Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/26/why-do-kangaroos-sometimes-attempt-to-harm-or-drown-dogs.html
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Whut yu sayin’ 'bout roos?
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It’s Australia. I’m pretty sure that kangaroos just kill dogs so that the rest of the continent’s lethal fauna won’t think they’re ‘soft’.
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It’s not just dogs…
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This got me thinking; how long does an introduced species have to be around before it is considered “native“?
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Depends. Humans? One generation, tops. According to themselves, anyway.
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At least in terms of moral valence, I tend to go with, “since before humans should have known better.” So roughly since Darwin, or a generation or two prior.
Victorians brought it over? Invasive.
First nations brought it over? Native.
More defensibly, if I’m going for consistency, “long enough that the local ecosystem has adapted to it and found a new stable state.”
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When that question arises in Australia, dingoes are usually suggested as one of the borderline cases where there’s a lot of disagreement about their native status.
The argument isn’t helped by the fact that it’s really hard to accurately estimate how long they’ve been here. Australia’s recent fossil record is very spotty. And if we try to measure how long they’ve been here by looking at how much their genome has drifted compared to their overseas ancestors, we strike another problem. Dingoes have been interbreeding with feral dogs brought here since 1788. We’re not even sure we know what the “pure” dingo genome is! So even if you decide they were native in 1787, you can still argue about whether the current dingo population still is native.
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exactly as I tought. thnx.
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