The plan to save Italy's dying olive trees with dogs

A deadly and hard-to-detect disease has been ravaging the treasured olive trees of southern Italy for 10 years. A highly trained squad of super-sniffer dogs could save them. On a sunny winter morning, the dog trainer Mario Fortebraccio slowly bends toward a line of potted olive trees and indicates it with his hand. Waiting for that signal, Paco, a three-year-old white Labrador, rushes through the row of plants with his head tilted, sniffing each pot at the root, the rhythm of his inhaling echoing through the greenhouse. The dog is carefully scouting for something humans can't sense. "They don't do anything if there is no reward, " Fortebraccio tells me with a smile. After a few seconds, having completed his task, Paco returned to the trainer, lifted his leg to urinate on.

a nearby plant, wagged his tail, and claimed a little crunchy treat. At Vivai Giuranna, an extensive commercial greenhouse with over one million plants in Parabita, in the southern Italian region of Puglia, Paco is searching for Xylella fastidiosa, a type of bacterium that has been ravaging southern Italy's olive fields for the past decade. Paco and a few other four legged colleagues make up the highly trained Xylella Detection Dogs team. "These dogs have got something unique, " says Angelo Delle Donne, the head plant health inspector for the government of the province of Lecce, who has been battling Xylella since it was discovered in Puglia in 2013.