Fraser Island dingoes are surviving as a superpack, eating less fish and garbage and roaming up to 120 kilometres a week.
They are more tolerant of each other than their mainland cousins and move around the Island depending on turtle and fish seasons, according to UQ dingo researcher Nick Baker.
Mr Baker has been researching the ecology of Fraser Island dingoes for his PhD since the fatal dingo attack on nine-year-old Clinton Gage on April 30, 2001.
The island’s large population of dingoes have often clashed with tourists by stealing food from campsites or hassling and attacking campers for food.
Some tourists continue to illegally feed or approach the dingoes despite big fines.
Mr Baker has been collecting dingo DNA, recording dingo encounters and tagging and tracking the dogs with ear tags and sand plots.
“On the mainland you have these strong packs that will kill anything off that tries to come into their area,” Mr Baker said.
“On the island they work like a superpack. They act as one giant pack rather than several small packs as was expected.
“They seem to have a home range where they spend most of their time and keep others out, but there’s not as much attack aggression as you get on the mainland.”
He said while the island dingoes worked together, the superpack was not terrorising the island.
He believed the dingoes were tolerant because they had more resources such as dead fish and turtles on the beach which they shared rather than aggressively defended.
But they were eating more natural prey such as bandicoots, rats, echidnas and skinks and less fish, human food and garbage.
In 1994, 80 percent of dingo faeces contained fish but Mr Baker’s study revealed this had dropped to 50 percent with only 10 percent of scats containing human food or garbage such as plastic bags or aluminium foil.
“This indicates that their population is returning to a more natural balance.
“What we want to see is dingoes being wild, doing what wild dingoes do and a big part of that is removing the dependency on supplementary food from humans.”
Dingoes can move safely through occupied territory and groups shift around the island where resources are greatest, depending on seasons.
“They learn very quickly that at certain times of year there will be fish available along the beach for example in tailor season when there are thousands of fishermen on the Island.
“We see a distinct shift in activity to the north of the island when turtle season is on.”
Most dingo activity is on the eastern side of the island with some adults travelling 27 kilometres in six hours.
One dingo ousted from his group travelled about 120 kilometres in a week down the eastern edge of the island from Waddy Point to Hook Point.
“It’s unusual for them to travel through other dog’s territories like that so quickly.
“When he actually turned up 100 kilometres away, he didn’t have a scratch on him.”
He said the island dingoes remained a wild population with less human interaction, largely due to the Island’s dingo management plan and more rangers.
“That massive education program has just made a huge difference to the way that people interact with them.
“You don’t get people doing as many stupid things as they used to do like trying to feed them and leaving food out in campgrounds.”
By February, Mr Baker’s research should detail more than 30 types of dingo prey, where dingoes move to throughout the year and their genetics.
His genetic data will reveal how pure the island dingoes are, how many are there, and their genetic variability.
To collect the DNA he has used scent lure traps which lure the dogs to a gaffer tape strip which they roll on and collects hair from which the DNA is extracted.
It is estimated there are between 100 and 200 dingoes on Fraser Island which Mr Baker said was a high density of dogs for the area.
Mr Baker’s research was supervised by Dr Luke Leung of the School of Animal Studies and was funded by a $67,000 grant from the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service.
For more information contact Mr Baker (phone: 0407 679 677, email: n.baker@uq.edu.au) or Miguel Holland at UQ Communications (phone: 07 3365 2619, email: m.holland@uq.edu.au)
