Sandy Maliki was three weeks old, full of parasites and almost dead of thirst when Barry Eggleton spotted the dingo pup and her two siblings on the edge of a South Australian desert track. The man gave the little dingoes water and then drove on to fly home from the nearest airport. But as soon as he got home, he drove the 2,500 kilometers back with his wife Lyn. The puppies, so small that all three could fit in his hand, were still there, apparently abandoned by their mother. The Eggletons raised Sandy, Eggie, and Didi with the bottle.
Today, Sandy is probably the best-known representative of her breed – and the most important part of an answer to the long-debated question among biologists as to whether Australia’s largest land predators are a (feral) breed of domestic dog or a separate subspecies that is closer to wolves. In 2014, Sandy won a competition called by an American biotech company for “the most interesting genome in the world” – against a pit viper and a sea slug, among others. The prize money should enable scientists to elaborately break down Sandy’s genetic information.
Some Aborigines of Australia kept dingoes as guard dogs
On Saturday, 25 researchers from six countries – including a scientist from the federal Julius Kühn Institute for Crop Plant Research in Quedlinburg – published the results of their extensive investigationsin which they compared the genome of the desert dingo Sandy with that of a Greenland wolf and those of five domestic dogs of different breeds: a German Shepherd, a Great Dane, a Labrador, a Boxer and a Basenji, which is believed to be the oldest existing domestic dog breed.
The result: Dingoes like Sandy are genetically “fundamentally” different from domestic dogs, according to Australian study leaders Matt Field and William Ballard. In terms of evolutionary history, dingoes are therefore an early offshoot of the line of development towards modern dogs and stand between the wolf and the domestic dogs of today.
Dingo Sandy at the age of three weeks.
(Photo: HANDOUT/EUREKALERT/AFP)
The researchers emphasize one difference in particular between dogs and dingos: the genome of domestic dogs has been shaped primarily by artificial selection since the domestication of their ancestors by humans began 14,000 to 29,000 years ago in the Neolithic period. The genes of modern dingoes, on the other hand, were shaped by adaptation to the environmental conditions of Australia, where their ancestors had come 5,000 or even 8,000 years ago. There they lived largely wild, some of them kept by the natives as guard dogs, but never as hunting dogs.
This difference can be discovered, for example, in the different equipment of a gene that produces a protein called amylase 2B, which in turn enables the digestion of starchy food. There is only one copy of this gene in the genome of a dingo, like that of a wolf. In domestic dogs, on the other hand, there are up to twenty copies of it. The researchers explain this by saying that dogs have adapted to starchy foods, such as rice, that humans fed them. The wild dingoes, on the other hand, do not need this: they hunt marsupials, reptiles and fish. Ballard, Professor of Genetics at La Trobe University in Melbourne, even draws the conclusion from the new findings that they therefore do not kill sheep and other farm animals with a high fat content. He calls for better protection of the dingoes from the farmers’ stalkers.
Barry Eggleton says his dingoes are as tame and loving as other dogs. But dogs are just like children when it comes to dealing with them, but Sandy and her siblings are like adults: “They don’t need us to survive.”