Comparing morphology used to be the main way scientists determined taxonomic relationships. Phylogeny was determined through examining the fossil record of what appeared to be related species, and almost all of our initial classifications of organisms were based upon comparing morphological features.
That’s because we didn’t have anything else.
But as we have become more and more sophisticated at examining and comparing physical features, we’ve actually discovered some errors.
For example, it was long assumed that skunks were part of the Mustelidae family. The mustelids include all the weasels, otters, badgers, otters, ferrets, polecats, the wolverine, both species of mink, the martens, the fishers, and the tayra.
Skunks are famous for their anal scent glands, which many mustelids also possess.
And what’s more there is a mustelid that looks very much like one of the striped skunks.
This is a zorilla or African polecat.
In many parts of the US, skunks are often referred to as polecats, and even Charles Darwin referred to South American skunks as zorillas.
The African zorilla does look a lot like one of the spotted skunk species (Spilogale):
Eastern spotted skunk.
Although direct phylogenetic relationships between skunks and the zorilla were not largely accepted into the twentieth century, it was assume that skunks were mustelids.
In 1997, an mtDNA analysis of extant mustelids and skunks that compared them to other caniform carnivorans revealed that the traditional classification of Mustelidae was wrong. Including skunks in Mustelidae makes the family paraphyletic. That means that skunks derive from a different line of decent than the other mustelids. The study revealed that two animals called “stink badgers” that are native to Indonesia and the Philippines are actually the only Old World representatives of the skunk lineage. The study suggested that the skunks of the Americas should be placed in their own family called Mephitidae, where they currently reside.
Molecular and morphological methodologies sometimes do disagree.
And one might wonder why scientists are more likely to accept molecular data over morphology and the fossil record.
It’s really quite simple.
Convergent and parallel evolution are major factors that can make morphology more similar and thus suggest that organisms are more closely related than they actually are.
Further, the fossil record is hit or miss. Fossils form only under certain conditions, and we will always have a very incomplete record of life on earth if we rely upon the fossil record alone to determine taxonomy and phylogeny.
DNA provides a much more complete record of ancestry. All living things have DNA, and we’ve found it very useful tracing phylogeny and describing the taxonomy of extant forms. In the strands of DNA, one can figure out how the evolution of a particular organism happened. For example, the taxonomic status of the giant panda was hotly contested for decades. Some authorities placed it in the family Procyonidae, while others placed it in the bear family (Ursidae). Red pandas, which look very much like raccoons, have a chromosome number that is similar to the giant panda’s. Giant pandas have 42 chromosomes, while red pandas have 36. Most bears have 74 chromosomes. And this argument was used to deny the giant panda a place in the bear family– until a reciprocal chromosome painting analysis revealed that pandas had bear chromosomes. They were just fused!
Mitochondrial DNA analysis has revealed that red pandas aren’t procyonids. They are currently listed in its own family called Ailuridae.
You see, in addition to the chromosome similarity between giant and red pandas, they also had a morphological feature in common.
They both have a “wrist” that is made from the radial sesamoid bone.
The two animals both eat a lot of bamboo, and this “wrist” helps them hold the bamboo as they eat it.
Traditionally, these animals were believe to be close relatives– which is why we call them both pandas. If the red panda could be classified in the raccoon family, wouldn’t it also make sense to classify the giant panda– its supposed closest relative– in the same family?
DNA and chromosome analysis have revealed that giant panda are bears, and red pandas are not raccoons.
There is no relationship between the two, other than they are both caniform carinvorans.
But even with these advances in molecular analysis, there are people who still hold to morphological studies to state relationships.
If I were to ask you what your closest non-human relative is, I’m sure most of you would say chimpanzees.
And if we are to accept the DNA evidence, humans and two species of chimpazee, the common chimp and the bonobo, are closely related. We share about 99 percent of our genomes, and we had a common ancestor with them between four and six million years ago.
But if we are to use the old comparative morphology method, the results come up with something else.
Jeffrey Schwartz, a physical anthropologist at the University of Pittsburgh, has conducted several morphological studies on people, our fossil ancestors, and extant great apes.
The results of his research are quite different from the molecular data:
Now, all the molecular evidence suggests that the two species of orangutan split off from the common ancestor of all the African apes between 15.7 and 19.3 million years ago. The orangutan genome is only 97 percent similar to that of a human.
Schwartz essentially denies the molecular evidence, and he wrote a paper in which asked a simple question: why do we trust DNA more than morphology and the fossil record?
I think this has already been answered. The fossil record is hit or miss and has never been as complete a record of life on this planet as the DNA evidence has revealed to be. Further, the fossil record doesn’t have as sophisticated an ability to take into account convergent and parallel evolution.
There are lots of reasons why orangutans and humans could have similar morphological features.
Perhaps the most parsimonious is that humans and orangutans have retain similar primitive ape features that have been lost in both the two species of chimpanzee and the two species of gorilla. Or there was simple convergent evolution between the two ape lineages.
This does not require a simple denial of the molecular data.
It should be noted that virtually no experts on great apes or human evolution agrees with Schwartz’s assessment. The DNA evidence that humans are African apes that derived from the same lineage as the chimpanzee and bonobo is overwhelming.
But it is an interesting test of the morphology and fossil record methodology of classification and the new molecular methodologies.
It should also tell us that we need a little bit of skepticism when reading paleontology papers. In most very old fossils, DNA cannot be extracted. All the analysis that can be made from these fossils are comparative morphology studies.
And as we’ve seen, these result studies in modern animals can be quite different from what the DNA evidence suggests, and it’s likely that some of the taxonomy of extinct organisms are quite wrong.
And there is a lot more room for debate in paleontology than with zoology. The analysis can vary greatly depending upon which assumptions and what morphological features are being examined.
More and more sophisticated DNA analysis, including the use of SNP chips to examine large parts of the genome, are revolutionizing the way modern zo0logists classify organisms. Of course, not all DNA studies are equal. It often depends upon the DNA sample that is being used for comparison.
For example, when the sequencing gorilla genome was released earlier this year, it was determined that some parts of the gorilla genome are more similar to corresponding parts of the human genome than these corresponding parts are to the chimpanzee genome. If a DNA study examined only those parts of the human and gorilla genomes, one would assume that the two were more closely related than they actually are.
But as we get more and more sophisticated technology for reading and comparing the genome, we will get better answers about taxonomic relationships and evolutionary history.
This data will likely cause great revisions in what we think know about life on this planet.
But there should be nothing wrong with that.
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Speaking of parallel evolution,I always wondered why nothing equivalent to an ape evolved from the New World monkeys?
The closest we have are capuchin monkeys which do use tools.
Given the evidence of crossing with Neanderthal and Denisovans (and who knows about H. floresiensis), and given the more recent evidence about interbreeding by other species (canid, multiple bird species, etc), it’s not outside the realm of possibility that Homo habilis or even before that, some “crossing” occured. Or, as some have postulated, the chimps and Gorillas are not the “most basal” types that so many assume (knuckle walking might well be quite derived for one thing). Consequently the most recent common ancestor might have had more “orang” characteristics that are lost in the chimp and gorilla but not in the Homo line.
On the other hand, as seen with the initial assertion that H. Sapiens and Neanderthal did NOT cross, sometimes one reads into DNA what one wants to see or assumes it says something it doesn’t. One might be decended from a given ancestor and yet have very few actual genes from that ancestor — it is a matter if those genes are or aren’t beneficial and if they are or aren’t conserved. Most “related” studies don’t look at the entire DNA, but sections of DNA – and thereby might miss an indicator of relationship that isn’t readily evident.
Peggy Richter
I think everything needs to be considered. Although molecular genetics is useful, scientists need to not become so one-dimensional. We still need anatomists working on phylogenies! We still need to make since in terms of the how and why animals are related. Mol. genetics is great, but there is often still inconclusive or conflicting results. Having said that, evidence cannot get any better than a full genome. Again, we just need to stay open to all evidence, even though molecular genetics is probably the most discriminating.
Thank you to Peggy and Phillip. I’v been working on a post for 2 days and couldn’t get it right.
Jeffrey Schwartz has few fans. Nobody agrees with him. It’s not that he was employing an old idea; he was actively opposed to the use of molecular evidence in taxonomy, a technology that is older than his work. Why? Nobody seems to know. He’s published his book twice and answered his critics. The most charitable thing I’ve read is that he just doesn’t understand genetics.
But the question is, why are we beating this dead horse? Nobody is arguing with SNPs. It is still true, however, that any technique can be misapplied, sampling errors can always occur, wrong conclusions can be jumped to. DNA does not give us an excuse to stop thinking critically. I just makes it harder, because it is hard to understand.
The issue is that this guy is so far out of what we already know. There are so many different pieces of evidence that humans are African apes and closely related to chimps, that he’s probably quite, quite wrong about it.
I really don’t buy the persecution complex that some of these people or their defenders get. Janice Koler-Matznick is wrong about the origin of the domestic dog. All other evidence–but her paper– shows that dogs are derived from wolves, and even should be classified as conspecifics with them.
Science works this way. If all the evidence from multiple sources points in one direction, it’s probably true. That’s what we have with the humans as African apes and the chimps being our closest relatives. Schwartz’s work not withstanding.
In fact, he’s so out there that virtually no serious scholar pays any attention to his research in this area.
It’s kind of like Jack Horner’s theory that T-rex was a scavenger. The media eats it up, but the real experts don’t think it’s worth paying attention to.
I thought I just said that Schwartz is wrong. Guess I’m not expressing myself very well.
Took awhile to remember, but I think I referred someone to Jan’s paper on dog and wolf morphology. For anybody who’s interested in canid skulls, there are a few good pix on the site carnivora.com. She was trying to trace descent of dog (or maybe just dingo?) from a particular wolf sub-species, but I can’t remember why. That was way back before mtDNA studies, though. Why are we talking about her? She’s concerned about conservation. From the standpoint of dog origins and evolution, she’s not a player. She’s not a geneticist, not a biologist. (She’s contributed a lot of samples, though.) And she has a first-rate breeding program in place.
I’m going to hop down to talk to Philip, if I may.
The problem is that she was wrong– and yes, she did use morphology– but I often come across comments on the lines like “she was ignored” or “the establishment didn’t like what she had to say.”
No. The establishment– the actual experts in the field– saw glaring errors in her paper, including things that were already falsified in other studies.
This is how it works.
You are correct about Jan. I’ve never attempted to defend what she thinks. I don’t know who was whining about her being ignored, etc. That was before my time. But she’s not ignored, that I know of. In fact, she’s cited everywhere; it gets monotonous. For what it’s worth, however, in the tiny world of NGSD’s, where I am nobody, I defend the right to exist of all the (4) movers and shakers, their dogs, their programs. For what little that’s worth.
Over there it’s about saving as much of the genome as possible while avoiding inbreeding depression. Politics – yeah – their business – not mine.
But I do think anyone who is interested should be able to look at that paper and any others on morphology. For very early periods morphology is all we have for lack of salvageable DNA. It’s also all we have to tell us what extinct critters might have looked like.
I’ve not seen that paper cited anywhere but a few publication, including something I wrote the year before last.
I am currently reading “Societies of Wolves and Free-ranging Dogs” by Spotte. I believe domestics should be given separate species status, especially the dog. Here is where genetics becomes short-sighted. Yes, dogs are extremely similar to the wolf genetically (and often physically), but physicality is not the only component of phenotype. Behaviorally, dogs are quite different. Even dogs and dingos have some very notable differences. My point is that dogs mixing with wolves or dingos will change their behavior in a negative way. Species concepts are largely artificial and inconsistent anyway, so saying that a dog is not a wolf is not (double negative!) this awful lie. I personally support giving dingos and certain feral pariahs separate subspecies (or even species) status to protect their niches and unique behavior. Just because a hybrid dingo cannot be told apart physically from a pure one doesn’t mean behaviorally it can’t (and from what I am reading, it appears behavior would be a great, albeit somewhat impractical way to tell the difference between pure and hybrid).
As I said previously, we must consider EVERYTHING, not just genetics!
Are you daft?
Do you not realize how grey the fuzzy line is between domesticated dogs and wolves? How would you classify Scandinavian wolves which are now the results of recent Soviet wolf-laika crosses released into the wild? How would one classify the northern sled-dogs where staked-out bitches were left out for wolves to mate with? How would you clarify where dingoes end and where it ends when virtually almost of them now have recent European admixture? What would we do with the Italian wolf which breeds freely with street dogs?
Arguing to split a species on the basis of behaviour is idiotic because even in wild population, a wolf in the tundra does not necessarily behave in the same fashion as a wolf inhabiting the Great Lakes or Yellowstone.
Or what of morphology? Those Eurasian wolves are much more coyote-like than the big-game hunting ones found in Alaska and Canada, yet we still consider them as one species. The Arabian wolves, where the modern lineage of domesticated dogs derived most of their genetic influence from, are of different morphology and behaviour than either Eurasia or North America; yet all these populations are considered as one wide-spread species found throughout the northern hemisphere.
Genetics may be lumping some species together, but they are also splitting many species as well– for instance, many frog species which were considered as one are now considered as separate now that scientists know they cannot interbreed freely on a genetic level despite sharing the same niche, geography and morphology.
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/ridley/a-z/Biological_species_concept_b.asp
Biological species concept:
“Where we have sexual reproduction a species can be objectively defined as a group of organisms which reproduce sexually amongst themselves but don’t reproduce with members of other species.
Where we don’t have sexual reproduction – as in asexual species, or in fossils where we have no idea of how they reproduced – then there is no objective definition of the species, and the species just becomes like the genus, the family or the class. It’s subject to arbitrary human decision.”
Dave, not everyone uses that concept. Philp is using the ecological species concept, which I find particularly fault in this case. I found it faulty when Raymond Coppinger first used it, and I still do now.
Which the definition is not sufficient enough to draw a distinct line between domestic dogs and wolves. At best, it would explain why coyotes do not inter-breed with other canids.
The ecological species concept works well with mantellas and poison dart frogs because the resources which the specialists are allocated to, or what they designated themselves to, minimize or completely eliminate the gene-flow between populations even though they occupy the same habitat; preventing inter-breeding between closely-related species.
Mark Derr has a very good critique of these free ranging dogs studies.
The best on is the dingo. The dingo is derived from fully domesticated dogs that simply became wolves when no longer living in an agricultural society.
Virtually all free ranging dogs live in agricultural societies, where it’s easier to scavenge and not “be a wolf.” Further, there are wolves in Europe that do nothing but scavenge and regularly– much more than the initial studies suggested– interbreed with domestic dogs that are scavenging at the same dumps. Black wolves and wolves with dewclaws are fairly common in Italy– and are the result of dogs and wolves exchanging genes. On the American frontier, dogs and wolves mated as readily with each other as separate breeds of dog do.
I think this “ecological niche” malarkey is just hooey. Not all wolves hunt big game and live in packs and weigh 120 pounds. Nor are all dogs like those in Third World villages. Nor have they been historically.
By your logic– and that of Raymond Coppinger– Arabian and Arctic wolves would be separate species, as would Eurasian wolves in Russia that hunt deer and boar and Eurasian wolves in Romania that scavenge and mix in with the street dogs.
I’d like to know why dogs get this mystical species treatment. No other domestic animal does.
No one says that chickens are separate species from the red jungle fowl. No one says domestic pigs are as separate species from Eurasian wild boar.
I think it’s because we have in the dog a descendant of the only large predatory mammal that man has ever domesticated– the only one that has ever been proven to occasionally kill people in the wild. That freaks people out a bit too much. Coppinger himself admits to be bitten by a wolf after rough handling it, which tell you how astute an observer of dog behavior he actually is.
In a weird way, he’s sort of recycled the Lorenz/Darwin postulates about jackals being an ancestor of some dogs, just instead of jackals, he uses scavenging village dogs as the intermediate step to deny the wolf most of the credit. Sadly, this view has created as much piss-poor reductionism as Cesar Millan has– and yes, I’m full aware that they are opposed to each other. The irony is that Cesar Millan and that whole set of faulty axioms has created an opposite reaction on the other side– and he’s divined up its own set of false axioms and reductionism.
Can we cut to the chase here? Would it make any difference, do you think, if we replaced all the dingos in Australia with Golden Retrievers?
It would make very little difference– if the golden retrievers knew how to hunt and kill from watching other dogs, they could take their place. It might take them a while to evolve heat tolerance. But golden retrievers have been known to kill prey as large as deer.
A dingo is just a breed of domestic dog that went wild. It’s not separate species. It’s derived from domestic dogs. It’s not a wolf or the missing link between dogs and wolves.
Before European colonization dingoes were often kept as hunting dogs.
Hm..the missing link! You know, when you allow dogs to breed themselves you wind up with a medium sized yellow thing. You never recreate the gray wolf. Not the Arabian wolf, not the Indian wolf, not any wolf.
Dingos are anatomically distinct from other dogs: they have longer canines and great big jumbo carnassials. I emphasize that because I didn’t know that until my dingo pup erupted his adult teeth. It was “WT…?”
This is incorrect. I wish people would stop saying it.
What you say violates Dollo’s Law of Irreversibility, and it has not been born out in Romania or Russia or any other place where European dogs have roamed freely.
Most of those dogs are like German shepherds mixes and are on the large side.
Freely breeding Bulgarian street dogs:
http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=133020
Do they look like dingoes?
This might be the stupidest thing that people say about what happens when dogs freely breed.
It’s simply false.
OK. I never liked the idea anyway, for this reason: I think we can’t recreate the wolf because we’ve lost a lot of genes along the way. I think the domestic dog is a subset of the ancestral gene pool. No amount of free breeding can restore what’s missing.
But that’s an interesting point about E European street dogs. They don’t look like Asian street dogs or like African street dogs. I wonder why.
I think the big issue is Bergmann’s rule, followed by founder effect.
OK. Occam’s rule says you are right. But Bergman doesn’t hold. Look at all the medium sized dogs that live in the Arctic. I’d like to think the central asian dogs are on a different line of descent (with inter-breeding, of course). To put it another way, how come the founders were so big? Just saying.
Bergmann’s rule doesn’t work for domestic dogs that have been selectively breed or are derived from very small founding populations.
Natural selection does select for larger size in colder climates, though, within the same species. Dogs are included. Wolves follow it almost exactly.
The big street type dogs are all from cold climates. They exist in Mongolia and in Europe. Even the Himalayas, but not India. Even Newfoundland dogs are an example of this, even when one discounts for their exaggerated size since they became a British pet breed.
BTW, something like this is already happening.
Dingoes will readily mate with other domestic dogs, and when domestic dogs from our civilization go feral, they are gradually taking over the dingo gene pool.
This bothers me not one iota.
Dingoes themselves have been absorbing domestic dogs from Indonesia for centuries as they’ve entered the continent on trading ships and even leaky sea-going canoes.
Glad you finally said it. Makes me sad. Why would you want to reduce all dogs to one uniform breeding population? Every single dog a smelly, flop-eared, can’t find his way home, Beagle cross. A can’t be housebroken Yorkie cross.
The dingo can be distinguished genetically from the DD. Dr. Alan Wilton (U of NSW) identified some genetic markers present in dingo and absent from DDs. Also, he found a few more markers that distinguish the NGSD from the dingo. This genetic test can distinguish between pure dingos and crosses. Before his untimely death last year Dr. Wilton was interested in conserving the pure dingo.
What you just wrote is a pointless statement. I have genetic markers different from you. Does that make me a different species?
I’m sorry this is late breaking news for you, but it’s been proven that dingoes arrived in Australia as domestic dogs, anywhere from 3,500 to 6,500 years ago. Their closest relatives are Indonesian domestic dogs– many of which don’t even really look that much like dingoes, like the Balinese street dog.
Anyway, only a fringe element still considers the New Guinea singing dog a distinct subspecies from the dingo, which itself really is a poor candidate for subspecies status– seeing as it derives from domestic dogs.
I’ve never said that the dingo or the singer are sub-species or species. That was just an FYI for Philip, who said dingos and crosses could not be distinguished genetically. They can be. But that doesn’t make them species or sub-species.
You are correct about the time of arrival of dingo in AU. There are no fossils older than 3500y. But you are wrong about the dingo’s closest relatives. The dingo originated in S China. There are still dingos in Thailand and on one island in Indonesia. The balinese dogs are irrelevant. Savolainen et al. place the dingo’s origins in S China. The point of the study was to relate the dingo to Austronesian dogs, if possible. Fossil dogs from Polynesia are not dingos. They are Austronesian in origin. Had Austronesians left dogs in Australia, they would have been the only thing left by Austronesians. There are no other traces of Austronesian presence in AU.
So, the dingo went from North to South. The Austronesians and their dogs went from East to West. Somewhere their paths crossed, but it wasn’t in Australia and if it was in New Guinea, it did not affect the Singing dogs living far inland and high up in the mountains.
New topic: Dingos are not a breed. A breed is a breeding population descended from a small number of founders and then artificially selected for desirable traits. The dingo is descended from a small number of founders, but was subsequently subjected to natural selection. It’s a race, not a breed.
It’s actually a landrace. If you scroll down, I correct that error.
The UCLA study that examined 48,000 SNP’s found that dingoes were nothing more than East Asian domestic dogs: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/artwork/5/5/1/0/1/155101/dog-breeds-1-prv.jpg
Look at where they group on that chart.
The basenji was more genetically distinct than the dingo!
No one says the basenji is a separate subspecies, but it has more of a claim to that title than the dingo!
OK, but East Asian dogs that spent 3500 years going it alone without much help from man. It shows us what happens to dogs under those circumstances in a land where they are top predator (besides man). It’s an interesting test tube and the result is a beautiful animal, smart and athletic and still friendly to man. Why would you want to cross-breed that into oblivion? And has it occurred to you that we may need such a gene pool to save our messed-up modern breeds? Just a thought.
Well, the thing is that the genes they are getting from domestic dogs are actually of some use to the dingoes. They are often larger than normal dingoes, and that allows them to target larger prey.
Probably not the best thing for the macropods.
It’s just like how the black dog mutation worked its way into wolves and was of some benefit to the immune system.
Dave, watch how you speak to people. I do not appreciate my ideas being called idiotic, and I certainly do not appreciate being called daft.
If you do not control yourself or if retrieverman doesn’t censor you, I will most definitely cease to post here.
I believe strongly in minimizing man’s tempering with ecological and evolutionary processes as much as possible. I deplore the idea of our tempering with various species, i.e. domestication, changing the way the species originally was or the evolutionary path it was on.
In my conservation biology class in undergrad, my professor spoke of the difficulties in applying the various species concepts. Many of them have large loopholes, including the ecological and biological species concepts. I am a splitter. I believe it preserves potential evolutionary changes the best. I believe in protecting each ecosystem and its potential.
If the shoes fit, then there is no need to mince words. It is a bit absurd to demand civility when worst things are said and more fierce words are exchanged in the world of academia every day in discourses and debates. Threatening to muzzle someone or to leave is a poor conduct and only shows that the person is using the excuse as a shield to avoid saying he or she is wrong.
How can you conserve an ecological niche when the wild things refuse to acknowledge the resources which divide them? If wolves will readily fuck with sled-dogs without being encouraged by man; and if entire populations of wolves are derived from being mixed with domesticated dogs without man`s intervention, then how can we say there is sufficient evidence to divide a species based on ecological niches? We have many examples in literature where wolves will readily adapt to a new way of life.
Sorry, the fact Scandinavian wolves are derived from re-wilded laika, Italian wolves are composed of street-dogs, Romanian wolves will readily mate with any dog on their own accord and that Arabian wolves are mistakened as Caanan Dogs tell us that there is no resources in the environment which drive a split in the clade.
The idea of separating dogs and wolves based on behaviours is noble, however the evolutionary forces are not there to maintain a split. Wolves are too good at adapting themselves to almost everything that is thrown at them– that is why dogs are successful; they are descendants of wolves which learned to live among humans. So it should not be surprising when humans are taken out of equation, which happens every day, dogs re-integrate back into the wild population silently and barely a fizzle.
I think splitting is actually dangerous without a very good reason.
Take the two subspecies of white rhino. One is down to about 8 individuals.
It was just recently decided– based upon some genetic evidence– to split the two into two species.
That means that the northern white rhino is done.
There is a group that is trying hybridize them, but it’s going to be much harder to conserve them now they have been split. Will the hybrids be recognized?
BTW, you never answered my question: If ecological niche determines species in wolves, then arctic wolves aren’t the same species as Arabian wolves. No serious expert considers them distinct species, but they have about as many differences as exist between the big game hunting wolves from the North that everyone knows and most dogs.
Reading into Philp’s original post, it sounds to me as though he was just trying to find a way to classify some populations such as to enable their conservation. He’s saying that an isolated population becomes a separate line of descent. Why quibble about the definition of “species”. Next we’ll be quibbling about what “domestication” means and I’ll be begging for a bullet.
It cuts both ways, but it wouldn’t cut both ways if our laws had a more holistic concept of species.
True.
Some thoughts.
Yes, one can distinguish a Dingo from “other dogs and wolves”. But you can do the same thing with a Belgian Sheepdog. All that means is that the Dingo has been isolated long enough to have some unique genetic characteristics that can be used diagnostically to identify them. The issue is if there is enough difference to grant dingos unique status.
On the other hand, distinguishing species or sub species by relatively small genetic differences is exactly what DNA divisions do. I haven’t seen any set criteria that says “> X% of difference == species, X% = subspecies and <% = same animal. For one thing, most separations include geographic and/or behavior differences or chronological separations and there are "clumpers" and "seperationists" who differ significantly on their views.
We like to have everything classified and categorized into little boxes. It’s one of the ways we identify things. But nature is far more messy than that. I expect that if one could recover fossil cheetahs from the areas between India and Africa and do DNA, one would find that long ago, the cheetahs were a continuum with the most remote from each other the least related. Same for tigers, wolves, lions, etc. Only with people do the biologists recognize there can be huge variance within a given species. The most remote Amazon tribe is recognizably human, but also identifiable by DNA by unique genetic variations, if only very small ones. At what point is it a subspecies or species? Pretty much, it seems to be “by consensus” and not any specific consistent criteria.
The idea that feral Goldens would be able to replace Dingos is theoretically possible, but they would not recapture the exact genetics any more than feral horses = the original basal horse, feral sheep if the mouflon is merely a long-feral species, then the original wild species is gone.) or feral cattle = aurouchs. Theoretically, it isn’t generally possible for a derived animal to recapture exactly the ancestral basal state. So at what point is an animal “derived” enough that it is its own species rather than the same? Could H. Sapiens breed with a remnant population of H. Erectus if they existed? Probably so. Yet there are clear differences between H. Sapiens and H. Erectus and if DNA were recovered from Erectus, it would be possible to show this, even though the % of difference would be even less than humans and chimps.
Peggy gets really close to something else that’s going on with the dingo.
I misspoke when I said that dingoes were a breed of dog. They are actually a landrace that has absorbed other dogs as they have entered the continent.
You’re very right that mustangs are not the ancient American caballoid horse, and an ersatz dingo derived from other domestic dog stocks wouldn’t be the dingo.
Ecologically, they would be the same, though. Except with horses, the ecosystem they evolved to live in no longer exists. We have grasslands, but they aren’t like the ones of the Pleistocene.
But dingoes aren’t some kind of special animal. They are a truly feral dog. If you want to conserve them, they either must be conserved as a landrace– which makes a lot more sense considering they are a landrace– or as a closed registry breed– which they never were.
Let’s conserve them as a landrace.
Then they don’t have to be pure.
I lost a post here somewhere.
Anyway, yes, purity should be maintained as well as possible. Otherwise it won’t be a dingo. Didn’t you just say, “an ersatz dingo derived from other domestic dog stocks wouldn’t be the dingo.”? Doesn’t that kind of imply purity?
I know, it’s been absorbing dogs since day one. Moot. Dingo mtDNA is distinct from all other mtDNA. And there are the unique SNPs. So that argument is weak at best.
If you want to cross-breed your inbred, messed up, freak dog breeds, that’s ok, but why would cross-breeding a dingo be desirable? Cross-breeding means extinction, as most people know. Why would you want to destroy the dingo?
Actually, the result of your logic will result in dingoes becoming a closed registry breed that will have all sorts of problems.
That’s because there are very few dingoes that don’t have other dog in them left.
That’s a great way to make them extinct.
There are sanctuaries in Australia where they are protected from other dogs. Maybe perfect purity is no longer possible (except possibly on Frazer Is.), but it’s not too late to try our best. AU is the country that built the dingo fence. They can fence in their parks and sanctuaries if they want to.
Dingos in the Southeast are heavily cross-bred. Elsewhere it’s a mixed bag. I think they are trying to find and save relatively pure populations. There’s also the captive population. They are not cross-bred. They can be used, too, to increase diversity.
The closed registry is not a good idea. (I shouldn’t have to say that.)
This will not work long term– unless all these dingoes are inside zoos and sanctuaries.
The bulk of the gene pool is going to have other things in it.
That’s just what happens.
What I read somewhere is a plan to fence in large parks as sanctuaries. Let the parks have this function, too. Fences to keep the dingos in and the domestic dogs out. Would it be better to just kiss the dingo goodbye, do you think?
mtDNA does not mean anything other than that the Dingo is descended from a bitch line that is extinct elsewhere.
You cannot SEE mtDNA. It does not matter if Dingoes become adulterated with other bitch lines, because you cannot SEE it.
The smart thing to do would be to cull animals that do not fit the proper physical appearance. This would keep recessive colors and patterns at a minimum and eliminate dominants like black and brindle. It would be no different than the way selection has worked to make the Saluki or the collies or any other landrace of domestic dogs used as tools.
Dingo mtDNA is unique in the sense that it contains mutations not found elsewhere, mutations that occurred after the split from ancestors in SE Asia.
It is not a test of purity, except in the sense that any dog with non-dingo mtDNA is obviously not pure. For testing purity they use something else, SNPs, I believe. They’ve isolated a bunch of markers that are unique to dingo and that appear in every presumed pure dingo they’ve tested. Any dog that lacks any of these markers, then, is not pure dingo.
I believe they will cull obvious crosses. I can’t imagine them not doing so.
A landrace is by definition NOT PURE. There is always bleed around the edges.
Depends on what you mean by “pure”. In this discussion we’ve used the term to mean not crossed with non-dingo dogs. But in the technical sense, you are right. Unless, of course, the “land” is surrounded on all sides by water. Not much leakage there. However, within AU there are variations on the dingo theme. There is, for instance, something called the Alpine dingo. So there’s variation in type within AU.
A third meaning is the one we use when talking about AKC type breeds where it’s virtually synonymous with “severely inbred”.
Dingos don’t have to be “pure” in that an occasional addition is not an issue. On the other hand, why then have an issue about crossing say, a Bengal tiger with a Indochinese Tiger? Obviously these two “subspecies” overlapped in range at one time and surely crossings in nature once occurred. Yet most preservationists hyperventilate over the issue of reintroducing captive bred tigers into the wild because they are “mixed”. Which is it? Either one is preserving a “land race” that may have some unique characteristics and depends upon the forces of nature (or in the case of domestic animals, selection by humans based on functional roles) to select for a set of genes that preserve the “type” of the land race. It may be true that dingos were completely domestic at one time, but their current status in Australia is not that of say, a generic retriever – they are much more like the Tarpan horse – a highly managed animal that is considered part of the wild landscape and ecosystem. It does matter that they retain their unique characteristics and to that end, prevention of “swamping” by introduction of significant numbers of other dogs is a desirable outcome and this seems to be the view of the Australians.
The thing is that it cannot be stopped.
If you try to sequester off a big chunk of the dingo gene pool to keep it “pure,” you are essentially creating a breed out of a landrace.
It’s no different that what’s been done with a lot of other traditional breeds.
These pure dingoes will become like basenjis in the West in very short order.
well, it does seem to be that the Australians are in fact doing exactly that — sequestering off those that they consider “pure”. At least that’s what one finds on Wikipedia. I don’t know if it can be “stopped” or not. Most dogs don’t seem to do that well entirely on their own although they manage well enough as “village” dogs. Drop a few Goldens off in Yellowstone and I expect they might not do as well as the wolves there if for no other reason than they haven’t learned the survival skills. Presumably some of the characteristics of wolves would give them a Darwinian edge. There doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of hybridization in say, Alaska even though a lot of dogs probably are lost or go “free roaming”. From my own perspective, an absolute purity is silly — say (completely arbitrarily here) 10% “hybrids” is no big deal. Get up to 50% and there’s a problem with keeping the characteristics of the animal you are trying to preserve. Somewhere between 10 and 50% is the “gray” zone. I feel the same regarding tigers, African/Asiatic lions, etc. — some crossing is better than losing the entire group out of misplaced concerns about purity, but being indifferent to wholesale mixing also destroys the unique characters of the animal you are trying to save. If the dingos are to be treated as no different than a stray dog, why preserve them at all? If one is going to respect the Aborigine’s view of the dingo and the historical value of the dingo, then some effort to preserve their unique characteristics is in fact justified.
Indigenous Australians don’t think of dingoes in the way you’re implying.
They are rather well-known for keeping scores of Western dogs around their settlements where they used to keep dingoes.
AU is a country, not a monolithic culture, not a state of mind, not a set of tastes. The dingo will be saved, if not as a cultural artifact, then as part of the indigenous fauna, if there is sufficient political will, same as conservation efforts everywhere else.
However, I heard one aboriginal woman say that the dingo was the domestic dog of the aborigines. She did not regard it as a wild animal at all. She said it was fully domesticated until aboriginal lifestyles were disrupted by invasion by Europeans.
In any aboriginal group you will find differences of opinion. Same as us.
That’s what it is, but it’s a landrace, not a breed.
Getting all worked up that they are no longer pure is really one of the most stupid things I’ve seen.
Dingoes have proven hardier than indigenous American dogs when meeting Western dogs and their diseases.
Saying that dingoes must be pure is a good way to kill them off in the long run.
Diseases are not the issue. Native American dogs are not the issue.
The biggest threat to the dingo is inter-breeding with dogs of western descent. Australian conservationists are attempting to stop the inter-breeding while the dingo type is still viable. I don’t see anything wrong with that.
They are wasting their time, and in the end it will not “save” the dingo.
The only pure dingoes that will exist are Fraser Island.
That’s life.
It’s a landrace.
Drop the romantic bullshit.
I agree with Kathy. It isn’t necessary to go to the extreme “purity” of a stud book, etc, for the dingo. I haven’t seen anyone actually suggest that. However, preventing wholesale interbreeding that would thus “swamp” the dingo as a unique aninimal IS being suggested, and I don’t see that making efforts to do this is wrong. The Mexican wolf is a wolf – and was once undoubtably related and interbred with the now extinct California wolf, the wolves of the plains, etc — it’s not like there was never any interaction by these animals on the boundaries of their ranges. But if the Florida panther is best preserved by using Texas panthers and not those of California, then I don’t see that it is so absurd to try to keep the dingo as a dingo and not just some hodgepodge of semi feral stray dogs.
“some” interbreeding with stray dogs is probably inevitable — but that doesn’t mean that one should do nothing to control it from becoming overwhelming. Otherwise, why bother to preserve ANY animal as a unique species/sub species if it can be interbred and preserved that way? What is the point of 5 subspecies of tiger? Why worry about the seven subspecies of lion? the 9 iterations of leopard? they can interbreed and probably once did before humans reduced their ranges so much that contact was lost. Just plunk any old leopard out there and it will be ‘as good” — or is it? Just because the dingo is originally domestic does not mean that it thereby should have no preservational status. If it’s worth it to try and preserve all those other subspecies (or races or breeds or types. Call them what one will). then it is worth it to try and preserve dingos too.
You could make this case if you could prove that dingoes were unbelievably genetically unique.
They have not. They are East Asian dogs. Basically a glorified shiba inu.
Except on Fraser Island, pure dingoes are just a demographic impossibility. Unless you’re going to do what the red wolf people do– in which case, that’s bloody fruitless endeavor, whether the scientific basis for it was grounded or not!
If dingo is defined as a dog that has no western blood in it, they will eventually become reduced to a very small population– basically a founding population in a closed registry breed. (This is on the mainland, not Fraser Island.)
Red wolves, though technically wild, are suffering from an inbreeding depression, because it’s been divined that they should be kept pure.
Now, you can make the case that interbreeding with dogs is bad for Ethiopian wolves. Ethiopian wolves aren’t dogs. They don’t clade with any extant dog or wolf or jackals or anything else that’s particularly common. There, you can make a case that crossbreeding with domestic dogs causes some degradation.
But this is like screaming about mustangs crossing with Percherons on the frontier. A feral animal, though an old introduction, is still a feral animal.
heh. You ought to hear the BLM folk regarding using any “new” blood on the Panamint range mustangs. If you had, you wouldn’t be making comments about mustangs crossing with Percherons. “purity” of various mustang bands IS in fact a big issue to many. I used to hear all about this when I worked for China Lake as I was involved in their contracts for range management (which included the mustang and burro herds as well as bighorn sheep). As for the dingo, you said “You could make this case if you could prove that dingoes were unbelievably genetically unique. They have not. They are East Asian dogs. Basically a glorified shiba inu” –well, from my point of view the dingo is as deserving of preservation as say, Cotswold sheep, or longhorn cattle. Some unique characteristics and a historical value justify making some effort to keep an animal identifiable as a “dingo” around. I’m not too concerned about “don’t ever introduce new blood” but I wouldn’t want the dingo to end up being the “st John’s water dog” either. I don’t see that some middle ground is unrealistic in terms of philosophy or achievability. As for feral just being feral, So what? MOST, if not all, animals are going to survive only if humans help them, if only by simply setting aside land for them. If one considers the Yellowstone wolves of any value, (as I personally do), I don’t see that saving the NG singing dog or the dingo is of any less value simply because they’ve been domestic at one time. Is an animal undeserving of any effort to preserve it unless humans had nothing to do with it? then why care about any of the retriever breeds? or retrievers at all? They are simply a human construct in a particular point of human history. If the Australians want to preserve dingos as dingos (and distinguishable from Akitas or basenji) I don’t see that this desire is particularly unreasonable or unobtainale. I just think that neither “NO INTRODUCTION OF FOREIGN BLOOD” nor “ANY FERAL DOG WILL DO” are the sole solutions, but support something in between.
Well, the thing is a Yellowstone wolf is actually something there because of nature and was there tens of thousands of years.
The dingo– not really.
I know all about the mustang craziness– which is why I mentioned it. Personally, I don’t think we should have feral horses roaming on public land in the US. Canada has only the Sable Island ponies. All their Western feral horses became mink and French-Canadian food.
People fail to recognize that this isn’t the Pleistocene anymore. We no longer have that type of grassland habitat, though we certainly do have grasslands.
The gene flow can’t be stopped on the mainland. It just can’t, unless you essentially turn dingoes into basenjis. The Fraser Island dingoes are a healthy enough population to be left alone.
Preserving them on Fraser Island would be fine by me. Don’t know if one then “needs” a feral dog running about in Australian mainland, but that’s for the Australians to decide one way or the other. As for feral horses/donkeys in the US, I wouldn’t preserve them based on their Pleistocene connection. Preserving some for historical reasons, maybe so. I certainly find those most “into” preserving them are usually those who don’t have to deal directly with the consequences. I agree that it isn’t the Pleistocene anymore. Part of the vanishing of elephants, polar bears, some of the tigers, etc is in fact a result of simple change that has been going on since life started here. Obviously much is human caused, but not all. The whole preservation concept has at least a large dose of “maintaining a stasis” and not just offsetting human damage.
If Australia’s ecosystem requires a dingo, then it needs a feral dog.
A dingo is a feral dog. Therefore, it can handle a dingo with something else in it.
Just because Australia wasn’t known to Europeans doesn’t mean that dingoes just arrived one day and they remained entirely isolated from other dogs.
They wouldn’t have such a close relationship to East Asian domestic dogs if that were the case.
That is what happened as far as anyone can tell. Their close relationship with other Asian dogs is a consequence of common ancestry.
Gene flow can be stopped on the mainland – with fences. What do you have against fences?
A lot!
Do you know how many really unique Australian animals get hung up in fences every year and die?
You are also very likely stopping gene flow between populations of native Australian species, which isn’t good for them.
This problem will make lions go extinct in Africa.
You can bring in new blood anytime you want. As long as it’s not DD blood. As for hanging animals, that’s never been a problem before. They’ve got their sheep fenced in and their rabbits and dingos fenced out all over the place.
You’re wrong.
Kangaroos, cassowaries, and emus get caught in fences all the time.
Wild animals are collateral damage wherever there are fences. Without fences there’d be few domesticated animals. And no GRs; they’d all be eaten or cross-bred by coyotes. Deer and birds kill themselves crashing through plate glass windows. Do you want to prohibit windows? Is this discussion getting silly?
It’s you who are making this silly.
Those animals that are being killed in those fences are unquestionably native species. They have an effect on their populations. And gene flows are likely not happening between rare– really rare– native fauna.
To put up extensive fences under the delusion and pretense that it will keep the dingoes pure is very short-sighted– and just a wee bit selfish.
It is you who think dingoes are so much more unique than other dogs that we have engage in something as drastic as fencing or– even worse– turning the landracce into a conservation project like is being done with red wolves– which is also delusional.
Tortoises and rattlesnakes are becoming genetic inbred messes because of fences and highways. That is in North America. It is not really a good idea for Australians to adopt a similar strategy.
Secondly, have you ever considered why dingoes exist the way they are now? If the outcrosses are not very successful at adapting to the landscape and at predation, they would not be passing on their genes to the next generation. The dingoes are undergoing something rather… re– err, evolutionary.
This whole discussion is really silly. “Pure” dingoes exist on Fraser Island. It’s a healthy population.
We would we think that going into mainland Australia and fencing it off to save “pure” dingoes there is a good idea, when conservationists in Australia are very strongly arguing that the dingo fence be taken down– or at least part of it.
This makes no sense.
Then how about an open registry? Which could include zoo owned, privately owned, and wild individuals? Shoot or otherwise remove from the breeding population anything that looks crossed. Maintain pure stock wherever its feasible. But, then, you don’t care one whit about crossing them with western dogs. Later on you can shoot all of them because, like the RW, they’ve been annihilated by out-crossing. In other words you bring about the thing you deplore. You would out-cross them then say they are not worth saving because they are out-crossed.
On another subject. Yes, I believe the dingo is so “special” it deserves to be conserved, now that you’ve introduced that term. Your use of the term “special” suggests classism. I can say “special” and mean unique (except that I wouldn’t introduce the term “special” because it’s loaded). You can then hear the message as “My dog is better than your dog. And as such deserves better treatment”. I believe there is a lot of animosity behind this thread but I don’t understand fully what it is or how it got here.
However, here is what I mean by unique:
The dingo has a unique history. Australians like it as long as it isn’t killing livestock. (They don’t like feral cats and foxes, BTW.)
But on the genetic side I think there is another argument. The out-crossed individual is, of course, not a dingo. We’ve covered that. But Dave has just brought up the matter of fitness again. So, additionally, methinks there is a high probability that the out-crossed individual is not fit. It’s not a matter of “bad” genes, but a matter of mismatched genes. The dingo was a generalized dog to begin with (as are its extant but endangered relatives in Thailand). So, it started out as pretty fit. That is, it was not a pug. You can’t just mix parts and hope that growth and development will iron out mismatches. They may or may not. It takes nature umpteen rounds of mutation – selection – reproduction – more selection, etc, for hundreds of generations to get it right, more or less. “Right” meaning a fit animal that breeds true without inbreeding. When you outcross, it’s as though you introduced a lot of mutations all at once. I think the organism is bound to suffer a loss of fitness as a consequence, at least in the short run. If you were introducing dogs from another population of dingos your argument that new genes will be absorbed and/or beneficial might have some validity, but to introduce western dogs is to deliver a genetic assault. The idea that dog is just one big gene pool is not applicable because many of our western breeds have been created by the maintenance, by people, of mutations that would not have survived in nature and maybe the elimination of large parts of the gene pool. When you cross these with the dingo you are subjecting dingo to a cross with a genetically impoverished animal. Kind of a shotgun approach to extinction, killing them one gene at a time.
Fraser Is, BTW, is not a complete solution. For one thing it’s a small population. For another, it’s not safe. Several years ago 40% of the F.I. population was shot after a little boy was killed. How rational was that? Apparently there’s no way to require people to keep an eye on their kids where there are wild animals.
And one more thing. To denigrate the dingo as a glorified shiba is to be seriously confused, IMO. The shiba is an attempt on the part of Japanese breeders to restore/recreate an indigenous Japanese breed. They are being restored much as the Irish wolfhound was restored. There are six or seven such breeds in Japan. They are distinct from one another and from Chinese, Korean and SE Asian breeds in conformation and in cognitive capabilities. The shiba shares some but not all of the genetic markers of the dingo, probably because of common ancestry.
I believe the dingo (or its ancestor the ur-dingo) was the ur-dog of the Far East. How it got to where and what it is from the wolf of the middle east we don’t know. (We don’t even know that about man.), Would be nice to have the details of history, but fossils are scarce in hot humid places and DNA tends not to be preserved. There is no point arguing; we just don’t have the facts.
It’s only contested by people who can’t read the genetic literature. Or who just refuse to accept it.
The closest thing to an ur-dog is the basenji. Your direction of dog domestication is simply wrong. It went from the Middle East, Europe, and Central Asia, not East Asia and radiating out.
There are so many things wrong with her comment I don’t even know where to start.
Looking up outbreeding depression might be a good start. (Hint: animals suffering from outbreeding depression do not usually reproduce.) Accepting the fact that Dingoes are not a different species from other dogs might also be good.
The basenji is on its own line of descent from the founder. No one has claimed that basenji is ancestor to anything else. Secondly I was putting the origin of dog in the middle east. Just trying to say we don’t know how it got from there to the far east. But we do know that we have dingo-like dogs in the east but not in the west. Why? Nobody knows.
Wrong.
Basenjis are very closely related to Middle Eastern wolves, which are the primary ancestors of the dogs we have today.
But this crap you’re peddling about dingoes being the ancestral dog is Grade A bullshit.
You can find that in old texts.
Then they looked at the DNA– DNA doesn’t lie– and found that dingoes are derived from domestic dogs, not the ancestor of domestic dogs. They aren’t really all that special in the grand scheme of things.
I’m not approving further comments from you on this post, because it’s a waste of my time.
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