![]() ![]() ![]() Any sort of naval exploration would lead to the introduction of rats (and by extension ship cats) to the island, and setting up of stations or bases would invariably lead to some other animals being brought along to allow for some self-sustenance. Moving into how this ties into their extinction (or how it could be prevented), there really isn't a way for this to be avoided unless the Age of Exploration as we know it is averted. Coupled with the rest of the island's ecosystem being massively disrupted at the same time, and the recipe makes for a rapid extinction. While young dodos seem to have grown very fast compared to other flightless island endemics (growing to independence seemingly before the end of their first wet season, in time for the drought), tiny clutch sizes coupled with a lack of any defenses of nests from predators (as well as cats and dogs hunting young) meant that eventually there was simply no way for the birds to reproduce effectively. Not much is known about dodo reproduction, but they seem to have followed the common trend for flightless island birds of only one or two offspring per nesting season. The main problem, and the main reason they seem to have gone extinct so quickly as they did, was the introduction of various invasive animals to Mauritus by sailors that either killed the adult birds (dogs), ate chicks (cats), or most importantly, ate their eggs (pigs and rats). Pressure from actual humans on dodos was fairly minimal, in the sense of most island endemics - while they were easily hunted by sailors, their flesh was universally regarded as distasteful, and no records exist of sailors making attempt to collect their eggs or young (as was the case with seabirds on islands where they nested en masse). Their lack of fear towards larger predators is a bigger issue, and ties into the big one with dodos: their lack of adaptation to deal with non-native insular animals. Birds in a captive situation with reliable food would not have to stop gorging themselves, or go through a starvation period, making them get as fat as those depicted in the more famous paintings of specimens imported to European menageries. While they seem to be gluttonous when faced with fruit as indicated by written sailor records, the fact that Mauritus has an annual dry/wet cycle indicates that this was an adaptational feature to encourage birds to gorge on fruit when it fell at the end of the wet season, giving them fat reserves to rely on during the drought. For one, they don't seem to have been (exceedingly) fat and sluggish birds in their natural habitat their leg bones indicate at least some capacity for fairly fast movement, and the obesity seen in depictions of the few live specimens brought to Europe is nowadays believed to be the result of overfeeding of the birds. Let's break it down into what we understand about the dodo, and why it died out.Ĭontrary to how it is generally portrayed, what we know about dodos (which is a lot less than one would expect given the fame of the animal: partial remains from four specimens brought to London, some written anecdotes and drawings from sailors, a couple of paintings of animals in menageries, and some subfossil remains from a single swamp in Mauritus) suggests that they weren't nearly as dysfunctional as commonly made out to be. Having dodos survive into the modern day is a very difficult proposition, if not completely impossible for a timeline as we know it. ![]()
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