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: Feral & introduced species
A Rubbish Diet
By Heather Crawford, Mike Calver and Trish Fleming. Domestic cats (Felis catus) are one of the most widely distributed and successful carnivores globally. In cities, unowned cats (‘stray’) live in close association with human habitations and can roam across neighbourhoods, commercial areas, parks and bush reserves, hunting wildlife and scavenging food where they can find…
A fearsome predator — even small stray and feral cats take large and difficult-to-handle prey
By Trish Fleming, Heather Crawford, Clare Auckland and Mike Calver. Despite thousands of years of domestication, pet cats (Felis catus) retain a strong hunting drive. It is therefore easy for cats to survive independently of people. Today in Australia, it is estimated that there are 1.4–5.6 million feral cats in natural environments, and another 0.7…
Can we save flatback turtle nests from foxes?
By John-Michael Stuart. Murdoch University is part of a joint effort in the State’s north-west to save a population of vulnerable flatback turtles from predation by foxes (see story). Along with Curtin University and the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions (DBCA), we have been working with the pastoralist of the remote Mundabullangana Station. Mundabullangana…
Dead animals offer a treasure trove of data
By Trish Fleming. Red foxes were introduced into Australia from Europe and have become established over the continent over the last 100 years (Saunders et al. 1995). The red fox has contributed to the extinction of more than 25 Australian mammal species (reviewed by Saunders, Gentle & Dickman 2010, Woinarski et al. 2014). The Red…
Remote cameras in your closets?
By Peter Adams. Eventually it happens to all of us, the lab gets cluttered with equipment, space becomes a premium and inevitably you have no other option but to face facts, it’s time for the dreaded lab clean up. I discovered boxes of old cameras that have sparked off a trip down memory lane.
‘Ugly’ animals need love too – With limited research funding, do we have to choose what we work on?
Our paper has been named one of the Top 10 stories for 2016 by Australian Geographic, and listed as one of the top-downloaded articles for 2016 in Zoology & Animal Science by Wiley! By Trish Fleming and Bill Bateman. In a recent paper published in Mammal Review, titled ‘The good, the bad, and the ugly:…
Wary foxes – smarter than our baiting regimes?
by Tracey Moore. A recent study looking into the effectiveness of 1080 baiting in Western Australian wheatbelt reserves noted a single fox surviving after 8 baiting campaigns (Marlow et al. 2015). This signifies we are up against some clever foxes when it comes to the control of wild canids. After all the saying ‘cunning as…
Hot ham! Using thermal imagery to count feral pigs
by Peter Adams. Feral pigs have a significant impact on Australia’s native resources. This is most obvious in the disturbance they cause by their rooting behaviour. They turn over the soil in search for subterranean food resources such as tubers, roots, rhizomes, fungal fruiting bodies, and invertebrates. Basically, they eat everything they can find. But…
Fox predation of turtle nests
by Stuart Dawson. Turtles are good examples of r-strategists. They produce many young that experience high mortality (compared with K strategists, such as humans, which invest heavily in each individual offspring). Most people would know that many turtles are killed as hatchlings, but did you realise that they are often predated even before they even hatch?
Perspective: methods for controlling fox populations
by Shannon Dundas. Baiting using sustained, coordinated, broad-scale baiting programs between government agencies and private landowners is the most effective way to control red fox numbers. For agricultural areas, effective fox control will reduce stock losses. Effective predator control is also essential to enable native species to survive within their natural habitat, a much more feasible…
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