African Painted Dogs Could Be Cooked Into Extinction By Climate Change

30.08.2023 - 01:29 / forbes.com

Global warming isn’t only affecting animals like polar bears and emperor penguins. African wild dog populations may also collapse due to climate change

© Copyright by GrrlScientist | hosted by Forbes | LinkTr.ee

When people think of animals that could be driven extinct by climate change, they usually think of polar bears and, perhaps these days, emperor penguins, both of which are struggling to survive due to the lack of sea ice at the poles. But a newly published study by a team of researchers based in Great Britain finds that African wild dogs will likely go extinct too if average global temperatures increase by more than 3°C (5.4°F).

The African wild dog, Lycaon pictus, also known as the painted dog or Cape hunting dog, is an endangered wild canine native to sub-Saharan Africa where it inhabits savannas and arid regions. A previous study – which took place at sites in Kenya, Botswana and Zimbabwe – found that intentional and unintentional killing by humans, as well as disease spread by domestic dogs, accounted for 44% of all African wild dog deaths at the study sites between 2002 and 2017 (ref).

This most recent study was based on information about painted dogs’ survival and breeding that was gathered from the Kenya subpopulation over a period of 16 years. This data was used to construct a computer model that runs population simulations under various demographic parameters and temperature scenarios. These computer models showed population declines of approximately 40% under a 1°C temperature increase and a complete population collapse at a temperature increase of 3°C or higher — a scenario that could possibly occur by 2070.

Already, Earth’s average temperature has increased by at least 1.1°C (1.9°F) since 1880, according to an ongoing temperature analysis by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).

“The severity of the impact even surprised me — around the middle case scenario the model predicts catastrophic population collapse,” said the study’s lead author, quantitative ecologist Daniella Rabaiotti, a Postgraduate Teaching Assistant and Honorary Research Fellow at University College London.

“The model predicts that wild dogs are able to maintain the number of breeding individuals in the population under 1-3 degrees of warming, but, above that threshold, the number of packs — and the entire population — collapses,” Dr Rabaiotti elaborated on Twitter (otherwise known as x, lol.)

Behavioral data gathered from the Kenya subpopulation also revealed that under higher temperatures, the wild dogs limit their daytime activities thereby reducing their hunting opportunities whilst also increasing their risk of contracting diseases.

Further, Dr Rabaiotti and collaborators also found that adult