By Tenaya Duncan. Linear clearings are everywhere. We use them every day, to get to work, take the dog for a walk, get to our office or the shops or even to go on a road trip. Roads, footpaths and hallways, free of obstruction, make our travel more efficient. And we aren’t the only ones…
Tag: Murdoch University
Bilbies’ burrow building takes a hit from feral cats
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…
Procrastibaking – 2018 Bake your thesis competition
By John-Michael Stuart, Janine Kuehs and Natasha Tay. So we are not going to sugar-coat it, anyone who has done a PhD will tell you it is always an ongoing challenge to avoid the temptation to procrastinate and stay on track with your research. Especially this time of year when research fatigue sets in and…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
Life in the city: urban carnivores
by Bill Bateman & Trish Fleming. Our paper “Bateman P.W. & Fleming P.A. (2012). Review Article. Big city life: carnivores in urban environments. Journal of Zoology, 287, 1–23” has made it on to the list top cited papers of 2013 for Journal of Zoology. Obviously enough, it pleases us that our research is making an…
Welcome to Western WEB
Western Australian researchers have joined forces to create the WWEB. Working across urban, agricultural and natural landscapes, we investigate how animals respond to human presence, but can also contribute to our quality of life. We are wildlife biologists. Our research focuses on translational biology, where improving our understanding of the physiology and behaviour of vertebrates…
westernWEB 