By Faith Chen. The greater bilby (Macrotis lagotis) is an important ecosystem engineer. Their extensive burrows provide important shelter, foraging and hunting opportunities for a variety of other mammals, birds, reptiles, and invertebrates (Hofstede & Dziminski 2017; Dawson et al. 2019). Bilbies were once widely distributed across the Australian continent but are now restricted to…
Category: Wildlife biology & management
Do black-flanked rock-wallabies compete with kangaroos?
By Julia White. Paruna Sanctuary is privately managed by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC) as a wildlife corridor between Avon Valley National Park and Walyunga National Park near Gidgegannup. It’s partial predator-proof fencing means that it serves as a refuge for some very special fauna, including the endangered black-flanked rock-wallaby. These little wallabies are reasonably…
Red foxes feasting on Australian wildlife
By Trish Fleming. The fox is one of the world’s most widespread carnivores. Key to its success is its opportunistic diet. They eat anything(!), from insects to mammals, live prey to carrion. They are known predators of turtle eggs, digging up nests of eggs and newly hatched young. They love poultry and will also take…
Cat bells for biodiversity
By Natasha Harrison. Australia’s birds, reptiles, and mammals are increasingly becoming at risk of extinction [1]. Many of these species inhabit urban areas where one of the major threats to their survival and persistence is predation from domestic cats. It is estimated that the average pet cat kills close to 200 wildlife prey species per…
The great escape
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,…
Tracking quokkas through fires
By Leticia Povh. Most Western Australians know quokkas from their travels to Rottnest Island. Fewer of us are lucky enough to have been introduced to quokkas on the mainland, where quokkas are restricted to a small number of scattered populations. These populations face threats, including reduction of habitat, decreasing rainfall, competition with feral species, and…
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…
Give an Easter Bilby, because they give back!
By Stuart Dawson. Easter is upon us, the holy grail of long weekends (especially when so close to ANZAC Day). Every year in Australia we celebrate this time with chocolate bunnies, inadvertently popularising an invasive and destructive species, the European Rabbit. The reason we use rabbits appears to be due to their famously fecund nature,…
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…
Follow the road – bilbies and cats use access tracks
By Stuart Dawson. As humans, we follow linear clearings all day. Every road, footpath, and hallway is a clearly defined, linear opening that allows us to move easily, quickly, and (excluding some beautiful European cities) reduces the likelihood of becoming lost. When these roads and tracks are within undisturbed vegetation, such as across much of…
Secrets of the noodji (native ash-grey mouse)
By Kiarrah Smith. Despite being subject to the greatest rate of Australian mammal species extinction over recent times, native rodents are a relatively poorly studied group. The risk of rapid decline is particularly valid for species considered ‘least concern’, but for which we have very little understanding of their biology or habitat requirements. One such…
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…
As humans change the world, predators seize the chance to succeed
Published in The Conversation and in Animal Behaviour By Bill Bateman and Trish Fleming. If you have ever been to a nature reserve in Africa, you may have been lucky enough to see predators on a kill – maybe something spectacular like lions on a giraffe. The chances are you got to see that because…
Wild dog control
A three-year project examining control of wild dogs has been finalised. A summary of our findings on wild dog impacts is available and some news articles summarise this work. This work will be continued as part of a grant awarded under the Western Australian Wild Dog Action Plan. You can read about this proposed work…
Advances in Mammalogy in a Changing World #IMC12
By Trish Fleming. 750 mammal experts made the long trip to Perth last week, to discuss breaking research on their favourite furballs at the 12th International Mammal Congress. There were up to 10 parallel sessions, which made it difficult deciding which talks to attend at any one time – no two attendees would have come…
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…
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…
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…
Cryptozoology in southwest Western Australia; or ‘where have all the cougars gone?’
By Bill Bateman. Cryptozoology is a strange subject – it literally means the zoology of ‘hidden’ or undiscovered animals. Cryptozoology can include the scientific description of species like the okapi (Okapia johnstoni), a giraffe-like artiodactyl from central Africa, that first became known in the west in the late 1800s/early 1900s; or even the gorilla (Gorilla…
A tiny strip of metal…
By Lauren Gilson & Nic Dunlop. Who would have thought that one tiny strip of metal could convey so much information? It isn’t a microchip; in fact it is not electronic at all. It is a rather low-tech, simple instrument: the metal bird band. On a fairy tern (Sternula nereis), this band is 5.5 mm…
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:…
No water before white man – the story of a watering hole
By Tracey Moore. The definition of rangelands is ‘open country used for grazing and hunting animals’ and/or ‘woodlands, shrublands and grasslands for animals to graze or wander upon’. A total of eighty one percent of Western Australia is rangelands. Some of the rangelands resembles a desert and to run stock on it seems like a…
How do you relocate animals you can’t catch?
Originally posted on Brian Chambers – Wildlife Research Blog:
There are a lot of species of wildlife in Australia that we know very little about. Generally we know a fair bit about the mammals, particularly those that live in the more temperate parts of the continent and so are close to where the majority of…
Are urban ravens really ‘thugs’ and ‘murderers’?
By Bill Bateman. There has been a series of letters in West Australian newspapers recently that have prompted me to write this piece: the letters complain about an apparent rise in the number of ravens (Corvus coronoides) in suburbs and a concomitant decline in other bird species. The ravens are accused of nest robbing: “there…
Shelter me, feed me! Quokkas select plants for shelter and food
By Holly Poole. Quokkas have been isolated on Rottnest Island over the last 7,000 years, since sea levels rose and cut off connectivity with the mainland. The island has a high density of animals. In autumn, after a hot and dry summer, if animals do not have sufficient body reserves, they can be particularly challenged…
Habitat islands in a sea of urbanisation – Identifying reserves used by quenda
By Gill Bryant. Quenda are fantastic urban adapters, persisting in and around cities and towns across southwest Western Australia (WA). Quenda play an important role as ecosystem engineers by modifying their environment well out of proportion to their body size, where a single quenda can excavate 3.9 tonnes of soil each year digging for their…
High density housing: Termite mounds are more than just lumps of dirt
By Trish Fleming. Termites are amazing ecosystem engineers – they create massive changes in ecosystems that are far out of proportion to their size. A recent paper by Thompson and Thompson (2015; Pacific Conservation Biology) has captured how important termite mounds are for the Australian landscape. At their study site in the Pilbara region of Western…
It’s getting hot in here: Reptile assemblages in drought-affected forest
By Shannon Dundas. In the past 50 years, the climate in southwest WA has become hotter and drier [1, 2]. Annual rainfall in the northern jarrah forest has decreased by 17% since the 1970s [3]. In addition to the direct effects, changing climate is having a substantial impact on wildlife species through changes in habitat….
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