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Victoria, please don’t aerial-bait dingoes

10 10 2019

Here’s a submission to Victoria’s proposed renewal of special permission from the Commonwealth to poison dingoes:

dingo with bait

08 October 2019

Honourable Lily D’Ambrosio MP

Minister for Energy, Environment and Climate Change
Level 16, 8 Nicholson Street, East Melbourne, VIC 3002

lily.dambrosio@parliament.vic.gov.au

cc:

The Hon Jaclyn Symes, Minister for Agriculture, Victoria

(jaclyn.symes@parliament.vic.gov.au)

Dr Sally Box, Threatened Species Commissioner

(ThreatenedSpeciesCommissioner@environment.gov.au)

The Hon Sussan Ley MP, Minister for Environment, Australia

(Farrer@aph.gov.au)

RE: RENEWAL OF AERIAL BAITING EXEMPTION IN VICTORIA FOR WILD DOG CONTROL USING 1080

Dear Minister,

The undersigned welcome the opportunity to comment on the proposed renewal of special permission from the Commonwealth under Sections 18 and 18A of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (Commonwealth) to undertake aerial 1080 baiting in six Victorian locations for the management of ‘wild dogs’. This raises serious concerns for two species listed as threatened and protected in Victoria: (1) dingoes and (2) spot-tailed quolls (Dasyurus maculatus).

First, we must clarify that the terminology ‘wild dog’ is not appropriate when discussing wild canids in Australia. One of the main discussion points at the recent Royal Zoological Society of NSW symposium ‘Dingo Dilemma: Cull, Contain or Conserve’ was that the continued use of the terminology ‘wild dog’ is not justified because wild canids in Australia are predominantly dingoes and dingo hybrids, and not, in fact, feral domestic dogs. In Victoria, Stephens et al. (2015) observed that only 5 out of 623 wild canids (0.008%) sampled were feral domestic dogs with no evidence of dingo ancestry. This same study determined that 17.2% of wild canids in Victoria were pure or likely pure dingoes and 64.4% were hybrids with greater than 60% dingo ancestry. Additionally, comparative studies by Jones (1988, 1990 and 2009) observed that dingoes maintained a strong phenotypic identity in the Victorian highlands over time, and perceptively ‘wild dog’ like animals were more dingo than domestic dog.

As prominent researchers in predator ecology, biology, archaeology, cultural heritage, social science, humanities, animal behaviour and genetics, we emphasise the importance of dingoes in Australian, and particularly Victorian, ecosystems. Dingoes are the sole non-human, land-based, top predator on the Australian mainland. Their importance to the ecological health and resilience of Australian ecosystems cannot be overstated, from regulating wild herbivore abundance (e.g., various kangaroo species), to reducing the impacts of feral mesopredators (cats, foxes) on native marsupials (Johnson & VanDerWal 2009; Wallach et al. 2010; Letnic et al. 2012, 2013; Newsome et al. 2015; Morris & Letnic 2017). Their iconic status is important to First Nations people and to the cultural heritage of all Australians. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: 1080, 1080 poison, cat, dingo, environment, environmental policy, fox, policy, quoll, Victoria
Categories : alien species, Australia, biodiversity, cat, community ecology, conservation, decline, demography, dingo, ecology, ecosystem, ecosystem function, environmental policy, extinction, fox, genetics, harvest, human-wildlife conflict, introgression, invasive species, mammal, management, meso-predator release, predation, predator, science, southern Australia, threatened species, top-down ecology, trophic cascades

Salamander Longshanks – breed them out

3 02 2010

Patrick McGoohan in his role as the less-than-sentimental King Edward ‘Longshanks’ in the 1995 production of ‘Braveheart’ said it best in his references to the invocation of ius primæ noctis:

If we can’t get them out, we’ll breed them out

What a charmer.

Dabbling in molecular ecology myself over the past few years with some gel-jockey types (e.g., Dick Frankham [author of Introduction to Conservation Genetics], Melanie Lancaster, Paul Sunnucks, Yuji Isagi inter alios), I’m quite fascinated by the application of good molecular techniques in conservation biology. So when I came across the paper by Fitzpatrick and colleagues entitled Rapid spread of invasive genes into a threatened native species in PNAS, I was quite pleased.

When people usually think about invasive species, they tend to think ‘predator eating naïve native prey’ or ‘weed outcompeting native plant’. These are all big problems (e.g., think feral cats in Australia or knapweed in the USA), but what people probably don’t think about is the insidious concept of ‘genomic extinction’. This is essentially a congener invasive species breeding with a native one, thus ‘diluting’ the native’s genome until it no longer resembles its former self. A veritable case of ‘breeding them out’.

Who cares if at least some of the original genome remains? Some would argue that ‘biodiversity’ should be measured in terms of genetic diversity, not just species richness (I tend to agree), so any loss of genes is a loss of biodiversity. Perhaps more practically, hybridisation can lead to reduced fitness, like we observed in hybridised fur seals on Macquarie Island.

Fitzpatrick and colleagues measured the introgression of alleles from the deliberately introduced barred tiger salamander (Ambystoma tigrinum mavortium) into threatened California tiger salamanders (A. californiense) out from the initial introduction site. While most invasive alleles neatly stopped appearing in sampled salamanders not far from the introduction site, three invasive alleles persisted up to 100 km from the introduction site. Not only was the distance remarkable for such a small, non-dispersing beastie, the rate of introgression was much faster than would be expected by chance (60 years), suggesting selection rather than passive genetic drift. Almost none of the native alleles persisted in the face of the three super-aggressive invasive alleles.

The authors claim that the effects on native salamander fitness are complex and it would probably be premature to claim that the introgression is contributing to their threatened status, but they do raise an important management conundrum. If species identification rests on the characterisation of a specific genome, then none of the native salamanders would qualify for protection under the USA’s Endangered Species Act. They believe then that so-called ‘genetic purity’ is an impractical conservation goal, but it can be used to shield remaining ‘mostly native’ populations from further introgression.

Nice study.

CJA Bradshaw

Fitzpatrick, B., Johnson, J., Kump, D., Smith, J., Voss, S., & Shaffer, H. (2010). Rapid spread of invasive genes into a threatened native species Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0911802107

Lancaster, M., Bradshaw, C.J.A., Goldsworthy, S.D., & Sunnucks, P. (2007). Lower reproductive success in hybrid fur seal males indicates fitness costs to hybridization Molecular Ecology, 16 (15), 3187-3197 DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-294X.2007.03339.x