If we brought devils back to the mainland, they could play a similar role to dingoes - keeping foxes and cats under control and potentially boosting the conservation prospects of Australia’s small mammals.
Rangers have mostly killed young male dingoes on Fraser Island, new research shows.
Jane Drumsara/Flickr
The famous dingoes of Fraser Island are not threatened by the practice of culling dangerous dingoes, says new research which shows the numbers killed are too small to harm the population’s sustainability.
The dingo fence is the world’s longest.
Thomas Newsome
Australia holds many world records, including the world’s longest fence, the dingo fence. At 5,531 km, the dingo barrier fence stretches from eastern Queensland all the way to the South Australian coastline…
Some people think that dingo control programs are harming Australia’s native wildlife. New research suggests this isn’t the case.
Benjamin Allen
Does dingo control harm Australia’s environment? Results from the largest Australian experiment on dingoes – published this week in Frontiers in Zoology – shows the answer to that question is a convincing…
American wolves show us how important large predators are for conservation.
Doug McLaughlin
We know that introduced predators such as foxes and cats are one of the greatest threats to Australia’s wildlife, but what is the best way to control them? Many Australian ecologists argue dingoes are…
Introduced species pose one of the greatest threats to Australia’s fauna and flora, but expensive efforts to control them aren’t working. Instead of spending millions of dollars on culling, giving dingoes…
Dingoes are back in the news, with Prime Minister Tony Abbott raising concerns on ABC radio last week about dingoes in drought-hit areas of Queensland and New South Wales: I’d learnt some years ago on…
Without tigers, our ecosystems will suffer.
Flickr/kohlmann.sascha
Humans have an innate fear of large predators, and with good reason. Nobody wants to be a shark or a lion’s next meal. But new research in the journal Science shows that our inability to live with these…
A dead dingo in 2013 (left) and a Tasmanian tiger, last seen in the wild in 1932.
Dingo photography by Aaron Greenville; a hunted thylacine in 1869, photographer unknown.
The last Tasmanian tiger died a lonely death in the Hobart Zoo in 1936, just 59 days after new state laws aimed at protecting it from extinction were passed in parliament. But the warning bells about its…
On a stop-over in Thailand, CSIRO scientist Laurie Corbett noticed some familiar-looking, ginger dogs wandering the streets. This encounter set him thinking about the origins of Australia’s dingoes, a…
Dingo: when they come to rely on humans for food and water, not killing them can be naive.
Flickr/woulfe
The sad reality of human-dingo relations is that blood will be shed, as Brad Purcell recently reminded us in these pages with his article about non-violent co-existence, The Australian Dingo: to be respected…
An important ‘apex predator’ that should neither be hunted as an enemy nor treated as a pet. With respect and wisdom, we can coexist.
AAP/Tony Phillips
It’s the dry season in the Northern Territory, and for many people that means camping under a clear winter’s sky in the Top End. Yet rediscovering nature can be a fraught exercise in wilderness areas like…
Imagine that your nine-week-old, longed-for daughter is taken by a wild animal in the night. Imagine you are suspected of killing her, and then convicted of this crime and imprisoned. Imagine that long…
The dingo fence is a blunt instrument; we could do better.
Paleontour/Flickr
We feel we have to set the record straight after some of our (Bradshaw’s) comments were taken grossly out of context, or not considered at all (Ritchie’s). A bubbling kerfuffle in the media over the last…
A Tasmanian tiger is strung up by its hind legs.
AAP/Supplied
Dingoes were twice the size of female thylacines and could have caused their extinction on mainland Australia through direct attacks, a new Sydney [study](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0034877?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+plosone%2FEvolutionaryBiology+(PLoS+ONE+Alerts%3A+Evolutionary+Biology…
Dingos are introduced, but have they gone native?
AAP
Native status is a big deal. It affects where conservation dollars are spent, and our inherent reaction to a species. Most people believe that native equals good and alien equals bad, but in some cases…
Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology and Models Theme Leader for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University