as the title of a children's book explains, "Everyone Poops."

Scat's a map of health

What does poop show? A lot. It reveals the level of the thyroid hormone, which gives researchers a good idea of how much the animal has been eating. That's important to orcas, because a major problem for them is a lack of their favorite food, salmon.

Orcas' exposure to toxins also would be expected to depress thyroid levels. By comparing the Puget Sound orcas with those in relatively toxin-free Canada, Wasser hopes to tease out the effects of toxins on the whales.

Cortisol, the stress hormone, is in poop, too. It could help researchers figure out what's bugging the orcas most. Wasser did this with spotted owls, showing that the presence of roads was a much bigger stressor than barred owls, which are the spotted owls' competitors and, sometimes, predators. For orcas, scat samples taken when a lot of sightseeing boats are around could be compared with samples taken when things are quiet.

And finally, there's DNA. It reveals the species and sex of an animal and can identify an individual animal. It is contained in cells that slough off the digestive system of mammals into their excrement.

"So many things are dumped from the body, and it's just sitting there," Wasser said. "It's a little harder to get from killer whales, but we'll get to that."

Diving for 'treasure'

The key to getting that stuff from orcas is going to be Ken Balcomb, the granddaddy of orca researchers in Puget Sound.

You see, the poop of right whales off Nova Scotia is bright orange, floats and is really smelly. Orca scat, though, doesn't float much and Balcomb hasn't seen it all that often in three decades of following the whales.

Balcomb has collected samples from dolphins in the Bahamas, where volunteer divers scoop up the dolphins' poop into film canisters. It helped him identify the groups of dolphins that hang together, sort of like the J, K and L pods of orcas in Puget Sound.

"It was elegant and inelegant all at the same time," Balcomb said.

Balcomb will be helping Wasser try to do the same thing with orcas, but he has his doubts.

The right whales near Nova Scotia "have a lot of floaters, and they themselves are pretty much floaters," Balcomb said.

Orcas, however, dive a lot and, he said, "here it'll be more of a brownish cloud ...

"A (killer) whale may swim under you, roll and give you a Bronx cheer, and you'll see it, but it'll be 20 feet down," he said.

Wasser, though, says a certain percentage floats and that should be enough. The big challenge, Balcomb predicts, will be figuring out which whale produced which poop, because they congregate so closely. And the water here, unlike in the Bahamas, is often cloudy.

"Figuring out who did a Freddy is going to be hard," Balcomb said.

Loads of fisher poop

Wasser wins praise from Laura Finley, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist overseeing recovery of the fisher, a weasellike animal.

In northern California, researchers previously had to catch the fishers, anesthetize them, punch holes in their ears to hold tags and draw blood. Then they had to repeatedly recapture them in a complicated series of steps to determine how many fishers were in the area. That and other techniques involve baiting traps, which is not natural.

A UW team using two dogs for six weeks found 700 fisher scat samples -- more than the wildlife service has a budget to analyze.

"We're really excited about this technique," Finley said. "If this technique turns out to be a useful tool, it's very non-invasive."

Wasser's center is building a training facility at the UW's Pack Forest near Eatonville for wildlife scientists from around the world. The program now has 11 dogs and has trained close to 30 over the years, Wasser said.

It's all about the ball, baby

Gator's Sunday trip on Lake Washington to get his sea legs was his first on the water.

On his Monday morning outing at St. Edwards Park in Kenmore, Gator -- a 45-pound, 8-year-old whose breed is also known as a "blue heeler" -- watched his handler, Smith, intently.

"Find it!" Smith said, and Gator trotted off eagerly, thinking of his reward -- the ball.

He stopped and peed on a cedar tree. This is "canine-ing" -- being a regular dog. And it's not allowed. He sniffed around under a log.

"Knock it off," Smith commanded, and Gator went back to work. He trotted a little farther, veered right, and sat.

"Look at him -- he's looking for his ball," Wasser said, as a Seattle P-I photographer moved closer for a shot. "The photographer can do whatever he wants, and Gator's not going to do anything because he wants his ball."

"Good boy," Smith said, tossing Gator a red plastic ball on a rope.

After 90 seconds of joy with his ball, Smith took it back and Gator was off to find some more wolverine poop.

"You get control of these manic dogs because you have the ball," Wasser explained. "If you threw the ball in front of a racing car, that dog would run in front of it."

Suddenly there was a small crisis. An elderly gentleman came strolling down the path with his pug, Epoonee, threatening to break Gator's concentration. Wasser gently explained to the man that he would have to wait a few minutes for Gator to move far enough off the trail so they could safely pass.

"Gator still has his potatoes," Wasser said. "He doesn't like for us to call them testicles, so we call them potatoes."

Why isn't Gator neutered?

"It keeps his drive up," Wasser said.

On land, Gator works inside predetermined areas. On the water, it will be a little different. The boat will stay downwind of the orcas. Whenever Gator "alerts" -- this can be told from his ear set and his tail, among other indicators -- researchers will know they're in the vicinity of orca poop. From there it's a matter of watching the dog. When he stops alerting and moves across the boat, researchers will know they've left the area downwind of the poop. The boat circles back in the direction Gator indicates, in the direction of the oncoming wind. He alerts again, then relaxes, and the boat turns back again. Eventually, the orca leavings can be pinpointed, and the dog is handed his ball. At least that's the way it worked off Novia Scotia with the right whales.

The National Marine Fisheries Service, which is in charge of administering $1.5 million for orca research secured by Sen. Maria Cantwell, is considering whether to fund the dog research. Details are still being worked out, but agency scientists have indicated their intention to at least try it, Wasser said.

One big change Wasser plans when Gator gets out onto Puget Sound: He'll use much bigger boats.