Conservation is a most contentious discipline, partly because it is ecology plus a moral stance. As such you might compare it to discussions about religious truths in the last several centuries but it is a discussion among scientists who accept the priority of scientific evidence. In Australia for the past few years there has been much discussion of the role of the dingo in protecting biodiversity via mesopredator release of foxes and cats (Allen et al. 2013; Colman et al. 2014; Hayward and Marlow 2014; Letnic et al. 2011, and many more papers). I do not propose here to declare a winner in this controversy but I want to dissect it as an example of an ecological issue with so many dimensions it could continue for a long time.

Dingos in Australia are viewed like wolves in North America – the ultimate enemy that must be reduced or eradicated if possible. When in doubt about what to do, killing dingos or wolves has become the first commandment of wildlife management and conservation. The ecologist would like to know, given this socially determined goal, what are the ecological consequences of reduction or eradication of dingos or wolves. How do we determine that?

The experimentalist suggests doing a removal experiment (or conversely a re-introduction experiment) so we have ecosystems with and without dingos (Newsome et al. 2015). This would have to be carried out on a large scale dependent on the home range size of the dingo and for a number of years so that the benefits or the costs of the removal would be clear. Here is the first hurdle, this kind of experiment cannot be done, and only a quasi-experiment is possible by finding areas that have dingos and others that do not have any (or a reduced population) and comparing ecosystems. This decision immediately introduces 5 problems:

1. The areas with- and without- the dingo are not comparable in many respects. Areas with dingos for example may be national parks placed in the mountains or in areas that humans cannot use for agriculture, while areas with dingo control are in fertile agricultural landscapes with farming subsidies.
2. Even given areas with and without dingos there is the problem of validating the usual dingo reduction carried out by poison baits or shooting. This is an important methodological issue.
3. One has to census the mesopredators, in Australia foxes and cats, with further methodological issues of how to achieve that with accuracy.
4. In addition one has to census the smaller vertebrates presumed to be possibly affected by the mesopredator offtake.
5. Finally one has to do this for several years, possibly 5-10 years, particularly in variable environments, and in several pairs of areas chosen to represent the range of ecosystems of interest.

All in all this is a formidable research program, and one that has been carried out in part by the researchers working on dingos. And we owe them our congratulations for their hard work. The major part of the current controversy has been how one measures population abundance of all the species involved. The larger the organism, paradoxically the more difficult and expensive the methods of estimating abundance. Indirect measures, often from predator tracks in sand plots, are forced on researchers because of a lack of funding and the landscape scale of the problem. The essence of the problem is that tracks in sand or mud measure both abundance and activity. If movements increase in the breeding season, tracks may indicate activity more than abundance. If old roads are the main sampling sites, the measurements are not a random sample of the landscape.

This monumental sampling headache can be eliminated by the bold stroke of concluding with Nimmo et al. (2015) and Stephens et al. (2015) that indirect measures of abundance are sufficient for guiding actions in conservation management. They may be, they may not be, and we fall back into the ecological dilemma that different ecosystems may give different answers. And the background question is what level of accuracy do you need in your study? We are all in a hurry now and want action for conservation. If you need to know only whether you have “few” or “many” dingos or tigers in your area, indirect methods may well serve the purpose. We are rushing now into the “Era of the Camera” in wildlife management because the cost is low and the volume of data is large. Camera ecology may be sufficient for occupancy questions, but may not be enough for demographic analysis without detailed studies.

The moral issue that emerges from this particular dingo controversy is similar to the one that bedevils wolf control in North America and Eurasia – should we remove large predators from ecosystems? The ecologist’s job is to determine the biodiversity costs and benefits of such actions. But in the end we are moral beings as well as ecologists, and for the record, not the scientific record but the moral one, I think it is poor policy to remove dingos, wolves, and all large predators from ecosystems. Society however seems to disagree.

Allen, B.L., Allen, L.R., Engeman, R.M., and Leung, L.K.P. 2013. Intraguild relationships between sympatric predators exposed to lethal control: predator manipulation experiments. Frontiers in Zoology 10(39): 1-18. doi:10.1186/1742-9994-10-39.

Colman, N.J., Gordon, C.E., Crowther, M.S., and Letnic, M. 2014. Lethal control of an apex predator has unintended cascading effects on forest mammal assemblages. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B 281(1803): 20133094. doi:DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2013.3094.

Hayward, M.W., and Marlow, N. 2014. Will dingoes really conserve wildlife and can our methods tell? Journal of Applied Ecology 51(4): 835-838. doi:10.1111/1365-2664.12250.

Letnic, M., Greenville, A., Denny, E., Dickman, C.R., Tischler, M., Gordon, C., and Koch, F. 2011. Does a top predator suppress the abundance of an invasive mesopredator at a continental scale? Global Ecology and Biogeography 20(2): 343-353. doi:10.1111/j.1466-8238.2010.00600.x.

Newsome, T.M., et al. (2015) Resolving the value of the dingo in ecological restoration. Restoration Ecology, 23 (in press). doi: 10.1111/rec.12186

Nimmo, D.G., Watson, S.J., Forsyth, D.M., and Bradshaw, C.J.A. 2015. Dingoes can help conserve wildlife and our methods can tell. Journal of Applied Ecology 52. (in press, 27 Jan. 2015). doi:10.1111/1365-2664.12369.

Stephens, P.A., Pettorelli, N., Barlow, J., Whittingham, M.J., and Cadotte, M.W. 2015. Management by proxy? The use of indices in applied ecology. Journal of Applied Ecology 52(1): 1-6. doi:10.1111/1365-2664.12383.