March 2014: The poisoning of dingoes, which are the top predators in the Australian bush, has a deleterious effect on small native mammals such as marsupial mice, bandicoots and native rodents. These were the recent findings of a research group from the Universities of Sydney and Western Sydney.
Dingoes are poisoned by farmers concerned about their predation on domestic livestock. The research, which set out to discover the long-term effects of this routine dingo control, was conducted in forested National Parks in New South Wales. Its conclusions were that loss of dingoes is associated with greater activity by foxes, which prey on small marsupials and native rodents. The numbers of kangaroos and wallabies were also found to increase when dingoes disappeared, and grazing by these herbivores reduces the density of the understorey vegetation in which the small ground-dwelling mammals live.
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