
A stray puppy that was found "whimpering" in an Australian garden is actually an endangered type of dingo, The Washington Post reported Monday.
DNA testing revealed that the puppy, named Wandi, had two unique features, he was 100 percent dingo, and he was an Australian alpine dingo — the most threatened type.
There are three types of dingos in Australia, Australian Dingo Foundation Director Lyn Watson explained to the Australian Broadcasting Corp. (ABC): tropical dingoes, inland dingoes that live in deserts and alpine dingoes.
"This type, the alpine dingo, unfortunately shares the eastern seaboard areas … where 80 percent of the Australian population lives," Watson told ABC. "So not only is the habitat of the alpine dingo dwindling to nothing, but our persecution of this animal — because it sadly looks like a dog — has pushed this beautiful alpine dingo very close to extinction."
Dingoes are also threatened by interbreeding with domestic dogs, according to the Australia & Pacific Science Foundation. The foundation explained why that's a problem:
The introduction of dog genes into the dingo population threatens to change/eradicate the unique characteristics of the Australian dingo. The uniqueness of the dingo and its importance to the Aboriginal people and Australian ecological systems make saving this species an important and urgent task. Features that distinguish the dingo from the domestic dog include its inability to bark. Instead, dingoes vocalise by howling. Dingoes only have one breeding cycle per year (unlike dogs which have two) and their skull morphology differs from the domestic dog. Because of hybridization and eradication programs, Canis familiaris dingo is a subspecies in danger of losing its uniqueness. Unless measures are implemented now, the extinction of the pure dingo seems inevitable in less than 50 years.
In Eastern Australia, where Wandi was found, pure dingoes are especially rare.
"Nowhere on the east coast of Australia can you find a dingo population that isn't at least fifty percent, and in some cases eighty percent, domestic dog," Ricky Spencer, an associate professor of zoology at the University of Western Sydney, said in a 2011 Australian Geographic article reported by The Washington Post.
This could make Wandi an important part of the Australian Dingo Foundation's breeding program.
"For us he is going to be a very valuable little thing," Watson told ABC.
But no one knew Wandi's conservation value when he was first discovered in a yard in the small town of Wandiligong in the state of Victoria in August.
"They went out in the morning and they could hear whimpering," veterinarian Rebekah Day told CNN.
The family that found Wandi first left him alone, thinking he was a lost puppy. But when no one came for him, they brought him to Day's Alpine Animal Hospital in nearby Bright.
Day said she found marks on his back that suggested he was carried away from his original family by a bird of prey.
"The resident hadn't heard any [other dingoes] calling. So he was just a lonely little soul sitting in a backyard," she told ABC. "He was adorable, serious puppy cuteness."
Wandi was eventually moved to Watson's sanctuary while his caretakers waited for the results of genetic testing. He can now join the around 40 adult dingoes in the foundation's breeding program.
"We're just keeping the genetic lines going until the day that there's going to be a safe place where they can be rewilded," Watson told CNN.
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The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
The period of the 45th presidency will go down as dark days for the United States — not just for the violent insurgency and impeachment that capped off Donald Trump's four years in office, but for every regressive action that came before.
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