Human interference with the natural order of things often has unintended consequences. With land and resources being used up, the creatures that usually suffer harm are the rarest and most discreet.
The New Guinea wild dog may be one of those creatures.
The New Guinea singing dog is a beautiful creature to behold.
True to its name, the singing dogs were named because of the unique way they harmonize with one another while howling. Hearing one of these incredibly rare creatures sounds eerie and unnerving. Lifting its head and howling, the resulting noise is like something out of a scary movie.
Only 200 of the dogs are left in conservation centers and zoos.
The dogs are so rare, in fact, that there are only 200 or so left in captivity around the world. All of the 200 in captivity are descended from a small group that was captured from the wild in the 1970s.
Astonishingly, researches think they have found a population still living in the Highlands of New Guinea!
While on a research trip, scientists spotted a pack of wild dogs that looked a bit like the captive dogs. The expedition journeyed into the highlands of Papua, Indonesia, in 2016 to study and document 15 of the dogs.
After finding the pack, they came back in 2018 for more detailed work.
If these were indeed the famed singing dogs, they would need more data. The researches collected blood samples from three of the dogs as well as a ton of behavioral and physiological data from them. They needed as much information as they could get to determine if these were, in fact, the rare dogs.
Years later, the data finally came out in a report.
The DNA of the captive animals have remarkably similar gene sequences to the DNA from the wild dogs! To give perspective, the two are more alike than and other canine DNA is to one another.
What would cause the DNA not to be identical if they are the same breed?
Posing a valid question, the answer is right in front of us. The simple answer is that the captive dogs are incredibly inbred, causing their gene pool to shrink. All 200 of the captive dogs descended from 8 original dogs captured decades ago.
‘The conservation dogs are super inbred,’ Elaine Ostrander, senior author of the paper and investigator at the National Institutes of Health, said, as per CNN. ‘[It] started with eight dogs, and they’ve been bred to each other, bred to each other, and bred to each other for generations – so they’ve lost a lot of genetic diversity.’
The goal is to breed some of the captive dogs with the new wild ones!
Inbreeding can cause serious health issues, and if we want to keep a record of the rare and beautiful creatures, something has to be done. The solution is to breed the two together to diversify the gene pool and create a healthier and more robust captive population.
New Guinea singing dogs are rare and exotic creatures that we should strive to protect.
With their haunting and harmonic calls, these strange dogs are worth us protecting. Now, the captive animals have a fighting chance!
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