Did overpopulation kill the dodo?

Answer 1

Yes, overpopulation of humans, but the animals which the humans brought were considered to have had more of an impact on their extinction than humans hunting them.

As with many animals evolving in isolation from significant predators, the dodo was entirely fearless of people, and this, in combination with its flightlessness, made it easy prey. But journals are full of reports regarding the bad taste and tough meat of the dodo, while other local species such as the Red Rail were praised for their taste. However, when humans first arrived on Mauritius, they also brought with them other animals that had not existed on the island before, including dogs, pigs, cats, rats and Crab-eating Macaques, which plundered the dodo nests, while humans destroyed the forests where the birds made their homes; currently, the impact these animals - especially the pigs and macaques - had on the dodo population is considered to have been more severe than that of hunting. The 2005 expedition's finds are apparently of animals killed by a flash flood; such mass mortalities would have further jeopardized an already extinction-prone species.

Although there are scattered reports of mass killings of dodos for provisioning of ships, archaeological investigations have hitherto found scant evidence of human predation on these birds. Some bones of at least two dodos were found in caves at Baie du Cap which were used as shelters by fugitive slaves and convicts in the 17th century, but due to their isolation in high, broken terrain were not easily accessible to dodos naturally. By 1755, Cossigny reports that the number of refugees and settlers which cut down the inland forest was so high that the well-flighted Mauritius Blue Pigeon was rapidly declining all over the island.

There is some controversy surrounding the extinction date of the dodo. Some state that "the extinction of the Dodo is commonly dated to the last confirmed sighting in 1662, reported by shipwrecked mariner Volkert Evertsz", but many other sources suggest the more conjectural date 1681. Roberts & Solow point out that because the sighting prior to 1662 was in 1638, the Dodo was likely already very rare by the 1660s, and that thus a disputed report from 1674 cannot be dismissed off-hand. Statistical analysis of the hunting records of Issac Johannes Lamotius, carried out by Julian Hume and coworkers[citation needed], give a new estimated extinction date of 1693, with a 95% confidence interval of 1688 to 1715. Considering more circumstantial evidence such as travellers' reports and the lack of good reports after 1689, it is likely that the dodo became extinct before 1700; thus, the last Dodo was killed barely more than a century after the species' discovery in 1581.

Few took particular notice of the extinct bird; by the early 19th century it seemed altogether too strange a creature, and was believed by many to be a myth. With the discovery of the first batch of dodo bones in the Mare aux Songes and the reports written about them by George Clarke, government schoolmaster at Mahébourg, from 1865 on, interest in the bird was rekindled. In the same year in which Clarke started to publish his reports, the newly-vindicated bird was featured as a character in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. With the popularity of the book, the Dodo became a well-known and easily recognizable icon of extinction.

Answer 2

No, they didn't. Spanish sailors stopped at the island which was the habitat of the dodo. They killed them and had their food. This continued till 1920 to 1930 till they were extinct.

Answer 3

The bird was rendered extinct by rats from the spanish ships eating the eggs of the dodo...this is well documented
http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/expeditions/treasure_fossil/Treasures/Dodo/dodo.html?dinos

Answer 4

the dodoes were killed and eaten by the spanish sailors as fresh meat

Answer 5

I was thinking that the rats that came over on the ship ate all the eggs, and then the saliors ate the birds for meat

Answer 6

No, the dodo killed them selfs, they are not called the "dodo" because they are smart..

Answer 7

No. The bird was hunted to extinction by sailors.

Answer 8

I think they were killed off by introduced fauna like rats and more importantly, man.