How the dodo went extinct
The dodo did not die because it was stupid. This explainer shows what actually killed it, in under eighty years, and what the sailors brought ashore with them.
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Transcript
The dodo's world: safe from predators
Meet the dodo, a flightless bird that lived only on Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean.
For millions of years the dodo thrived alone on Mauritius with no natural predators.
Being flightless was no problem because there were no hunters to escape from.
Sailors arrive with new animals
In 1598 Dutch sailors arrived on Mauritius in their ships.
They brought domesticated pigs and rats, which had never lived on the island before.
Multiple threats collapse the population
Pigs rooted through the forest floor and destroyed dodo nests, eating eggs before they hatched.
Rats ate dodo chicks and competed for food.
Dutch sailors also hunted dodos for meat to feed their ships' crews.
All three threats combined overwhelmed the bird's ability to survive.
Extinction in less than a century
By 1681, only eighty-three years after the first sailors landed, the last dodo died.
The species was gone from the island and from the world.
The lesson: habitat and invasive species
The dodo shows us how fragile island species can be.
When humans bring new predators and hunting pressure to a place where animals evolved with no defenses, extinction can happen fast.
Today we protect endangered species by controlling invasive animals and keeping their habitats safe.
Every sentence above was written before a single picture was drawn, then each object it names was painted for this video alone.
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