What happened to the dodo? The dodo went extinct in 1662 because of hunting and the introduction of invasive species.
We all know the saying, “as dead as a dodo,” but where does it come from? Well, interestingly, “dead as a dodo” doesn’t appear until 1904 and is probably an adaption of “dead as a doornail”. That makes some sense when you consider that the majority of people wouldn’t know what a dodo was. The reason for the sudden appearance of the phrase “dead as a dodo” in 1904 might have something to do with it being one of the characters in “Alice in Wonderland”, which was published in 1865, but there is no way of knowing.
Dodos were a species of flightless birds that lived only on the island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean. They were between 62 and 75 cm tall and they weight between 10 and 17 kg. They were fairly large birds. They were able to fly at some point, which is shown by the fact that they had to be able to fly in order to reach the island. They lost the ability to fly because they had no predators to escape from on Mauritius, and size was more of an advantage to them than being able to fly. They ate fruit, nuts, seeds, and roots.
The dodo is a very famous example of human caused extinction. The first dodos were encountered by Dutch sailors in 1598 and the entire species was extinct 64 years later. So, what happened? The first problem is that the Dutch sailors and settlers on the islands ate a lot of the birds. Dodos don’t have any natural predators, which means they never learned to have any fear. If nothing is going to eat you, you don’t really have anything to worry about. The sailors found that they could walk up to the dodos and just club them because the dodos wouldn’t run away. They were able to take a few at a time and they ate them on their ships, or in their settlements. They were very large birds and they provided a lot of food, but they didn’t actually taste that nice. They were said to be oily and tough. One account says that the belly and breast were “of pleasant flavor and easily masticated.” The dodo tasted so bad that the Dutch sailors called them Walghvögel, which means “tasteless” or “sickly”. The sailors had been on a ship for a long time and they weren’t too fussy when it came to meat.
The sailors and settlers did eat a lot of dodos, but that is not the main reason that they went extinct. Mauritius is a fairly big island and the humans there probably wouldn’t have been able to hunt all of the dodos. I say probably because there is no way of knowing. If they survived long enough, the remaining dodos would probably develop a healthy fear of humans as well. The main reason the dodos went extinct is because of the invasive species that came to Mauritius with the sailors.
When the sailors landed on Mauritius, they brought rats, cats, and pigs. The rats lived on the ships and ate the food the sailors had. The cats were brought on board to deal with the rat problem. And the pigs were brought to provide food on the journey because pigs are hardy animals that will eat anything. When they landed on the island, the rats, cats, and some of the pigs escaped and became wild. They weren’t a direct threat to the dodos because they are much smaller than a dodo. The problem was that they ate the dodo’s eggs. Many birds lay a lot of eggs. Chickens, for example, can lay an egg a day if the conditions are right. Dodos can only lay one egg every season. The rats and pigs started to multiply and it didn’t take long for them to eat all of the dodo eggs. Cats don’t eat eggs, but they were perfectly capable of eating the dodo chicks. With all of their eggs and young gone, there was no hope for the dodos and once the adults died, they went extinct.
There has been talk about trying to bring the dodo back to life. There is no way of bringing back an extinct animal, but scientists could make a version of it. The first step would be to sequence the DNA. It is difficult to find quality DNA in long dead animals because it decays, but scientists have found one sample that has perfect DNA. The next step would be to take a chicken egg when it is still a group of cells and edit the DNA in those cells to match those of a dodo. Then they would wait for the egg to develop and hopefully, a dodo would come out. It sounds simple in practice, but it is a long way from being possible yet. And this is what I learned today.
Sources
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/09/20/what-happened-to-the-last-dodo-bird
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauritius
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Adventures_in_Wonderland
Image By BazzaDaRambler – Oxford University Museum of Natural History … dodo – dead apparently.Uploaded by FunkMonk, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20054563