Top-predators play stabilising roles in island food webs, including Fraser Island, Australia. Subsidising generalist predators with human-sourced food could disrupt this balance, but has been proposed to improve the overall health of the island’s dingo (Canis lupus dingo) population, which is allegedly ‘starving’ or in ‘poor condition’. We assess this hypothesis by describing the diet and health of dingoes on Fraser Island from datasets collected between 2001 and 2015. Medium-sized mammals (such as bandicoots) and fish were the most common food items detected in dingo scat records. Stomach contents records revealed additional information on diet, such as the occurrence of human-sourced foods. Trail camera records highlighted dingo utilisation of stranded marine fauna, particularly turtles and whales. Mean adult body weights were higher than the national average, body condition scores and abundant-excessive fat reserves indicated a generally ideal-heavy physical condition, and parasite loads were low and comparable to other dingo populations. These data do not support hypotheses that Fraser Island dingoes have restricted diets or are in poor physical condition. Rather, they indicate that dingoes on Fraser Island are capable of exploiting a diverse array of food sources which contributes to the vast majority of dingoes being of good-excellent physical condition.

Canids across the world are involved in negative interactions between humans and their interests, with numerous examples of conflict management. K’gari (Fraser Island) and its dingo population are well known for the human-dingo conflict in the tourism and residential scenes. In this article, the successful management of such interactions is described through six key lessons learnt from over 20 years of adaptive management and its evolution into the current Fraser Island Dingo Conservation and Risk Management Strategy. These are (1) focus on people first, (2) understand local dingo ecology, (3) identify the pathway to intervention, (4) target dingo impacts, and prioritise behaviours and individuals, (5) work to a strategy (adaptive management), and (6) collaborate and engage with external stakeholders. This best-practice approach may be useful to managers of other populations of canids.