Is the Australian dingo an escaped stray or an intruder who never obeyed?
Are Australian dingoes (dingoes) runaways from home or intruders who never submit? | BMC Journal
Title: The Australian dingo: untamed or feral?
Journal: Frontiers in Zoology
By J. William O. Ballard and Laura A. B. Wilson
Published: 2019/02/13
Digital ID: 10.1186/s12983-019-0300-6
Link to original article: http://t.cn/Eo3igHg
We believe the link: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/wy63yERsTo1ABzPNXV4A3A
Is the Australian wild dog an escaped wild (feral) animal or an untamed animal that has never been tamed? It is important to clarify this issue because the Australian government has a policy that considers the Australian wild dog to be a wild animal and therefore allows for their widespread hunting. bill Professor Ballard and Dr. Laura Wilson explored this issue in their new article, published at Frontiers in Zoology* on.
Desert Australian Wild Dogs Eggie and Sandy
Barry Eggleton
Australia is known for many things, and the specter of “species extinction” should not be part of the country’s image.
About 100 years ago, Australians caused the extinction of the wolf Thylacine, the largest known modern marsupial carnivore. In 2019, the Western Australian government plans to introduce a bill that will allow the hunting of the Australian wild dog, the land’s top predator. Since Western Australia covers about one-third of Australia’s land mass, this policy change could lead to the slaughter of pure Australian wild dogs, adding to Australia’s list of extinct species.
**Is the Australian Wild Dog ever truly tamed? ***
In _ Frontiers in Zoology_. In a published debate article, we posed this simple question: “Were Australian wild dogs ever tamed? Do they exist as wild dogs now, or have they never really been domesticated?” The purpose of this question is to pause the current debate and engage in a rational debate from an academic perspective.
Understanding the origins of the Australian wild dog is politically and culturally important, as its arrival transformed Australian Aboriginal society. In addition, the issue is ecologically significant because the origins of this species can influence our understanding of the ecological role of the Australian wild dog in extant Australian ecosystems.
We first go back to Charles Darwin’s 1868 article in The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. A book on the subject. He pointed out that the principles of choice can be simply divided into three categories: systematic choice, unconscious choice, and natural choice. Darwin’s term “methodological selection” came to be known as “artificial selection,” and through this “artificial selection” The world has seen the creation and continued reproduction of thousands of species of poultry, livestock, and cultivated plants.
According to Darwin’s theory, two things should be fulfilled for a canine species to become domesticated: unconscious selection by humans to become domesticated, and finally, artificial selection. So, according to the first principle, an animal that has been domesticated and then returned to the wild (which we call an undomesticated animal) can be marked as having the characteristics of unconscious selection. In contrast, a wild animal that has been domesticated and then returned to the wild (i.e., a feral animals) are assumed to be characterized by both unconscious and artificial selection.
These simple theoretical predictions provide a template for the analyses and experiments needed to resolve the debate.
The Australian wild dog most likely arrived in Australia from Southeast Asia 3500-10,000 years ago. At present, we do not know whether these original Australian wild dogs were domesticated or domesticated. However, we do know that the first Australian wild dogs to arrive in Australia were likely few in number and arrived by boat. It is therefore unlikely that the Australian Wild Dog was domesticated in Australia.
The earliest known occurrence of wild dogs in South Australia is estimated to be between 3348 and 3081 years ago at Madura Caves in the Roy Plains, Nullarbor region of southeastern Western Australia. They did not inhabit the island of Tasmania, which separated from Australia 12,000 years ago due to changes in sea level, strongly suggesting that the Australian wild dog did not arrive in Australia until 15,000 years ago.
The key to understanding whether the original Australian wild dog was domesticated is to construct a high-quality, high-read-length, scratch-reference genome from wildlife. In 2017, we were honored to win the Pacific Biosciences' and the full genome of Sandy, a pure desert wild dog (Sandy and her siblings were found in the desert at 4 weeks old) has been released online.
But there is the challenge of rigorously examining the genomes associated with the character selection and experimentally verifying that the wild dogs were once domesticated and bred but are now wild domesticated animals. If this is the case, then the debate should be resolved by ascertaining whether the fact that it was integrated into the Australian biota at least 3500 years ago is sufficient to establish it as a cornerstone taxon.
Alternatively, the Australian wild dog may have been domesticated, but not bred. If this is the case, the debate should again focus on how to develop strategies to protect wild canids and adequately clarify their ecological role. In the meantime, although the Western Australian government has at the last minute reversed its decision to remove the Australian wild dog from the native animal list, the Australian wild dog is still listed as a pest by the government and is still “restricted” by the Western Australian Agricultural and Pastoral Region.
Summary:
Background
The Australian dingo continues to cause debate amongst Aboriginal people, pastoralists, scientists and the government in Australia. controversy is whether the dingo has been tamed and has now reverted to its ancestral wild state or whether its ancestors were domesticated and it now The goal of this article is to place the discussion onto a theoretical framework, highlight what is currently known about dingo origins and taxonomy and then make a series of experimentally testable organismal, cellular and biochemical predictions that we propose can Discussion*.
Discussion.
We consider a canid that has been unconsciously selected as a tamed animal and the endpoint of methodical or what we now call artificial selection as a We consider wild animals that were formerly tamed as Untamed canids are predicted to be marked by a signature of unconsciousness, and those wild animals that were formerly domesticated as feralized. Untamed canids are predicted to be marked by a signature of unconscious selection whereas feral animals are hypothesized to be marked by signatures of First, we review the movement of We then discuss how differences between taming and domestication may influence the organismal traits of skull morphometrics, Finally, we consider Cellular and molecular level traits including hypotheses concerning the phylogenetic position of dingoes, metabolic genes that appear to be under positive selection and the potential for micronutrient compensation by the gut microbiome.
Conclusions.
Western Australian Government policy is currently being revised to allow the These policies are based on an incomplete understanding of the evolutionary history of the canid and assume However, accumulated evidence does not definitively indicate that the dingo is feral. show that the dingo was ever domesticated and additional focused research is We suggest that incorporating ancient DNA data into the debate concerning dingo origins will be pivotal to understanding the evolutionary Further, we advocate that future morphological, Behavioral and genetic studies should focus on including genetically pure Alpine and Desert dingoes and not dingo-dog hybrids. Finally, we propose that future studies critically examine genes under selection in the dingo and The genome from a wild canid for comparison.
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Journal Introduction:
**Frontiers in Zoology ( https://frontiersinzoology.biomedcentral.com/,3.627
- 2-year Impact Factor, 3.782 - 5**_ _ -year Im_ _ **pact Factor) **_is an open access, peer-reviewed online journal publishing high quality research Articles and reviews on all aspects of animal life.
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