New Scientist: Kill the dingoes, and other species pay the price

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Kill the dingoes, and other species pay the price

 

11 November 2006

From New Scientist Print Edition.

 

THE eastern hare-wallaby is gone. The lesser bilby is no more. In the

past two centuries, these and 16 other mammals have become extinct in

Australia - almost half the mammalian species lost worldwide over

that time.

 

Changes in how people use fire to clear land, the introduction of

rabbits and disease, and sheep farming have in the past been blamed

for the extinctions. Now a team led by Chris Johnson of James Cook

University in Townsville, Queensland, says the cause is far simpler:

the persecution of mainland Australia's only top predator, the dingo.

" Where there are no dingoes, introduced predators are rife, and up to

65 per cent of ground-dwelling mammal species have disappeared, "

Johnson says. " If dingoes hadn't been so savagely persecuted, we

wouldn't have had this total catastrophe. "

 

By mapping habitat type and the range of ground-dwelling marsupials,

rabbits, foxes, dingoes and sheep, Johnson's team has shown that

wherever dingo populations have slumped, prey species such as the

lesser bilby have become extinct (Proceedings of the Royal Society B,

DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2006.3711). That adds to circumstantial and

historical evidence that dingoes protect small marsupials by reducing

numbers of introduced predators, such as the fox, whose numbers

explode in the dingo's absence.

From issue 2577 of New Scientist magazine, 11 November 2006, page 17

 

 

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