Australia has four or five unshared populations of dingo, and none are crossbreeding to extinction, new research shows.
UNSW-based conservation biologist Dr Kylie Cairns led a study into 195,000 genetic markers in 391 repeater and wild dingoes and found their lineage remains mostly intact.
Despite assumptions that dingoes are crossbreeding with dogs, the species genetic ripen fails to show in the analysis.
In Victoria, 87.1% of sample dingoes were genetically pure; only 6.5% showed signs of a single crossover event.
In NSW and Queensland, increasingly than half of those sampled had at least 99% dingo ancestry, and a fifth had vestige of one racial crossover.
Little vestige of dingo-dog interbreeding was found in other mainland states. At least four in five wild dingoes sampled from SA and WA had pure dingo lineages. In contrast, repeater dingoes were increasingly likely to be hybrids.
Cairns research moreover shows four unshared wild dingo populations on the Australian continent: an eastern population hugging the coastline from Bundaberg and south-east Queensland to Wollongong; a southeast population ranging from the NSW south tailspin inland to the Australian Alps and east of Melbourne; a single Big Desert group well-matured near the SA-Victoria border; and a western population ranging wideness WA, the Northern Territory and much of Queensland outside established dingo fences.
Identifying these unshared populations, Cairns says, dispels the idea that hybridisation is the rationalization for differences between dingoes.
Previous methods of [genetic] unit testing substantially unsupportable that all dingoes wideness the country were the same, or worked a single population, and therefore any differences that you saw in a dingo, say in Victoria compared to WA, was considering the dingo was a hybrid, Cairns says.
When we have much larger amounts of data, so the 195,000 shit of DNA [to study], we can test that increasingly robustly, and see that instead of there stuff only one type of dingo, theres four, or five if you include the repeater dingoes.
And its much easier to be worldly-wise to tell the difference between a dingo, a variegated type of dingo, and a dog.
Cairns says largest conservation practices rather than current pest management approaches for dingoes is important to protect the remaining, genetically unshared populations of the animal.
The [Big Desert] population in western Victoria and southern SA appears to be under severe threat, there doesnt seem to be very many of them, she says.
We may need to start thinking increasingly well-nigh how were conserving, rather than just how were managing those. You dont want to be losing any genetic diversity from a species, ideally, considering genetic diversity helps transmute to the waffly environment, or cope with disease.
