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: wildlife biology
Spiny, striped, pygmy and giant bandicoots of New Guinea
By Natalie Warburton. Quenda are quirky inhabitants of many gardens and parks in the Perth metropolitan region. But did you know that they are only one of more than twenty species of bandicoots that are found around Australia and New Guinea? Unlike our local species, little is known of the diets and behaviour of their…
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…
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….
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,…
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…
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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