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(CNN) – This dog can sing … or at least it can sing.
The New Guinea Song Dog, an extremely rare breed, is best known for its unique barks and howls – it is capable of emitting harmonic sounds that have been compared to the calls of a humpback whale.
Only about 200 captive song dogs live in conservation centers or zoos, descendants of some wild dogs captured in the 1970s. The animals are highly inbred due to a lack of new genes.
None had been seen in the wild for half a century until 2016, when an expedition located and studied 15 wild dogs in the remote highlands on the western side of New Guinea, known as Papua, in Indonesia. A new expedition returned to the study site in 2018 to collect detailed biological samples to confirm whether these wild highland dogs are indeed the predecessors of song dogs.
A comparison of DNA extracted from blood collected from three of the dogs suggested that they have very similar genomic sequences and are much more closely linked to each other than any other canine, according to research published Monday in the journal PNAS.
While their genomes were not identical, the researchers believed that highland dogs are the original wild population of New Guinea song dogs, with the difference up to physical separation over several decades and inbreeding among captive song dogs from New Guinea.
“They seem more related to a conservation biology New Guinea songdog population that is descended from eight dogs brought to the United States many, many, many years ago,” said Elaine Ostrander, distinguished researcher at the National Institutes of Health and senior author of the article.
“Conservation dogs are super inbred; (he started) with eight dogs, and they have been interbred, interbred, and interbred for generations, so they’ve lost a lot of genetic diversity.”
Wild highland dogs had a 70% genetic overlap with the captive population, Ostrander said, and the difference likely contained some of the original diversity now lacking in the inbred population, a breed created largely by people.
New Guinea is the second largest island in the world. The eastern half is Papua New Guinea, while the western half is part of Indonesia and is known as Papua. The dogs were first described after a specimen was found at an altitude of about 2,100 meters in the central province of Papua New Guinea in 1897, according to the study.
Despite anecdotal reports and unconfirmed photographs in recent years, many feared that the New Guinea Highland Wild Dog had become extinct from habitat loss and mixing with the village’s wild dogs.
However, the dogs were rediscovered in 2016 near the Grasberg copper and gold mine in Papua, where measures to protect the ecosystem around the mine had inadvertently created a sanctuary where highland wild dogs could thrive. The expedition team was led by James McIntyre, a field researcher and founder of the New Guinea Highland Wild Dog Foundation.
The same team traveled to the remote high-altitude region two years later and braved extreme weather and terrain to collect samples of blood, hair, excrement, tissue and saliva. The researchers also took measurements, weight, age, general health and body condition of the dogs, and two animals were given GPS collars to study their travel habits and territories.
According to the San Diego Zoo, the singing dog’s joints and spine are extremely flexible – it climbs and jumps like a cat. The zoo said ultrasound scans had shown this dog’s unique whine is similar to the song of a humpback whale.
Ultimately, the researchers hope that it will be possible to breed some of the wild highland dogs with the New Guinea song dogs, perhaps by using sperm samples, to generate a true New Guinea song dog population.
“New Guinea song dogs are rare, they are exotic, they have this beautiful harmonic vocalization that is not found anywhere else in nature, so losing that as a species is not a good thing. We don’t want to see this (animal) disappear.” Ostrander said.
By studying animals, the researchers hope to deepen our understanding of dogs before they were domesticated. While New Guinea song dogs and wild highland dogs are part of the canine species Canis lupus familiaris, the researchers found that each contains genomic variants that do not exist in other dogs we know of today.
“They are on a tree branch along with dingoes, which suggests that song dogs, dingoes, and wild highland dogs break away very early. They are much older in terms of canine development,” said Heidi Parker, a scientist. from the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health.
“By learning more about these ancient proto-dogs, we will learn new facts about modern dog breeds and the history of dog domestication,” Ostrander said in a statement. “After all, much of what we learn about dogs is reflected in humans.”
This story was first published on CNN.com, “A rare ‘singing’ dog, believed to have been extinct in the wild for 50 years, still thrives.”
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