By Natasha Tay. On 3rd March 1973 at the meeting of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), representatives of 80 countries agreed to protect animals and plants from being excessively and unsustainably traded and exploited. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) was thus created…
Tag: conservation
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…
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…
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…
Results are in! Highlights from backyard bandicoot spy-cams
By Emily Webster and Janine Kuehs. Many lucky residents of Mandurah and surrounds will have seen or heard about the bandicoot also known as quenda. You might even be proud to share your backyard with a quenda or two. But quenda areimpacted by expanding urban development fragmenting their habitat, and the presence of introduced predators…
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…
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…
‘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:…
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…
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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