30: Blue Footed Booby & Dingo
Ellen: Hey friends, this is Ellen Weatherford.
Christian: And this is Christian Weatherford.
Ellen: And this is Just the Zoo of Us, your favorite animal review podcast.
Christian: Yes. Where we talk about animals that you suggest and give them a rating of... zero to 10. I don't know if we've done zeros yet.
Ellen: Not quite yet. We've got some ones.
Christian: I'm gonna say zero to 10, in three categories: effectiveness, ingenuity and aesthetics.
Ellen: We are not zoological experts. What we are experts in is...
Christian: Hugs!
Ellen: Licensed and certified.
Christian: Yup.
Ellen: The only announcement I have right now is that next week is our live show, so if you're listening to this in or near the Jacksonville area, come listen to us learn you about aminals. If you want to. That would be fun.
Christian: In the picturesque setting of Riverside, Jacksonville.
Ellen: Yeah, it's so it's called Cultivate and it's a really, really cool little space down in the Riverside area. It's very adorable and I'm really excited to be there and see all of your beautiful faces.
Christian: All right, so who's first this week?
Ellen: You are.
Christian: Meeeee?
Ellen: Yes, you. It's your turn.
Christian: This week, I bring you and our listeners a very good bird known as the blue-footed booby.
Ellen: Spectacular.
Christian: Yes. That's not its scientific name. Its scientific name is actually Sula nebouxii.
Ellen: Interesting.
Christian: That's how I choose to pronounce it.
Ellen: Sounds great.
Christian: This species was submitted to us by the Paudeville podcast, as well as Katie Johns.
Ellen: Thanks y'all.
Christian: Thank you so much.
Ellen: Thank you for subjecting me to this.
Christian: Here we go. I'm getting my information from National Geographic, found at nationalgeographic.com, as well as Animal Diversity Web, found at animaldiversity.org. This is a seafaring bird mostly. I'm going to describe what it looks like really quick.
Ellen: Please do.
Christian: So, as its name implies, they have blue feet, which are also webbed. They have brown feathers on their wings, white feathers on the breast. They have brown and white feathers on their head, back, and tail. Their face and bill is a grayish blue, and they have the round head when you look at them from pretty much any angle.
Ellen: The blue feet are like a very, very vibrant blue, too. It's unexpected. When you see the rest of the bird, the rest of the bird has kind of regular, kind of muted... Normal bird colors, and then you get to the feet and it pops off.
Christian: Yeah. And these are adults that had the blue feet, by the way. As juveniles, they do not have that coloration of feet.
Ellen: They look kind of like duck feet too, right?
Christian: Yeah, they're webbed. They're very good at pushing water. Let's talk about how big they are. So they are 32 to 34 inches long, or 81 to 86 centimeters. Their wingspan is almost five feet, or about one and a half meters, and they weigh 3.25 pounds, or one and a half kilograms. Let's talk about where you can find these guys. They are off the western coasts of central and South America, but half of all breeding are found on the Galapagos islands. So a lot of the times you'll hear about these in documentaries that are centered around the Galapagos islands. Taxonomic family is Sulidae. The other things in that family are birds called gannets, as well as other boobies. So there are several birds known as boobies, but they have different colored feet in features. I think there are six.
Ellen: Interesting. So, and they are really stuck on the name, huh?
Christian: Yep.
Ellen: It can't be changed?
Christian: Spoiler alert: There's a reason for the name.
Ellen: Oh!
Christian: It's coming.
Ellen: Okay.
Christian: So first category up, we're going to talk about effectiveness. How good do they do the things they do? These are physical adaptations. I'm giving the blue footed booby a 7 seven out of 10. So first of all, webbed feet. They're very, very good at swimming. And they can, they're very good at diving too into the water.
Ellen: Oh really? Like they go fully underwater?
Christian: Yep. So they can plunge into water from a height as high as 80 feet, or 24 meters. That's pretty high up there.
Ellen: How did they get that high up?
Christian: ...Flying?
Ellen: Oh yeah, they're... They're birds. I forgot.
Christian: I guess I didn't explicitly say that, but yes, this is a flighted bird.
Ellen: Okay. Thank you for explicitly stating that.
Christian: But I believe one could deduce that from the wingspan.
Ellen: That's true, that's true.
Christian: So yeah, they're very good at swimming and diving, but they are not great at getting around on land, which is good, because they're only on land when they're nesting at night.
Ellen: I'm imagining a funny waddle.
Christian: Yes, it is very funny. I will touch on that again later. Next category: ingenuity. They do smart things or interesting tactics, tool use, that sort of thing. Gonna give them another 7 out of 10. They will sometimes hunt cooperatively, but usually they're hunting on their own and this is where they're diving under water and catching small fish. Like sardines, that kind of fish.
Ellen: Sure.
Christian: Not unlike penguins except, you know... Buffed, what with flight and all.
Ellen: Well, I mean they live in a warmer climate, right? So they don't have the same needs that a penguin has.
Christian: That's true. I guess that's not fair to penguins.
Ellen: I know we should be- we should be nicer to penguins. Everyone always dunks on penguins for not being able to fly. But like, we talked about the emperor penguin and why they don't fly. Right? They have their reasons. Leave penguins alone! Be nice to penguins.
Christian: My next ingenuity point: my primary one, and this is has to do with their- with the males' mating display. So the males will show off their feet.
Ellen: Really?
Christian: By doing a high-strutting, high step.
Ellen: I'm imagining Rockettes.
Christian: ...What?
Ellen: The Rockettes, like the ladies that do the Can-Can at like, festivals and parades and stuff.
Christian: That's too elegant. Again, imagine a funky waddle. It's like a person trying to walk around with flippers on.
Ellen: Aw, that's pretty great actually. Okay. So the male booby is walking around strutting his stuff and it looks like someone just kind of flapping around in flippers, and the female booby sees this pitiful display and she's like, "Aw yeah, I need to get me some of that."
Christian: So, here's the thing, the bluer the feet, the more attractive.
Ellen: Definitely. Absolutely.
Christian: And here's why. So this is the primary reason why I put this under ingenuity. So it's thought that the foot color indicates being healthy and well fed.
Ellen: Really?
Christian: So that's because the blue coloration comes from their diet.
Ellen: It's reminding me a bit of how flamingos turned pink due to the krill that they eat.
Christian: Yes.
Ellen: Okay.
Christian: And I got this information from a very specific article, which I will now cite. That article is titled "Pigment-based skin colour in the blue-footed booby: an honest signal of current condition used by females to adjust reproductive investment."
Ellen: Adjust reproductive investment.
Christian: Yeah, that's, that's a scientific way of saying having a fondness for blue feet.
Ellen: I know anybody out there using online dating services is probably well familiar with adjusting their reproductive investments.
Christian: So yeah. The thought is, you know, the bluer the feet, the better an indicator that is of the male being healthy, being able to rear healthy young, that sort of thing. Last category, aesthetics. How pretty are they? Again, a 7 out of 10. So this is a 7 out of 10 across the board for me. For the blue footed booby...
Ellen: It's just a, it's just good. It's okay.
Christian: Yeah. Blue feet, obviously aesthetic, but also I find them sleek and a little goofy to look at them head on.
Ellen: Yes! Oh my gosh. There's nothing that makes me laugh harder than seeing a picture of a blue footed booby looking directly at the camera.
Christian: Yes.
Ellen: Because they look so nervous. Don't they? They look so anxious and caught off-guard.
Christian: It kinda reminds me of some of the Muppet characters. A little bit.
Ellen: What's the one that goes, "meep meep meep meep meep meep," who's that?
Christian: I do not know.
Ellen: It's that one!
Christian: Okay. So yeah, 7 out of 10.
Ellen: I feel like the blue foot is very unexpected. Like if you're starting at the top of the animal and you kind of work your way down, you're like, okay, I get it. Long skinny beak, long neck. Okay, brown and white bird. Oh no! You get to the feet and you're like, what happened?
Christian: I find them cute. So, some miscellaneous info. First up, the conservation status: they are of least concern.
Ellen: Oh, that's not what I expected. I don't know why, I guess I expected a seafaring bird to not be doing very well.
Christian: Apparently they're doing fine.
Ellen: Oh. Good on you, boobies.
Christian: Yes. Their average life span in the wild is 17 years. Their babies, earlier I mentioned that their feet are not blue, but also they look like little white floofs.
Ellen: Oh, little cloud bird!
Christian: Yeah, they're pretty cute.
Ellen: Just a little fluff ball.
Christian: And talking about babies, when the parents are feeding their young, so they do the very typical bird thing where they go out and get food, regurgitate it into the baby's mouths. Keep in mind these birds will have about two or three young in a clutch, I guess is what you would call it. So if food is scarce, what they'll do is they will decide to feed the larger of the chicks. As a way of, you know...
Ellen: Picking one.
Christian: Ensuring at least one survives.
Ellen: Readjusting their reproductive investment.
Christian: It's so stone cold.
Ellen: There are so many birds that we've talked about that do this though.
Christian: Yes. I guess it makes sense, I suppose.
Ellen: Birds do tend to spend a lot of their effort and energy caring for their young, right? So if you're going to be putting that much energy into it, you have to kind of allocate it appropriately to make sure that you're kind of getting the best results for your efforts. It's like we talked about the shoebill, that doesn't even bother with the second chick. Right?
Christian: That's true.
Ellen: They are just like, "Oh well, sucks for you."
Christian: Yeah. And also, they keep their eggs warm with their feet. So their feet have increased blood flow, so are warmer than the rest of their bodies.
Ellen: Really?
Christian: Yeah. So they use their feet to keep the eggs warm. I think a lot of birds have what's called a brood patch on their body to do this, but these birds do not.
Ellen: They have brood feet.
Christian: Yes.
Ellen: That's kind of cute. So I haven't seen this happen, but I am imagining a booby just standing on its eggs.
Christian: I don't think it's standing on them. I think it moves the eggs to be on top of its feet, like kind of like a penguin.
Ellen: Oh, that's pretty cute. That's adorable.
Christian: And now, my last and best piece of information: where the name comes from.
Ellen: Yes, please.
Christian: So boobies are thought to be named after the Spanish word for stupid.
Ellen: Oh no! No, no, no.
Christian: Which is "bobo."
Ellen: *sighs*
Christian: Yup. So some things are coming together, right?
Ellen: Yeah.
Christian: Per National Geographic, and I quote...
Ellen: Come on.
Christian: "European colonists may have characterized these clumsy and unwary birds when they saw them on land, their least graceful environment." Second quote, per Animal Diversity Web...
Ellen: Excellent.
Christian: "Its lack of fear and clumsiness on land has made this species vulnerable to man."
Ellen: Its both lack of fear and clumsiness. So I mean, if you're going to be a complete disaster walking around on land, you gotta be confident. Right? You gotta just go for it. Just own that walk.
Christian: Yup. So that's where the name comes from, or is thought to have come from.
Ellen: Delightful.
Christian: I thought it was funny cause I have heard the, the term "bobo" before.
Ellen: At least in the area where we live, people use "bobo" to describe something that is subpar, something that is not great.
Christian: But like just imagine for a moment you're a, you're a Spanish conquistador, you've arrived in Mexico and after having a busy day of doing awful, awful things, you go to the Pacific coast to find these birds and you're just like, "Man, these birds, they stupid."
Ellen: You see them and you're like, "This bird? Nuh-uh, that's bobo. That is a bobo bird." I would imagine that if I was an ancient Spaniard, having just had a long day of conquistadoring, I would probably be delighted to come across a bird just trying its best to get from point A to point B and just flapping its big old feet around. I'd probably be like, now that's great.
Christian: Flap flap honk honk!
Ellen: I am a bird and I'm trying!
Christian: So, that is the blue footed boobie.
Ellen: Excellent. You have really strengthened my connection to this bird. Thank you. Um, how long did you spend looking at pictures of boobies on the internet?
Christian: A good four-ish hours.
Ellen: Great.
Christian: And in this corner...
Ellen: Please don't say how much I weigh.
Christian: I was trying to think of what your animal weighs. I don't know.
Ellen: Weighing in at... An average of about 30 pounds.
Christian: The feather feather feather weight.
Ellen: But it ain't got no feathers. It's a Dingo!
Christian: Yay!
Ellen: Scientific name... Is... In a little bit of a gray area! It's a little bit controversial what their scientific name is.
Christian: Interesting.
Ellen: They go by either Canis dingo or Canis lupus dingo or Canis familiaris dingo.
Christian: So what has caused this drama in the scientific taxonomic arena?
Ellen: It is off the chain. There's so much, but there's reason for the drama.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: It's legit. It's for real. It has real world implications. So this is a situation where taxonomy is very complicated and very heated, but for good, legit reasons. First of all, the species was submitted via Instagram by the Tails Waggin Camp, which is the dog boarding camp where we send Puppy when we go out of town. Yeah. So I'm getting my information on the dingo from the Australian Museum as well as the Australian Dingo Foundation. If you have never seen a dingo, it's a dog... And that's it. It's just a dog. It's just a dog. It's about two feet tall, or 62 centimeters at the shoulder. And like I said earlier, about 30 pounds. It's like a medium-sized dog. Medium, maybe a little bit on the larger size typically, but it's a tall dog.
Christian: Sure.
Ellen: So they are found in Australia. Now here's the thing, the earliest evidence of dingoes in Australia dates back to 3,500 years ago.
Christian: So they did not come with the Europeans.
Ellen: No, definitely didn't come with Europeans, but they also weren't always there.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: This is a relatively recent addition to Australia. So it's believed that they were introduced to the continent prior to that evidence. It was the only hard evidence that could be found and dated back to 3,500 years ago.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: They were probably introduced to Australia around 5,000 years ago. So in the grand scheme of things, that's very recent. Right? But numbers on that vary a lot. Like, I found so many different sources that said so many different things on how long dingoes have been in Australia. So some of them said 5,000, some of them said 10,000 or 12,000, so just something around that amount of time.
Christian: Sure.
Ellen: They've been there for a long time, but not as long as native species. So it's generally believed that the dingoes were brought onto the continent by people from Southeastern Asia. Some genetic evidence suggests that they were most likely hunter-gatherers from Sulawesi in Indonesia.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: They believe that because the Dingo doesn't have the ability to digest grains, which suggests that it was not domesticated by people who were using agriculture. To, you know, so like if a dog had been domesticated by people that were harvesting grains or rice or something like that, they probably would be feeding those greens and rice to the dogs, and the dogs would have developed the ability to digest those things over time.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: So you see this in more recent domesticated dog breeds, you see the ability to digest grains but dingoes can't at all. Yeah. So that suggests that the people that they accompanied weren't harvesting grains.
Christian: Interesting.
Ellen: Yeah. So that's why they think they were hunter gatherers. The dingoes also had a very, very narrow origin suggesting that it took very, very few dingoes to establish the population. So they think that only like, a couple of dingoes came over.
Christian: Wow.
Ellen: They said it could have been as few as one breeding pair. So their taxonomic genus is Canis. This is the same genus as dogs, wolves and coyotes. Dingoes have been shown by genetic studies to be more closely related to modern domesticated dogs than to gray wolves.
Christian: Make sense.
Ellen: Yeah. So you can see the strong similarity with domestic dogs, particularly in shiba inus and akitas. They look like, exactly the same. Right? Except shiba inus are like, kind of cuter. They're like little tiny dingoes with little curly hair- little curly tails and, but it looks a lot like a dingo. Right? You can definitely see the similarity there.
Christian: Sure.
Ellen: So they likely share a common ancestor from Southern China. So it's thought that like some of those Japanese breeds of dogs share an ancestor with dingoes.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: There's still a lot of ongoing debate surrounding whether dingoes are actually their own species or they're just a breed of dog. This has implications when you get regulating, like protecting them or not protecting them as a species, whether they count as a species or whether they're just a breed of like, feral dog essentially.
Christian: Gotcha.
Ellen: Now they are most closely related to the New Guinea singing dog. So one was likely the origin of the other, because they're so closely related, and there actually used to be a land bridge connecting Australia and New Guinea.
Christian: Oh.
Ellen: So around the same time that the dingoes and the New Guinea singing dogs appeared in those areas, there was a land bridge between the two, but it's not really clear which one came first.
Christian: Quick question.
Ellen: What?
Christian: The new Guinea singing dog.
Ellen: Yes. It's very cute.
Christian: Why is it known as this?
Ellen: Because it howls in a really cute way, and it has a very melodic howl.
Christian: Is this a common breed?
Ellen: It's very rare.
Christian: Were you aware of it prior to doing this research?
Ellen: Yeah, I think I showed you videos of them before.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: They have a really pleasant howl. It's really nice.
Christian: I'll have to look them up.
Ellen: They're very, very rare though. But it's not really clear whether these dogs showed up in Australia first or New Guinea first. So I'm going to get into my ratings. I use the same system as Christian. I'm going to start with effectiveness. Our physical adaptations, I'm giving the Dingo an 8 out of 10.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: So first of all I'm going to talk about their fur. Their fur gives them a pretty decent amount of camouflage. So the fur is typically like a golden yellow or a tan color that blends in with the colors of a desert, right? It's going to blend in with a lot of like, the sand and dead plants and stuff like that. But, since they're found in all these different areas of Australia, Australia has a lot of different biomes. Right? So there could be some areas with desert, some areas with forests, some with like, wetlands, like there's just a lot of diversity there. So there are actually different types of dingoes with coats that are more adapted to the area where they live.
Christian: Neat!
Ellen: Yeah. So there's three types of dingoes. There's the desert, the alpine and the northern dingo. So in more forested areas, dingoes actually tend to have darker fur and they can be black. And what's really cute is that the dingoes that are black have white markings on them, looks exactly like a shiba inu. You know like a black and tan shiba inu? It looks exactly like that.
Christian: Neat.
Ellen: Yeah. So, differences between the dingo and the dog. Dingoes have longer teeth than modern domesticated dogs. They're also built for long distance running. So they have a really, really slender body. They have these long, super muscular legs, so they're really good at running and they're very fast. So it's good for covering long distances in like, you know, the outback and stuff where they have to- they have very large territories, so they have to cover really long distances and they're really built for that. They're definitely runners. That brings us to ingenuity. I give the dingo a 9 out of 10 for ingenuity.
Christian: Wow.
Ellen: So they will often hunt in packs. They communicate with each other with howls and with other vocalizations, like growling. They're working together and communicating with each other to take down prey that could be bigger than them.
Christian: Right.
Ellen: There have actually been a few studies testing dingoes on their intelligence.
Christian: Oh?
Ellen: The first study that I wanted to take a look at was their ability to take social cues from humans. So, like I mentioned earlier, they came to Australia with humans. It doesn't necessarily mean that they were completely domesticated, just that they hung around with humans a lot. So they at least spent, you know, a good chunk of their development around humans, but then returned to the wild. So it's interesting. They're kind of right in that midway point between a dog and a wild, like wolf or something.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: So, there was a test where they tried to see how well dingoes could comprehend human gestures. So these are things like looking at a target, pointing at a target to see if the dingo would pick the correct one. These were like, containers with food hidden inside. So they had already tested domesticated dogs and wolves using the same methods. So they just kind of applied the same test to dingoes to see how they fared. Pure dingoes, when tested for comprehension of these gestures, scored better than wolves, but not as well as domesticated dogs.
Christian: Expected.
Ellen: That makes sense, right? They're a little better at understanding people than wolves, but not quite as good as a pure dog. So another interesting thing about dingoes in relation to humans is that dingoes also initiate eye contact with humans more often than wolves. Wolves typically would not make eye contact with the human... Like, super willingly, but the dingoes maintained their eye contact for shorter durations than dogs.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: It's just another example of them being like, kind of in that midway point between being, you know, completely wild and a little bit more domesticated.
Christian: Right.
Ellen: Now there was another test of their intelligence called the detour task. This is a test of their problem solving abilities in which a food reward is placed behind a transparent barrier, in this case, it was a chain link fence, that the subject has to navigate around in order to access the food roared. And in this case for this test, it was shaped like a V with the food in the corner and the dingo on the other side where in order to get to the food, which the dingo could see and smell, the dingo would have to go all the way around one of the sides. And it would have to stay focused on the food long enough to go all the way around the fence and then come back to where it knew the food was.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: This test was actually kind of the reverse of the earlier test, where domesticated dogs perform pretty poorly on this test. They do a bad job, they tend to get more frustrated by having to problem solve independently without relying on, you know, interpreting cues from a human. They will tend to like, maybe start trying to dig at the barrier or they'll just bark at it or something, like, they- domesticated dogs tend to do very poorly at this task, but wolves are like 100%. Wolves ace this, no problem. And dingoes did well at this.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: Yeah. So dingoes seem to have kind of a good mix between being able to take social cues and also being able to critically think on their own.
Christian: Interesting.
Ellen: Yeah. So it's, it's kinda cool because it gives them the best of both worlds intellectually. Right? So here's another thing that they can do: spontaneous tool use.
Christian: Woah!
Ellen: Yeah. So captive dingoes have been observed manipulating objects in their enclosures, such as moving a table to access different heights. Yeah. So like, pushing around like a table or, or some sort of structure in their enclosure to get to a higher area that they couldn't get to before.
Christian: Interesting.
Ellen: Yeah. And they have even been recorded opening gates.
Christian: That's... not great.
Ellen: Like learning how to open gates. It's not ideal. It's not what you want your dingo to start doing, but at least it means it's pretty clever. This is a pretty smart little guy. Another thing that I thought was pretty clever of them is that both parents participate in rearing their pups. Not to, you know, ascribe too many human values to animal behavior, it's just, I have a soft spot for some egalitarian parenting roles. So they do a pretty good job, you know, raising their puppies. So I wanted to kind of highlight the intelligence of the dingo by contrasting it against that of Canis familiaris. In particular, the beagle that is at my feet currently. Her name is Puppy, and I gave the dingo a 9 out of 10 for ingenuity, I give my beagle a 2 out of 10 for ingenuity. She is bad at interpreting social cues. She cannot detour. She frequently gets her leash stuck on poles and cannot figure out that she has to walk backwards to get it unstuck. So if we are taking her for a walk and her leash gets wrapped around a pole, she just cries until we fix it for her.
Christian: I guess I'll just die.
Ellen: Guess I'll die here. Guess this is where I live now. And as far as spontaneous tool use in our dog, there has been one isolated freak incident of sophisticated tool use.
Christian: Yeah...
Ellen: That one time we had a baby gate at the bottom of our stairs and we were leaving her downstairs by herself, unsupervised, and we came home one day and the baby gate, which was mounted to the wall with these tension bolts that you had to twist in order to push them against the walls... The gate had been removed from the wall. And we were like, huh, that's weird. So we just put it back and thought nothing of it, and then the next day the exact same thing happened again. And we were like, how is this gate coming apart from the wall every day now? So we put the gate back on the wall, and then left puppy downstairs and went upstairs and watched, and we saw her go up to the gate and use her paw to twist the bolt that had the gate mounted to the stairs. And I tell you what, that was probably the most insane thing I've ever seen because this dog is dumb as a brick. This is not a bright dog. This is the dumbest dog I've ever met in my whole life. And she had figured out the mechanics holding the baby gate in place and how to dismantle them. So that was just, I think that was like... An outlier, right?
Christian: It was a freak accident. Because she'll do that, right? Where she'll paw at the bottom of something she's trying to get in, and then it just so happens that that motion was exactly what she needed to do to unscrew that bolt.
Ellen: I know, it was just the most bizarre thing that this very dumb dog was able to figure out such a high level task. It's crazy. So yeah, overall, I mean the dingo has got this one in the bag. I think a dingo is way smarter than our dog.
Christian: Yeah, that's what I was going to ask, did they do the same test they did all the, like the domesticated dogs where they did a list- like, a ranking of dog intelligence? I wonder where the dingo would fall in there.
Ellen: I mean it really varies depending on the task that you're trying to judge them on. Right?
Christian: True.
Ellen: They didn't necessarily outperform either dogs or wolves in any of the tasks, but they had consistently higher.... Right? Like whereas one task the wolf would be terrible at but the dog would be good at, the other one the dog's terrible at but the wolf's good at, the dingo's like, consistently pretty good at all of them. They're not necessarily the best at any of them.
Christian: The Jack of all trades.
Ellen: Yeah. So this is a clever, clever dog I think. So finally this brings me to aesthetics for the dingo. I give them a 9 out of 10. This is a good boy. It's a good boy. They're just, they're really pretty. They're cute. They have these long, like slender legs and pointy ears and they have kind of a bushy tail. They have short fur all over their body, but their tail is bushier than you might expect it to be. Yeah. I don't know. It's just cute dog. That's all I got. What more do you need? What more do you want from me? It's a cute dog! Leave me alone!
Christian: Dang...
Ellen: So miscellaneous information for the dingo, their conservation status is... Vulnerable...? This one's kinda tough to nail down because, like I said earlier, there's still some debate over whether they count as their own species. So it's kind of hard to give them an independent conservation status because nobody's really- nobody has come to a complete consensus and complete agreement on whether they count as their own species. So, breeding and hybridization with domestic dogs has actually eroded a lot of the genetic consistency of the dingo. It's estimated that about a third of the wild dingoes in Australia are actually hybrids with dogs. So since dingoes are Australia's largest mammalian predator, and they are opportunistic hunters who will pretty much eat anything, they are seen as pests by a lot of people in Australia. So there have actually been organized efforts to reduce dingo populations, especially in agricultural areas that are trying to protect their livestock because dingoes will hunt anything basically. And they're very, and they're quite good at it, so they're going to get what they want. The Australian Dingo Foundation is a nonprofit that operates a dingo sanctuary and participates in research and conservation of the dingo. So those studies that I mentioned earlier testing their intelligence, those were performed on dingoes kept in the dingo sanctuary by the Australian Dingo Foundation.
Christian: Makes sense.
Ellen: Yeah. So they do a lot of the research in learning more about dingoes, which is really cool. So laws protecting dingoes and dingo hybrids vary across regions in Australia. Some places protect them and consider them an endangered species, some consider them pests and an invasive pest. And so that's, it's just like you're going to get a wide range of policies on dingoes in different areas. So that's why the taxonomy of the dingo matters. So if it is its own species, it can then be classified as endangered. However, if it is just seen as a dog, then it has a lot less footing for legal protection.
Christian: Sure.
Ellen: Cause then it's just like, it's a feral dog, right? There's dogs everywhere, you don't need to worry about it. It's just a dog. So that's kinda why taxonomy matters. In this case. It's like whether you are going to be able to protect the species or not.
Christian: Sure.
Ellen: I know that when I was a kid, I had a book that was really important to me that was a dog breed encyclopedia. I think we just got rid of it, like in this move to our new house. We got rid of the book, but it was really important to me and the dingo was in that book as a dog breed.
Christian: Aw.
Ellen: So I want to wrap up with this one last little tidbit that I really love. This is a story. In August of 2019, a lone puppy fell from the sky into a residential backyard in Wandiligong, Australia. The puppy had marks on its back that suggested it had been picked up and carried off by an eagle. So they think that's how it got to where it was all by itself, with nothing, no family nearby or anything. So the family that lived there took the puppy to a vet where the vets discovered that the puppy was a purebred alpine dingo.
Christian: Wow.
Ellen: The rarest type of dingo, they're actually endangered. So he now lives at the Australian Dingo Foundation's Dingo Discovery Sanctuary. His name is Wandi, after Wandiligong where he was found, and you can follow him on Instagram at wandi_dingo.
Christian: Woah!
Ellen: That's W-A-N-D-I, underscore, D-I-N-G-O. [to the tune of "Bingo Was His Name-O"] D-I-N-G-O, D-I-N-G-O...
Christian: And Dingo was his name-o.
Ellen: Yup!
Christian: Ah. So, should I keep a dingo as a pet?
Ellen: No.
Christian: Okay!
Ellen: No.
Christian: But you just said-
Ellen: No, no, no, no. Don't keep wild animals as pets. Don't do it.
Christian: That's okay. They're probably poor pets anyway.
Ellen: They're bad pets. They- no. Don't keep dingoes as pets.
Christian: I was joking for, for our listeners' sake. Okay.
Ellen: Well no, cause I think that's a good thing to say. I think that's a good thing to include in the show for people that might be listening, and might be hearing me talk about, oh, it's a really cute dog that is also pretty clever. They might be thinking, "oh, where do I get a dingo and keep it in my house?" This is me telling you: don't. You don't. You just don't do that. So that's the dingo.
Christian: Thanks honey. It was very good, and not traumatic at all.
Ellen: Well, thank you to everybody who has spent this time with us this week. We really appreciate everybody that's been listening and we haven't asked this in a while, but if you could please head over to your favorite podcatcher and drop us a good review. I hope we've earned it.
Christian: Or any review, whatever you think we deserve.
Ellen: If you have a bad review, please don't leave that.
Christian: I'll read it.
Ellen: Please keep, please keep that one to yourself. Actually, if you have a bad review and you have negative feedback, you can send it directly to Christian.
Christian: Yeah!
Ellen: Don't send it to me. I'll cry.
Christian: I definitely won't read it on a Mean Tweets type thing.
Ellen: I will cry. I can't take it. I promise. Christian can though.
Christian: Yeah.
Ellen: So yeah, thanks everybody who's been checking us out. That's really cool of you. You can come hang out with us on social media. We're on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Just search the name of the show. You'll find us. Come join our Facebook group. It's pretty great. We love it a lot. If you want to hear us talk about a particular animal species, send those to us either on social media or via email. My email address is ellen@justthezooofus.com. A transcript of this episode will be made available at justthezooofus.com.
Christian: Very good.
Ellen: Yeah, and last mention, thank you to Louie Zong for allowing us to use the song "Adventuring" off of your album Bee Sides.
Christian: Always a pleasure to listen to.
Ellen: Yes, as I hope so is our podcast.
Christian: Oh!
Ellen: I think it is. I think you have a very lovely voice and I like to hear it.
Christian: Nuh-uh...
Ellen: It's a good thing I like to hear it cause I have to listen to it three separate times!
Christian: Yeah... Okay.
Ellen: Anyway, byeee!
Christian: Bye everyone.