By Janine Kuehs and Natasha Tay. The Backyard Bandicooteers attended something a little different last week! St Emilie’s Primary School science teacher Kerrie Cogger contacted Murdoch University after they discovered little diggings in their school’s bushland. Mrs Cogger, along with her students (who together undertake many activities in the bushland), set up a motion activated…
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…
Backyard Bandicoots in Mandurah
By Melvyn Tuckey; Greenfields resident, committee member of Peel Preservation Group Inc. and avid nature lover. Early in 2017, Melvyn noticed a new creature visiting his backyard, and so begins the “Story of Bandi”… It was around midnight sometime in late January that I first sighted an unusual creature in my backyard. On this particular…
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…
Five Noongar eagles take to the sky
Simon Cherriman has been placing satellite-trackers on juvenile wedge-tailed eagles as part of his PhD studies. His project is investigating juvenile dispersal in these iconic birds, comparing how birds from arid and mesic parts of WA move when they leave the nest. Recently, five birds from the Perth region have been ‘sat-tagged’ – Simon will…
Backyard bandicoots
By Trish Fleming and Amanda Kristancic. They come in the middle of the night to raid our gardens of fungi, bulbs, and grubs – leaving in their wake characteristic small conical diggings across lawns and flower beds. Sharing our cities with southern brown bandicoots (quenda) is something that Perth and Mandurah residents have come to…
Bird Banding, long-term research, and ethics
By Bill Bateman. Hans Christian Cornelius Mortensen, back in the late 1890s, made small bands of aluminium, marked with his name and address, and attached them to the legs of birds – from starlings through to storks. Since then, bird ringing (in the UK and some other parts of the world, such as South Africa)…
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…
Bilby Indigenous Knowledge Festival at Kiwirrkurra
By Stuart Dawson. Last week I attended the Bilby Indigenous Knowledge Festival in Kiwirrkurra to share expertise and findings with Indigenous rangers, landowners, scientists and land managers. These are my unique experiences at this celebration of this important vulnerable species. As we arrived in Kiwirrkurra, the most remote community in Australia, at 1am, three things…
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:…
Foxes in the city
By Bill Bateman & Trish Fleming. Of all the species described as ‘urban adapters’, it is perhaps the red fox (Vulpes vulpes) that is most well-known. In Europe, foxes seem to have been hanging around towns and cities for centuries – certainly urban foxes were recorded around London in the 1800s [1]. Today, the red…
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….
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…
Hormones gone wild
By Stephanie Hing. Hormones, neurochemical signaling substances, are in charge of everything we do. From the time you got up in this morning to when your head hits the pillow tonight (and as you sleep), hormones will be working hard to keep you alive. They coordinate all the systems in our bodies from digesting food…
Some like it hot: Temperature-dependent Sex Determination (TSD) in reptiles
by Ash Wolfe. Did you know that the surrounding atmospheric temperature of an egg can influence whether a reptile will hatch as a boy or a girl? This is most common in turtles and crocodylids, but also occurs in tuatara and some other lizards. So, rather than genetic sex determination (GSD; like in humans,…
Death on the road
Bill Bateman & Lauren Gilson. Perhaps the most fundamental impact we can have on wildlife is killing it. We can be very opinionated on the rights and wrongs of killing animals; for instance, hunting is a very emotive issue. One cause of death of wildlife that we might not think about that much but which…
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).
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?
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…
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