By Natasha Tay. Australian animals get a bad rep for being a bit obtuse when it comes to predators, with more than half (73 of 124) of Australia’s Extinct, Threatened and Near Threatened terrestrial mammal species considered to be extremely susceptible to introduced red foxes and feral cats (Radford et al. 2018). For this reason,…
Category: Anti-predator behaviour
Runways and fancy feet – tracking escape paths of marsupials
By Natasha Tay. Ever thought you’d spend two weeks in the bush giving bettongs rave party feet and putting them on a runway for science? I travelled to Arid Recovery in South Australia this past May to do exactly that. My PhD investigates anti-predator behaviour in marsupials, focussing on how anatomy affects their physical ability…
Bobtails and dugites – reptiles in the city
By Ashleigh Wolfe. The study of urban ecology is a rising topic within the ecological research community, and as urban sprawl increases across the globe, and more and more people are moving to urbanised areas, the need to understand how we as humans impact wildlife is growing. Urbanisation presents novel challenges for wildlife in many…
Is ecotourism good or bad? The answer is never simple…
Bill Bateman & Trish Fleming. Humans innately like to categorise things. Perhaps this helps us to compartmentalise and understand the world. Zoology, and other life sciences, tend not to be so amenable to this; taxonomically and ecologically and physiologically and genetically there is always overlap, there is always some confusion. The study of behaviour is…
Island paradises: Are tourism and conservation compatible for ‘island tame’ species?
By Bill Bateman. Living on an island can have an effect on your behaviour. You might have noticed this yourself if you associate islands with holidays and relaxation. On an evolutionary scale something analogous happens. Darwin said: “At the Galapagos Islands, I pushed a hawk off a tree with the muzzle of my gun, and…
Who are you looking at?
by Bill Bateman & Trish Fleming. Animals are constantly on the lookout for potentially dangerous situations. Vigilance (time spent observing their environment for danger) is one measure of their antipredator responses. Another is their ‘flight initiation distance’ (simply: FID = how close you can come to an animal before they take off).
The ‘Risky-Decoy’ hypothesis
by Bill Bateman & Trish Fleming. If an ecologist asks you if you are good at modelling you might think that they are referring to something mathematical, and start running in the opposite direction. But a simpler kind of modelling is often used by behavioural ecologists who are interested in predation. If you wanted to…
Autotomy – just drop it and run
by Bill Bateman & Trish Fleming. An organism only has to fail once in escaping a predator for its evolutionary fitness to be reduced to zero. Selection to avoid ending up as a meal is, therefore, intense. More intense than selection on avoiding missing a meal such that in the evolutionary arms race, prey tends…
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