• • • google suggested • • •
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
Found: The Rare Singing Dogs of New Guinea, In the Wild
The distant cousin of the dingo had been hiding out in the island’s highlands.
These singing dogs were recently found near a gold mine in Papua. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
JAMES MCINTYRE FIRST HEARD ABOUT the singing dogs of New Guinea in 1996. More than two decades passed before he finally saw one in person. There were near misses before: anecdotal sightings, scatological evidence, camera trap snapshots, and the occasional eerie, prolonged vocalizations that give the animals their name all hinted at their existence.
But the breakthrough moment finally came in 2018, when McIntyre’s troupe of field biologists came across the canids at 14,000 feet, sniffing around a high-altitude gold mine on the western side of the island, in the Indonesian province of Papua. This was a shock: They were far from the lowlands that constitute their historic range, where previous expeditions had attempted to seek the dogs out.
Until recently, scientists weren’t sure whether these rare singing dogs still existed in the wild. But the high-altitude, copper-haired dogs that McIntyre encountered have now been confirmed as a novel population of the New Guinea singing dog, according to a study recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
McIntyre, a co-author of the recent paper and the founder and director of field research for the New Guinea Highland Wild Dog Foundation, captured some individuals temporarily, to collect evidence of their existence and to attach GPS tags to some of them. “In science you need to prove it, and you prove it with DNA,” McIntyre says. “We were able to provide some of the best canid geneticists on the planet with the tools they needed to ascertain what kind of dogs they were up there.” …
Long kept secret, Canada’s ghostly spirit bears are even rarer than thought
Adept at catching salmon because they blend into the daylight, the white bears are small in number – yet First Nations are stepping in to help.
A spirit bear in British Columbia. A recent study revealed that the white bear is rarer and more vulnerable than previously thought.
When Marven Robinson was a kid, any mention of spirit bears was met with hushed dismissal from the elders in his community, the Gitga’at First Nation of Hartley Bay, British Columbia. Since the 19th century, Indigenous peoples in the area learned to keep the bears with ghostly coats a secret to protect them from fur traders.
As the ancient legend goes, the Wee’get (meaning the “raven,” known as the creator of the world) turned every 10th black bear white to remind people of the pristine conditions of the Ice Age.
Spirit bears are white-coated black bears that inherit their pale fur from a rare recessive gene. Known as moksgm’ol, meaning “white bear”, spirit bears are sacred to the Indigenous people who live in the Great Bear Rainforest, a 6.4m-hectare swath of land in central and northern British Columbia.
Despite growing public interest in the bruins, scientific understanding of them is still nascent. But a recent collaborative study by the Kitasoo/Xai’xais and Gitga’at First Nations and academic researchers has revealed that the white bear is rarer and more vulnerable than previously thought.
Researchers spent eight years combing 18,000sq km of the rainforest, placing lures on barbed wire to collect hair samples from black and spirit bears and map out the presence of the white bear gene. While scientists had previously estimated there were anywhere between 100 to 500 white bears, the study concluded the gene that causes spirit bears is up to 50% rarer than previously thought. Urgently, about half of spirit bear hotspots fall outside of British Columbia protected areas, making their habitats vulnerable to logging, mining and drilling projects.
Spirit bears are white-coated black bears that inherit their pale fur from a rare recessive gene.
Spirit bears have long been present in First Nations traditional song, dance, and storytelling, but it wasn’t until 1905 that they were recognized by Western science and named Kermode bears, after Francis Kermode, former director of the British Columbia Provincial Museum. It took another century for visitors to start flocking to the rainforest to catch a glimpse of the magical white-coated bear, producing a boost of ecotourism dollars for First Nations communities. The Kermode bear was even designated British Columbia’s official mammal. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
