Dog days

 

Credit: Sage Ross

“Dogs in the Wild: Meet the Family” is a 2022 BBC nature documentary. Everyone knows about the domestic dog, but here we are indeed invited to meet its “family”. I admit that the diversity of the Canidae is pretty staggering. Some live in unexpected places: the Tibetan fox in the Himalayas, the Arctic wolf at the Queen Elizabeth Islands and the diminutive fennec fox in the Sahara desert. And yes, many red foxes live in London!

Some canids are embroiled in intricate near-symbiotic relationships with other organisms. The dingoes at Fraser Island survive in part by eating eggs of sea turtles, but they inadvertently also protect hatched turtles from further predation, since no other predators dares to approach the beaches if the dingoes roam there. The Fraser Island dingo population is also considered important since these specimens are supposedly very “pure”, genetically speaking, while dingoes in other parts of Australia have interbred with domestic dogs. To stop further racial mixing, domestics have been banned from the island (sure wonder why humanity meddles into the love lives of feral canids, but there you go).

Meanwhile in South America, the wolf apple is the preferred diet of the maned wolf, a bizarre canid that looks like a fox on stilts. The maned wolf´s bad eating habits help spread the wolf apple, with some assistance from leaf-cutter ants! The canid literally shits out the seeds of the wolf apples it consumes, and the seeds are then saved from the scorching sun by ants, which takes them to shaded and moist places around their nests (the ants are interested in remaining fruit fragments attached to the seeds). There, the seeds sprout and a new wolf apple plant can wet the appetite of the maned wolf…

I don´t think “Dogs in the Wild” has any deeper purpose or meaning. The point is to show the viewer some interesting animals, and perhaps to show off the technological prowess of the BBC. But sure, I admit that “the family” was pretty wild!