Dingoes aren't just feral dogs, says study

According to a new study published Friday in Science Advances, dingoes are genetically similar to wolves and dogs.

The bane of modern ranchers has been the species thatrevered in Aboriginal culture, but has been Australia's top predator since the extinction of the tigers last century.

The evolutionary position of the dingo has been divided for a long time.

The lean, tan-colored canines brought to the continent 5,000 to 8,500 years ago are thought to be another form of domestic dog.

A global collaboration involving 26 authors from 10 countries compared the genome of a desert dingo named Sandy, who was rescued in 2014 along with her siblings, to those of five domestic dog breeds and the Greenland wolf.

They found that the dingo's genome was different from other dogs.

She shared more similarities with the domestic dogs than with the wolf. Sandy was closer to the German shepherd than the other dogs.

Sandy the desert dingo is an intermediate level between the wolf and domestic dogs. The genome of an Alpine dingo was found in the Australian Alps and the team is certain that it is the same one.

Human movements thousands of years ago.

There are several applications for the finding.

The dingo genome can be used as an ancient reference book to help identify which genes are responsible for genetic disease in modern dogs, rather than trying to compare breeds which share much common ancestry.

The history of the ancient people who brought them across the sea from Southeast Asia can be seen if you know more about dingo evolution.

They had to cross some water with some people that were traveling.

Once they sequence the dingo, the team hopes to get a clearer sense of the timelines and answer questions like whether it was a single migration or multiple.

The study wanted to test the differences in how dingoes and German shepherds metabolize nutrition compared to domestic breeds, so they ran a controlled diet study on a number of dingos and German shepherds.

wolves and dingoes both have one copy of a gene that creates aamylase, a molecule that helps dogs live on a diet of starchy vegetables.

There are eight copies of the gene in German shepherds. After 10 days of the same food and water, the German shepherds scat contained three different types ofbacteria.

Like the wolf in North America, dingoes are popular with city dwellers but hated by farmers for killing livestock.

dingoes evolved to prey on small marsupials and aren't easily able to digest high-fat foods, so lambs are more likely being hunted by wild dogs or hybrid dogs.

He hopes to exonerate the dingo in future behavior experiments.

More information: Matt A. Field et al, The Australian dingo is an early offshoot of modern breed dogs, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abm5944. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm5944 Journal information: Science Advances

There will be a new year in 2022.

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