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Encore for singing dogs? Discovery could save species from extinction

Photo by Brian Davis

A recent international study discovered that the New Guinea singing dog, a population thought to be extinct in the wild, shares nearly its entire genetic identity with the New Guinea highland dog, a rarely seen wild population in the island’s high-altitude, mountain regions.

According to Brian Davis, a co-senior author of the study and a research assistant professor at the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, this suggests that the two dog populations diverged within the past few decades and are essentially from the same population.

Because the captive group of singing dogs is severely inbred, this new information could support a conservation program with the potential to save the singing dogs and bring their population back from the brink of extinction.

The research project began in 2018, when James “Mac” MacIntyre, the head of the New Guinea Highland Wild Dog Foundation, led an expedition into the mountains to collect blood samples from highland dogs.

These samples were sent to Davis, who analyzed the highland dog DNA and compared samples collected from captive singing dogs, named for their unique vocalizations that resemble a wolf howl combined with a whale song.

“We assessed about 200,000 genetic markers across the genome,” Davis said. “Once we sampled these markers, my colleague Heidi Parker at the National Institutes of Health, who’s a fantastic canine geneticist, compared these markers with more than 1,500 other dogs.

“We basically did an all-to-all comparison to find their place in the tree of life for dogs,” he said. “When we found out that the highland dogs were most similar to the singing dogs, we knew we had something.”

He discovered that while all dogs in Oceania (the geographical region including Australia, New Guinea, and nearby islands) descend from the same ancestral population, the singing and highland dogs have a highly similar genome. As well, the highland dogs do not appear significantly hybridized with any other population of dog, reinforcing their unique place in dog evolution.

In addition to advancing the knowledge of the singing dog population, this project also inspired many questions to fuel future studies.

“Now we’re trying to understand the timing in which each Oceania population branched off,” Davis said. “That’s going to be the subject of some future work, especially when we get more samples. We also hope to understand where these dogs are along the domestication continuum.”