Australia's last mainland Eastern quoll

[youcantry]

Earlier this month Gary Opit and I had the pleasure of visiting the Australian Museum in Sydney, for the purpose of viewing Australia's last confirmed mainland Eastern quoll specimen. Click through to read the full story and view the enlarged image.

Please note - this photo was produced with the permission of the Australian Museum and may not be reproduced for any purpose. Full terms of usage contained in the main article.

wherelightmeetsdark.com/index.php?module=wiki&page=LastMainlandEasternQuoll

Chris.

[Thylacopardus]

Hi Chris,

Fascinating article, what a real shame. Thanks for that article.
It just sends shivers down your spine to think something that took 25 million years to evolve from a common ancestor then becomes extinct in just 200 years since the modern human way of life arrived to this ancient land. We could not even save the quoll in Lane Cove.....what a joke we are, worste still 99.99% never even knew it was ever there.
Thanks Chris I am now one of the .01% that knew.

Put us all in the shame file for this one...we can't blame the Tasmanians for this one guys!

[Thylacoleo Gal]

Good points. There's probably a strong case for deforestation affecting temperate forests because that's where most of the farming is done, hence most of the land clearances. Apparently the case is not so strong for deforestation of tropical rain forests. So whether forestation is the cause of native animals' extinction or whether the cause is perhaps the introduction of feral animals leading to 'hyper-predation', as per Chris Johnson, or whether it's forest turnover due to human farming practices, is not so clear. Exotic predators/competitors and habitat range restriction are probably the key factor, at least in Australia.

D.


No convincing evidence for decline in tropical forests
www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-01/uol-nce010708.php

Claims that tropical forests are declining cannot be backed up by hard evidence, according to new research from the University of Leeds.

This major challenge to conventional thinking is the surprising finding of a study published today in the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences by Dr Alan Grainger, Senior Lecturer in Geography and one of the world's leading experts on tropical deforestation.

"Every few years we get a new estimate of the annual rate of tropical deforestation,” said Dr Grainger. “They always seem to show that these marvellous forests have only a short time left. Unfortunately, everybody assumes that deforestation is happening and fails to look at the bigger picture – what is happening to forest area as a whole.”

In the first attempt for many years to chart the long-term trend in tropical forest area, he spent more than three years going through all available United Nations data with a fine toothcomb – and found some serious problems.

“The errors and inconsistencies I have discovered in the area data raise too many questions to provide convincing support for the accepted picture of tropical forest decline over the last 40 years,” he said. “Scientists all over the world who have used these data to make predictions of species extinctions and the role of forests in global climate change will find it helpful to revisit their findings in the light of my study.”

Dr Grainger does not claim that tropical deforestation is not occurring, as there is plenty of local evidence for that. But owing to the lack of frequent scientific monitoring, something for which he has campaigned for 25 years, we cannot use available data to track the long-term global trend in tropical forest area with great accuracy.

“The picture is far more complicated than previously thought,” he said. “If there is no long-term net decline it suggests that deforestation is being accompanied by a lot of natural reforestation that we have not spotted.”

...


Notes to Editors

Dr Alan Grainger, Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Leeds, is an internationally-renowned expert on tropical deforestation, having studied the issue since 1978. He is the author of numerous scientific papers and two overview reports, the first published in The Ecologist magazine in January 1980, followed by a book, Controlling Tropical Deforestation, published in 1993. He gained his doctorate the University of Oxford in 1987 for producing the world's first global computer simulation model of the tropical forests.

[youcantry]

Interestingly, the Eastern quoll was said to prosper for the sake of farming. The EQ really took to habitat bordering both fields and forest - the forest provided shelter and nesting sites, while the fields provided ample prey in the rodents and insects the farms attracted.

The problem was that EQs could also take chickens, and the larger - and very similar - spotted-tailed quoll definately takes chickens.

Result? Anihilation by farmers. The practice still goes on today despite laws.

But is it enough to drive it to extinction? Probably. Other theories include disease which is spread by cats or foxes; predation by foxes; and just now I am reading about the effect of dividing up habitat on genetic variability. Basically by reducing our forests to pockets (or islands), we are creating a scenario where over the long term, genetic variation decreases to the point where it does directly contribute to extinction by making it difficult for species to adapt to rapid change.

Case in point? The Tasmanian devil.

Chris.

[Thylacoleo Gal]

Prof. Johnson's thesis is that it's 'hyper predation' that sends small and medium sized marsups exinct. It may well be that a smallish predator like a quoll would do well in farmland if land clearance increased the numbers of prey species like rodents. It's when foxes and cats appeared that extinctions began. Interestingly foxes and cats colonised Australia at different rates and so their arrival in the inland was staggered - and so to were marsupial extinctions.

[youcantry]

Good point. I'd like to research that further.