One Man’s Stew
Flight Of The Dodo
By Ed Lusch

     Everyone has heard of the Dodo, that ungainly, stupid-looking flightless bird which became extinct hundreds of years ago. Next to the dinosaurs, the Dodo is the most famous animal to have turned out the lights. We remember its existence because we (Man) caused its disappearance.
     Found only on the island of Mauritius, the last eyewitness account of living Dodos took place in 1662. Several surviving birds were captured and eaten by stranded Dutch mariners, but after that, no Dodos were ever seen alive again.
     A combination of insidious factors doomed the Dodo. Dutch and Portuguese sailors killed the bird, boiled it, smoked it, pickled it and otherwise roasted it to rareness. Once Dodos became rare, they were no longer worth the trouble of hunting. Man introduced animals such as pigs, monkeys, and cats, ate the remaining Dodo eggs and chicks, sealing the bird’s fate. As renowned science writer David Quammen put it, “The toilet bowl of its destiny had been flushed.”
     The Dodo would never plod about the island again. But, did other plant or animal species get flushed down their “toilet bowl of destiny” as a result of the Dodo’s inglorious departure?
     As mentioned in October’s column, “There But For the Grace of God,” species do not die alone. The inter-dependence of flora and fauna dictates that no species is an island.
     Biologists do not know what other plants or animals went down for the count with, or shortly after, the KO of the Dodo. But the process of the ripple or domino affect of extinction as applied to the Dodo could have looked something like this: Dodo guano was the primary food source of the Mauritius fecal beetle. Without Dodo doodoo, the fecal beetle’s population plunged. Its main predator, the Mauritius Stinky Skink, fed almost exclusively on the Fecal Beetle and with its meal ticket now scarce, the Stinky Skink population plummeted precipitously. A small endemic Island Hawk needed the Stinky Skink as a food source and for the calcium contained in the lizard’s bones which provided the shell hardness of its eggs. The hawk began laying soft-shelled eggs, which broke under the weight of the incubating female and no future hawk generations survived.
     These three island dwellers, the Fecal Beetle, Stinky Skink and Island Hawk, while not directly decimated by the loss of the Dodo, became rare because of it: rareness is the prelude to extinction. Of course, these are highly simplified examples of species interdependence and we don’t have to stop at the hawk.
     What if a certain fruit, say the red Mauritius apple, favored by the Dodo had to pass through the Dodo’s gut before it could germinate? And no other animal on the island could provide this symbiotic relationship. Of course, the adult trees live on until death, but with no seed germination—no offspring—and once again we hear the toilet flushing. With the loss of animal and plant diversity, the island of Mauritius becomes ecologically impoverished.
     Regardless of whether or not the above imagined scenario is close to the mark or not, the island in reality has become impoverished and continues to lose its Eco-integrity.
When, if ever, does this seepage of floral and faunal erosion subside? No one knows. The death of the Dodo—one domino tumbled, if you will—may have been the beginning of the zoological collapse of Mauritius Island. Is this simply an isolated event, or is the Dodo a symbol of something more ominously persuasive than a big, dumb, flightless bird?