Could feral animals in Australia become distinct species?

UngulateNerd92

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You might think evolution is glacially slow. At a species level, that’s true. But evolution happens every time organisms produce offspring. The everyday mixing of genes – combined with mutations – throws up new generations upon which “selection pressure” will act.

This pressure is popularly known as survival of the fittest, where fittest means “best adapted” individuals. Tiger snakes with a mutation for a larger head can eat larger prey. Evolution is the zoomed-out version, where species change – or evolve into new ones, better adapted to the environment they find themselves in.

Evolution acts over millennia. But given the right conditions, it can also work surprisingly rapidly. Australia’s isolation produced our distinctive animals. But until recently in a geological sense, it had no camels, cats, toads and dogs. Now it does. Millions of feral animals, birds and amphibians now call Australia home. And their new home is beginning to change them in turn.

Could feral animals in Australia become distinct species? It's possible – and we're seeing some early signs
 
I have three things to say about this.

1. I get the feeling that "compassionate conservationists" and some animal rights activists might try to use this to give invasive species protection. That, I'm not looking forward to if it were to happen.

2. I'm not sure why dingoes are being used as an example since unlike the rest of the introduced fauna of Australia, dingoes are native. True, they didn't originally evolve in Australia, but they've been there for thousands of years which has allowed the native fauna to learn how to live with them.

3. Komodo Dragons aren't actually an example of island gigantism. They originally evolved in Australia and made it to Indonesia in the Pleistocene.
 
Ah yes, allow the invasive species to destroy the populations to exterminate even more native species so they can replace the ones we exterminated.

Nah, I'm good with exterminating invasive species.
As a Kiwi "compassionate conservationists" do really annoy me, would you rather have all the cool native biodiversity or more rats and possums. Luckily its a very much minority, and pest control is quite widespread, from school kids to farmers, even I have been doing pest control. These people really just either lack an understanding of ecology or just really out of touch.
 
Ah yes, allow the invasive species to destroy the populations to exterminate even more native species so they can replace the ones we exterminated.

Nah, I'm good with exterminating invasive species.
What is interesting about this reply is this is exactly how many of those who do view Dingoes as an invasive species take view of them. I've heard new studies have come to light to challenge that narrative about the dingo, so I honestly don't feel I know enough to have a fully-formed opinion of the issue myself, but my mind immediately went to the theory they "replaced" the native marsupial carnivores.

Perhaps revelations like this should provide more incentive to remove invasives as it illustrates the potential for them to evolve beyond their existing niches and potentially become even bigger problems in the future. Who says what camels, cats, toads and dogs in Australia could become with a thousand years of evolution? Perhaps even more deadly, even more able to compete against native wildlife, less constrained.
 
As a Kiwi "compassionate conservationists" do really annoy me, would you rather have all the cool native biodiversity or more rats and possums. Luckily its a very much minority, and pest control is quite widespread, from school kids to farmers, even I have been doing pest control. These people really just either lack an understanding of ecology or just really out of touch.
Yes, thank goodness it's a minority. Good on you for doing invasive species control. I'm gonna say that they're really out of touch because keep in mind, they somehow manage to get phd's.

@JVM I do not understand why some view dingoes as an invasive species. Unlike pythons which have been in Florida for only decades, dingoes have been in Australia for thousands of years. As a result, animals like kangaroos have learned how to deal with them. Kangaroos for example will head for the water and try to drown them to defend themselves. Not to mention they're the only large carnivore in most of Australia. So getting rid of them would cause more harm than good to the landscapes.
 
Yes, thank goodness it's a minority. Good on you for doing invasive species control. I'm gonna say that they're really out of touch because keep in mind, they somehow manage to get phd's.

@JVM I do not understand why some view dingoes as an invasive species. Unlike pythons which have been in Florida for only decades, dingoes have been in Australia for thousands of years. As a result, animals like kangaroos have learned how to deal with them. Kangaroos for example will head for the water and try to drown them to defend themselves. Not to mention they're the only large carnivore in most of Australia. So getting rid of them would cause more harm than good to the landscapes.
The hypothesis for some years was that Tasmanian devils and thylacine were driven to mainland extinction by competition with the dingo. This has recently been challenged from what I understand, but that hypothesis if true would fit the description of native species being exterminated and replaced, which would make them essentially a successful imvasive species, regardless if kangaroo had learned to survive.

That being said, if the hypothesis is being discredited as I have heard, none of that matters, but it's obvious to see how if this was held as true, it would influence negative views of the dingo as a proto-invasive species. New data seems to point that marsupial carnivores may have died out before the dingo, in which case it blamelessly filled an open and necessary niche.

I am not trying to advance anything against the dingo if it sounds like it, I am not trying to change your stated opinio which I find completely valid, but you said you "didn't understand" so I thought I would elaborate.
 
I think there is a lot discussion of extermination efforts here, which are not really relevant to the topic at hand which discusses what will happen with species if they remain in situ, not whether or not they should.

The dingo originated as an invasive species, it's just been there for long enough that you can't tell so much because the way the ecosystem worked before it got there has never been seen, and because it now fills the rolls filled in the past by marsupial predator, whether or not it directly influenced their declines. I don't consider the dingo native, per se, but it is naturalized and its place in the ecosystem that remains is stable, and it should not be removed. It almost certainly would not have been beneficial when it was first introduced.

It will be the same in another ten thousand years with whatever new species of placentals survive that long. It doesn't take too long, really, for animals to start fitting more "neatly" into the ecosystem after an initial destructive period where competitors lack adaptations to compete with or defend against them. Putting aside entirely the ethics of extermination efforts entirely, I consider it unlikely that certain species like the house cat can ever truly be removed from the continent of Australia. They are too small, cryptic, and over a vast and little-inhabited region, and they can continue to be released through pet owners unless very dramatic laws are enacted that reduce their prevalence in captivity. Let's assume in this example that this is the case, and cats remain there as dingo ancestors did. Eventually, after a lot of extinctions of smaller prey animals that don't fare well against it, it will become like the dingo, and those which remain will have adapted survival strategies that work, and things will go on.

There are a lot of extinctions in the short term regarding introduced species, but also rapid behavioral adaptations among the initial survivors. A few birds and rodents in Australia have already learned to safely kill and eat cane toads, a novel toxic species, in less than 90 years. That is literally nothing as far as evolutionary time scales go, which usually operate on hundreds of thousands to millions of years. Invasive is an arbitrary term that eventually can't keep applying to a species. When is the cut off? A hundred years? A thousand? A million or more? Tens of millions of years ago, monkeys colonized South America from an ocean crossing across the Atlantic and if they were like any modern mammal introduction, likely contributed to the extinction of some other species before evolving into new forms that could not be considered anything but native to this new region. Australia has received a very large number of adaptable, generalist animals all at once through anthropogenic means, but animals have been reaching new regions and altering ecology and contributing to the extinction of other animals as long as animals have existed, and I don't consider this inherently unnatural. There is a time limit on how quickly to remove these animals from their new ecosystems before they become a more intrinsic part of them - because eventually, they will do so, and the ecosystem will reach a new norm, and over million of years remaining animal life will evolve into new species in a more stable ecology.

The dingo is an interesting example because it is one of the only species to have reached that point, where removing it is now directly harmful to the remaining ecosystem, and where prey species have effective survival strategies against canid predators. As awful as the concept of a future Australia where cats remained at large killing native wildlife may sound, in a few thousand years the cat would probably be much less destructive to the ecosystem than it is now, only 200 years after its introduction, and species which survive this early period would become less vulnerable. Australian cats are experiencing rapid phenotype changes as the outback is a distinct ecosystem with novel evolutionary pressures. Cats that live there for long enough will speciate into new forms, and if any remain in ten thousand years and there are humans left to see them, these new subspecies of cats could not really be considered invasive anymore. Left for millions of years, they would give rise to an Oceanian radiation of felid species, and then new genera, until they were no more introduced than the new world monkeys. It will come at the loss of previous biodiversity, and this is where people oppose the very idea, but on timescales larger than humans are good at imagining, life will still endure and become something new in the aftermath. Dinosaurs would find the idea of a world overrun with megafaunal mammals terrible if they had the capacity, but their extinction allowed the evolution of billions of new organisms that would never have existed otherwise over the following 66 million years. On long time spans events such as this are major motivators of evolutionary changes.
 
Ah yes, allow the invasive species to destroy the populations to exterminate even more native species so they can replace the ones we exterminated.

Nah, I'm good with exterminating invasive species.
I did not say that I approved of introduced species! Just speculated about future possibilities.
 
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