 Good afternoon and welcome to another episode of likeable science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen. Likeable science is all about how science is friendly, accessible, to be a central part of everyone's life. And today we're gonna be talking about a fun topic. We're gonna be talking about dogs. I don't like dogs, right? So I have with me Ms. Julie Chen. Welcome Julie. Hi, hi Ethan. Thank you so much for having me on the show. Julie is a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University in Environmental Sciences and Policy. Congratulations, that's great. She is the author of a recent article, Social Behavior and Structure in Wild and Captive Groups of the African Wild Dog. This was recently published in The Journal of Life, The Excitement of Biology. Yes. Congratulations. It's very nice to get an article in the journal when you're a grad student. That's a big coup. It's always very good when sort of your work is, you know, your hard work is recognized a little bit, you know. Yeah, excellent, excellent. And so your work basically is on the wild dog whose name is... Right. African wild dogs like co-inpectus. Like co-inpectus, okay. That's the genus and species. Yeah. So these are wild dogs that live in Africa. Yeah. And there are some considerable interest to conservationists now because like so much of the wildlife in Africa, their populations are much less than they used to be, right? They've run into habitat loss, who lost now. Right. So how was it that you got involved in doing this? Well, you know, in my research, you know, I was really interested in finding out what kind of behavior differences are sort of captive versus wild, African wild dogs. You know, and luckily at our local zoo, the Waikiki Zoo, which is a great place, they had a pretty full pack there. And so the point of my study was to really find out, are these animal, you know, do their behaviors, are they predominantly innate, meaning that it's really a matter of their DNA programming or is it learned, you know? So there are animals out there which are pretty much, they're born and they know what to do, you know, such as a lot of fishes and amphibians. Sea turtles are an excellent example. And then you also have animals such as primates and cetaceans that have a long learning period. You know, so I wanted to see where African wild dogs kind of sat on the spectrum. Right, because there's this move in conservation now at times to take animals that you've reared in a controlled environment, in a zoo or whatever, and then turn them loose basically. Yes. An animal which is behaving largely innately, you probably do pretty well, if at least, but an animal who's learned a lot of behaviors, unless you've been very careful about what you've taught it, will do very poorly as in this release, right? And, Nathan, that's a great point because the problem, so releasing of captive animals into the wild is very challenging, whichever animal you're talking about, right? And actually, there was a meta-study based on mammals that said the release of carnivorous mammals had a 70% mortality rate, okay? So that's pretty high, right? And these are the same challenges we find with African wild dogs, you know? But the nice silver lining is that if they are more innate, if they depend more on their instinct, then in theory, they should be much easier to reintroduce into the wild. And it's very important. You should get a higher success rate. Yes, yes, definitely. And there's all kinds of interesting work going on with, for instance, some of the condors that they purposely shield them with human contact when they're raising them. They have condor puppets feeding them. Yes, yes, exactly. So they're learning the right things. They'll pay attention to other condors, not people. Right. And that's the important part. So I mean, so these, the group I studied, of course, they were in the Honolulu Zoo. So they are a little bit habitualized to human beings because of our presence, you know, we're looking at humans. I mean, we're there looking at the dogs. But the zookeepers, I mean, they said, you know, they try to keep off limits to the dogs, limit interactions. So they're kept as wild as possible, you know? And that's very important. Now, lots of people probably aren't familiar with the wild dogs in Africa, right? Shall we start? I think you have a picture. You have some pictures, don't you? Yes, I do. I mean, we could look at slide one, which we could. So that is an African wild dog that you see right now. And essentially, you could think of them as wild dogs, you know? They belong to the same family as our domestic dogs, wolves and foxes. And you could think of them like medium to large sized dogs, right? They weigh about like 40 to 50 pounds. But what's very distinctive about them is their coat pattern, right? They have this distinct pattern of browns and blacks and whites and yellows. And each dog actually has a different pattern, you know? So it's like a signature, right? Just like some dolphins and whales, they all have different fin sort of shapes, too. It's the same with African wild dogs. It's useful when you're studying them in the wild, because you can learn to recognize individuals and then track them. It does get kind of hard, though, especially when they're bouncing around. Right, they're moving fast and they look similar or not. They live across much of Africa, much of the not desert, but more tropical and sub-tropical of South Africa, right? So they're found predominantly in Sub-Saharan Africa, which includes South Africa. Botswana has a good population there. There's Tanzania. There's also, I think, that's in Kenya. So that area, that's where they are. So it's sort of more of a drier Sub-Saharan kind of landscape versus tropical. Right, not really jungle. And they live, they have a pretty interesting social structure, right? Yes, that's a great question. So what is very unique about African wild dogs is that they are cooperative breeders. And what they are is essentially, in a pack, you only have two members that are breeding, and they're called the alpha pair. And the whole pack actually comes together to take care of the pups of the alpha pair, which is very unusual in nature, because essentially the other members are not breeding. They're giving up their reproductive fitness, which is a huge, no, no, no, right? I mean, your fitness and nature is pretty much determined by how many offspring you sort of have. But in this case, those non-breeding offspring are actually relative to what they are, typically the earlier children of the breeding pair. So it's super interesting. And sometimes it's also the brothers and sisters of the alpha pair. So the pack, the normal pack is really comprised of extended family, you know, the mother and the father, the children, aunts and uncles, you know, so very interesting. Yeah. But the female, as I understand, really sort of controls the whole thing and keeps other females actually from coming into heat and basically controls the whole thing. It actually is very interesting because there have been studies that show that the non-alpha members have lower testosterone levels and also lower estrogen levels. So they're less aggressive and less prone to want to breed. So only the alpha pair actually have elevated testosterone and estrogen levels. Yeah, no, it's very intriguing stuff like that. So within the larger ecosystem they play in, what their role, basically. So after a while, dogs actually play a very important role in the ecosystem. They are predators, so they're carnivores. So carnivores play a very important role because if you look at your basic food chain, you have three main levels. You have the top, which are the predators, the second are your herbivores. These are your animals such as your cows and your deer and your gazelles and etc. They eat the plants. At the lowest level you have the primary producers, which are your plants. Now imagine a world without carnivores anymore. So what would happen? The world will run amok with herbivores because there's nobody there to check them. As much as I don't want Bambi to be eaten, it's so important that their population do not explode. But in cases where they've taken all the predators away and deer populations have, they've eaten themselves into starvation. It's the same kind of reasoning with, when the wolves population got decimated in Yellowstone Park and the deer population exploded and they kind of ate out all the vegetation in there. And when that happened, it completely imbalances the ecosystem. Imagine if the world was bare of vegetation, that's no more food, no more shelter. And you are calling for a collapse of the ecosystem. They've seen on a small scale it really actually, that the removal of predators really fundamentally alters the balance of the planet types around all kinds of interesting things. So these packs range from handful to probably 20 or 30 individuals in a big pack, basically roam the cooperatively hunt, I assume. Yes, they do. So I mean the basic pack you could have a pack made of just two individuals, the alpha pair. And they have been recorded to have about 40 members, but on average it's 10 to 20 members, that's on average. And they essentially have a very tight knit social structure. They are together and do everything essentially together. That's the interesting part of, that's sort of the core of my research. They hunt together, they eat together, everything, they live together. Do you want to talk about or show some of those pictures? I would like to. So if we could go back to slide one. So these are some of the behaviors that I examine. So these are the African wild dogs in captivity. Here you actually see them, this is called resting association. So in the wild African wild dogs are resting all the time. And it's a form of social bonding. It's a very, very important behavior for them. It's kind of like they're hanging out. They're getting to know each other. So this behavior was exhibited by the captive group all the time also. And a lot of time they actually hang out in sort of groups based on their gender. They're also age and also they're ranked. Meaning dogs of the same age will hang out with each other more. And let's look at the next slide. So here this is called the greeting behavior. So in the wild, African wild dogs that are always greeting each other. It's kind of like, hey, hi, nice to see you. I haven't seen you. I miss you, right? And it's very, it's also a very important sort of social bonding behavior. Yes. And so in the captive group, you see them doing this all the time. They're kind of essentially nuzzling each other's faces. And there's so many of these behaviors are the same as the wild group. So the next slide we have here. So playing. So the act of playing is very common also in the wild pack of African wild dogs. And what was very surprising about my study is that the captive group played the same way as their wild counterparts, right? So here this is called case playing, right? Essentially one dog will be chased by the other dogs and they'll look back. They have this characteristic sort of back of their body is kind of tucked under them. Okay. And so the next slide is also about playing. So here we have play biting, right? So the dogs often they're playing with each other and they'll actually play bite with each other. There's no aggression. There's no sort of, you know, broken skin or anything, but it's essentially sort of like, you know, fun. And prediction younger animals, it's probably establishing where we're going to stand in the pack. Definitely. Definitely. All of this is definitely kind of helps them in sort of figuring out the ranking system who strongest, who will push, who won't. I know there's also one of the slide at the end, which actually you will see more of the coalition formation of the ranks. But let's look at the next slide. So this is more playing. And here the dog is actually playing stalking. So it's actually stalking another dog. And we know here that this is played because the tail is actually relaxed. There's also dominant stalking where, you know, dominant alpha is trying to sort of exert its dominance. And that's when its tail is straight out. So it's so interesting that even in captivity, they have these very minute detailed behavior that is identical with their wild African wild dog. And so I mean, I guess I want to circle back for a moment. So why African dogs? Was it just your advisors working on these when you started graduate school? Was it your long, deep interest in these animals? Well, I've always, so I grew up actually in South Africa. So I remember them when I was, I've seen them in person and I was always fascinated with them. But my research, I wanted to examine the social structure and behavior of animals, in captivity versus in the wild. And so I had to find an animal that had a very complex social structure. And there were only a few available at the zoo. Meerkats is one, but unfortunately, I wanted to do meerkats, but unfortunately, there was only one individual at the zoo. So that doesn't really help. So that didn't really help. But so then I thought about African wild dogs and there were, there was actually a pretty full pack there, you know, so they became an excellent specimen. Excellent. We're going to dig into this more deeply. I'm told that we have to go to a brief break right now. Julie Chen is with me. I'm your host, Ethan Allen, here on Likeable Science. We're talking about going to the dogs and we'll be back in one minute. Aloha. My name is Wendy Lowe and I want you to join me as we take our health back. On my show, all we do is talk about things in everyday life, in Hawaii or abroad. I have guests on board that would just talk about different aspects of health in every, in every way, whether it's medical health, nutritional health, diabetic health, you name it, we'll talk about it. Even financial health, we'll even have some of the Miss Hawaii's on board and all the different topics that I feel will make your health and your lifestyle a lot better. So come join me. I welcome you to take your health back. Mahalo. Aloha. I'm Marcia Joyner, inviting you to join us on Wednesdays at one o'clock for cannabis chronicles. The 10,000 year odyssey where we take a look at cannabis as food, cannabis as medicine, cannabis and religion, cannabis and dear old Uncle Sam. So please join us to learn all about cannabis again Wednesdays at one o'clock. Thank you. And welcome back to Going to the Dogs here on Likeable Science. I'm your host Ethan Allen. Thanks for coming back and joining us. Julie Chan is with me. She's a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, just published a paper about the social life of wild dogs in a journal Life, the excitement of biology. Again, congratulations on that. Thank you. So before the break, we were talking a little bit about some of the their social behaviors. We were pointing out there's a bunch of different behaviors that appear to be very parallel to the behaviors that exhibit in the wild, even in this captive pack who have never, never seen the wild, right? Yeah. And I think we had a few more, a few more pictures showing some more, some more of those. So we have some more pictures showing how, so here we have a parallel running, which is also a form of play. And so in the wild, the dogs do this when they're actually playing with each other, essentially they're running parallel flank to flank with each other. And the captive group was also demonstrating this very same behavior. The next slide. So okay, this is very interesting. So this gets into the behaviors that have to do with alpha dominance, right? So of course the alpha, and here it's the alpha female, they have a lot of control over the pack. You know, they decide in the wild, they decide, you know, when to hunt, when to start hunts, when to continue hunts and when to stop hunts, right? So in this picture that you see here, what I observed is the alpha female essentially got up from resting. And she started to head back to the back of the enclosure, which is where the food is kept. And all of a sudden, all the other sort of her children, they rouse themselves from rest and they start following her single file. Now we have to notice that they're following her single file because that is exactly how in the wild these packs follow the alpha. A lot of time you will actually see them following one after the other. So it's really interesting that, you know, in captivity, they're exhibiting exactly the same behavior. Yeah, there's probably a good evolutionary reason for that behavior. It probably makes it harder for other animals to pick up scent and harder to tell how many of them there are. Right. And it could also be like a ranking system, you know, who comes first and second. That would be interesting to know is it always in sort of that same order? It would be interesting. Yeah, that's definitely, that's a potential paper right there. Are there differences? I mean, are there things that you see in captivity you don't see in the wild or vice versa? So in captivity, you know, one of the problems is that the animals can't hunt, the enclosure is much smaller. So in the wild, African wild dogs, they have a range of 300 to 2,000 square kilometers. They're nomadic animals. So they roam the plains. They're running all over the land. Yeah, a lot of times. So, captivity kind of changes this a lot. They can't hunt anymore. They're fed all the time. They can't really sort of roam around their enclosure very much also. And so some behaviors such as, you know, dispersal. So in the wild, a lot of the female dogs, you know, that are not alpha, they will actually emigrate out to actually sort of reduce tension in the pack. They will emigrate out and actually start their own pack. You don't have this in captivity, right? You don't have hunting in captivity. And breeding is also very limited and controlled by, you know, the zookeepers, right? So the communal cooperative breeding, you don't really see that in captivity. But even that there have been so many similar behaviors, if it was allowed, I would not be surprised if the animals actually acted the same way. Yeah. And you could presumably set up a very large enclosure in outdoor space in Africa and get a pack of wood dispersal, travel around, might split the two packs conceivably. Yeah, and you could really see. Yes, you could really test it out easily, you know, to see that, you know, they were born in captivity, if sort of left to their own devices in like a large area where they have to hunt for themselves, how would they act? And I would not be surprised if their behaviors were very similar. Right. And so all this is sort of, this is great because it's sort of good news for the conservation of these animals, right? It sort of says, great, even if we lose them in the wild, you know, wiped out or reduced in the wild, if we can keep some remnant populations, even in relatively restricted circumstances, they'll probably sort of be good to go if we can ever restore some habitat for them. Yes, definitely. So, I mean, so far I did look into some papers and some people, you know, there have been some captive African wild dogs that have been released and they have not survived well. But, you know, but the thing is, as I mentioned before, releasing captive animals into the wild is very challenging, right? And depending on where you are on the spectrum, you know, you may need some preconditioning before you are released. So there actually have been a lot of success stories where, you know, for example, the African lion and environmental research trust, they have had a lot of success in rewilding captive-born African lions, right? And the key in what they're doing is that they socialize the pride before they release them. So essentially, essentially, they allow the pride to become a functional unit, okay, free of sort of human interaction. And so when they are released, they know what to do, you know, how to support them, how to interact, how to interact, et cetera, right? They've had some practice stalking prey, stalking breeding, also the social skills that they need, the hunting skills that they need, cooperative skills that they need, also. And so, for example, if we, I would believe that if we release the African wild dogs in Honolulu Zoo tomorrow, they probably won't survive well, right? They've never learned to hunt, they've never learned to survive on their own, right? But if you give them this preconditioning step, you know, and have them socialize as a functional pack, I believe that their survival rates will be much higher. Right, so if you put them into an enclosure of several hundred acres or several thousand acres, add some wild animals and prey animals in there for them to go after, give them some months or years of this, then they probably could be released with a fairly high success rate. Right, right. And so my theory is that, you know, depending on where you lie on the spectrum of, if you're an animal that's highly innate or highly, you know, need to have a lot of learning and training, you know, you could see like how much maybe preconditioning you need, like for example, sea turtles and amphibians, they don't need any. Like Sea Life Park, they have a great breeding program of sea turtles and they just release them, right? But maybe the African wild dogs are kind of in the middle left here, you know, so they need a little bit of, you know, training before they're released, right? If lions can do it, I'm pretty sure the African wild dogs can do it. And then something like chimpanzees would be a much longer, much more complex process. Much longer, much more complex. De-habituate them from people, habituate them to other chimpanzees, get a social structure going, teach them the skills, having to learn the skills they need to find the world. And especially with chimpanzees or primates, they're so interactive with us. It's very hard to sort of separate human interaction with them. That's been a problem with a lot of reintroductions that these animals are so habituated to people, they don't fear people, they walk up to people who work, people who release them, and those people probably shoot them, right? And that's actually a great point, Ethan, because that's actually one of the problems that captive African wild dogs have when they get released. The number one threat is being killed by humans, right? And also being killed by their main competitors, which are lions and hyenas. So they're so used to humans that they don't fear them. They may easily go up into a farm where there's livestock, and there you have human-animal conflict. So in the past, African wild dogs have been severely targeted by farmers, because they eat their livestock. So where do you want to take this work? What do you want to do with it? Well, I think the next great step for something like this is to find out what are the pre-conditioning steps. To really examine what is necessary to make these animals sort of functional in the wild after being bred and kept to the right. And of course, the challenge is always in conservation. There's always lack of funding. There's always lack of resources and manpower. And so if you could actually formulate a system that is affordable, economical, and very efficient, that would be great. Maybe the dogs essentially just need a close enclosure with their pack, and maybe just a couple of months together, like two to three, and that's enough for them to know what to do. Or maybe like some small other competitors, like a small lion or something. Who knows, right? The thing is we don't quite know right now. And I think that's a great avenue for the next step in this conservation. Right, so presumably some sort of almost a field test where you would get a much larger enclosure, minimize their contact with people even further. Right. They'll probably take a generation. Any wild dog who's growing up habituated to people, probably going to remember that and not ever be scared of people. Right. And maybe they need, like, right. But they're offspring, hopefully, who've never seen anyone, then it would not, they'd be very cautious about it. Right. And maybe they need like, you know, some encouragement to if you're humans, you know, maybe there's like, you know, sometimes you need to make noise around them or gunshots or stuff like that. That actually scares, and they learn that humans are dangerous, they need to be avoided, you know. Which is going to vastly aid their survival. Yes, definitely. Yeah, it's an all lesson. Yeah, I know. Learning to fear us. Yes, I know. And unfortunately, it's necessary sometimes, yeah. Now, this, I mean, I think this gets into, you know, all the animal releases that you try to do. I mean, the famous one, of course, was Ellis South Lion. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. All the conditioning that she herself tried to get her successfully. And it was difficult. Very difficult. Oh, yeah, I was taking a single lion and trying to get her out into a social environment, too, and you didn't have that in the image of socializing her, you know. Right, like with her, because she grew up in like essentially, she didn't have a prize. So when she was released, she had no friends, you know, she had no family. And no practices. No practice, yeah. The lion, yeah. Very, very, very challenging. Yes. So, you are going to finish up your degree? Yes, definitely. Sometime, reasonably soon? Reasonably soon, yeah. Hopefully in the year or two. And I mean, I would love to actually continue with my studies, maybe do a PhD or something. You know, my goal is definitely to get into wildlife conservation. You know, I have a love for mammals, especially African mammals, but also birds, because you know, I have parents, you know, and I always love birds a lot. So we will see, you know, like I feel right now, it really is a transition time for our planet. You know, there's a lot going on. There's been papers coming out that are saying that we may be on the cusp of the next mass extinction, the sixth mass extinction. And that's something we need to think about and worry about, you know. All our animals out there, all the wildlife out there may all be threatened. Yeah, so many species that start getting a collapse of the whole ecosystem. Yes. Many of them disappear, right? Yes. Yeah. So what would your advice to any young students, if they wanted to get into animal conservation business? Well, I would say that, you know, it's definitely a work for passion. You know, it's not something for glory or for money, you know, but I really believe it's worth it. I mean, essentially, you're helping save the planet, you know. And I think that, you know, experience is definitely key. You know, education is very key also, but experience first, you know. Go out there and volunteer, you know. Volunteer, because there's a lot of people who actually need a lot of help, you know, especially these rehabilitation programs. Everybody's underfunded. There's not a lot of money in wildlife conservation. So any kind of free time you have and you want to volunteer, go ahead and do it because they will definitely welcome it, you know. And what you get, what you get is in return is actually great experience, you know, and knowledge. And when you have that experience and knowledge and couple that with a great education in this background, somebody's going to want to use you for sure. Yeah, you are. Yeah. Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Julia. It's been a real pleasure having you here. I've learned a lot, as I'm sure all the audience has about wild dogs and conservation in general and great techniques to use. So I very much appreciate your taking the time to come by and talk with us today. Thank you so much, Ethan. It was a pleasure. And I hope you'll come back next weekend to another episode of Likeable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. Till then.