By Nat Warburton. The relationship between what an animal eats and how big it is, is an interesting evolutionary problem. Herbivores seem to be able to get excessively big (think hippos, giraffe, elephants and our extinct marsupial friend diprotodon). Indeed, large body size can an advantage to being a herbivore. Herbivores require large communities of gut…
Numbat jaw muscles in 3D
By Vanessa Thomas and Nat Warburton. Numbats are the only strictly termite-eating marsupials. They are endangered and only found in a few small areas of south-west Western Australia. Numbats have evolved a range of adaptations to collect their tiny prey, including a long snout, a very long stick tongue and powerful forelimbs with long claws…
Do you have bandicoots in your backyard?
By Janine Kuehs and Amanda Kristancic. Do you live in a part of Perth with local bushland nearby? Are there quenda present? Do you see their little conical digs on your walks and hear them rustle quickly into the bushes in the evenings? Do you see evidence of their foraging in your backyard? Or hear…
Dingoes compared with wolves, ancient dogs and today’s pet dogs
By Colline Brassard and Trish Fleming. Dogs (Canis familiaris) are descendants of the grey wolf (Canis lupus). The earliest accepted dog remains date back to about 15,000 years ago. Although all dogs share this same ancestor, their life as human domesticates has led to considerable variation, and modern dogs are one of the most variable…
Dingoes walk down Easy Street, but don’t change their diet
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…
How to eat a mouse whole; changes in skull shape in a large elapid snake
By Matt Patterson and Ash Wolfe. It’s not that easy to eat your food whole. Especially if you don’t have limbs to assist you. That’s what snakes have to deal with every day. The challenge is even harder for young snakes, which have to develop their abilities to handle and ingest their food. The dugite…
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…
World Wildlife Day 2022: highlighting our important ecosystem engineers
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
Ancient animals reveal unexpected environments
By Natalie Warburton @aNATomy_lab. Studying animal behaviour and ecology can involve hundreds of hours of field work in uncomfortable conditions, and for Australian mammals at least, very long nights. But what about animals from the past? How can we understand their behaviour and ecology, and what can this tell us about how ecosystems and the…
A PhD in wildlife ecology – Part III: How to finish it
By Stuart Dawson The premiership quarter! Its not uncommon for people to feel that they wrote 80% of their thesis in the last 10% of the time. This is not a bad thing, often the penny only drops in these later stages, and you finally have the understanding to smash out the writing. But its…
A PhD in wildlife ecology – Part II: How to survive it
By Stuart Dawson You’ve got in the door, and the novelty has started to wear off. From the 6 months, to the 2-year mark, you can do a lot to set yourself up for success. Talk to people, they actually aren’t that scary Being familiar with the literature is fundamental to any scientific pursuit, but…
A PhD in wildlife ecology – Part I: Should I do it?
By Stuart Dawson A PhD in ecology can be a rewarding or regrettable experience. Enrolments in PhD programs are often more sought-after following downturns in the job market, and it seems likely that following COVID-19, lots of budding young wildlife biologists will use the times as an opportunity to return to uni to do a…
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…
Australian diggers – strong-arm excavators and aerators of Australian landscapes
By Meg Martin. Digging marsupials play an especially important ecological role in Australian ecosystems by helping with soil turnover, nutrient mixing, seed dispersal and increasing breakdown of organic materials. Many of these species are highly specialised diggers – with strong forlimbs and long claws. Historically, the interactions between bones and muscle during behaviour has been…
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…
A fearsome predator — even small stray and feral cats take large and difficult-to-handle prey
By Trish Fleming, Heather Crawford, Clare Auckland and Mike Calver. Despite thousands of years of domestication, pet cats (Felis catus) retain a strong hunting drive. It is therefore easy for cats to survive independently of people. Today in Australia, it is estimated that there are 1.4–5.6 million feral cats in natural environments, and another 0.7…
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,…
Second-hand foraging: endangered red-tails feed research red-caps
Lauren Gilson. For three months I have been measuring the evaporative water loss of Red-capped parrots and Western Rosellas. Residents of the mesic (moist climate) habitats around Perth, these species are providing data for a larger exploration of water balance in Australian vertebrates. First I had to catch the birds, which was not easy in…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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