Endangered mammal close to home By Mary Bremner
As we travel between Point Roadknight and Urquhart Bluff, our eyes are drawn across the white caps to the lighthouse. But who knew that the narrow stretch of vegetation that covers the sand dunes under our gaze is home to some of our region’s rarest and most endangered mammals? Not I, at least not until I spoke with Aireys Inlet resident, Dr Barbara Wilson, about her four decades of investigation into some of our extraordinary native fauna. Barb is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Deakin University and runs her own ecological consultancy, working on national, state and local government projects. Barb’s passion for our local wildlife was ignited when she started a longterm study based in the Eastern Otways, as part of a PhD at Deakin University. She completed seven years researching the impact of the 1983 ‘Ash Wednesday’ bushfires on mammals and plants, finding out how long it took them to recover. There are two very special small mammals that make Barb’s eyes light up. They are nocturnal, very shy and you must be very fortunate to see them. We’re talking about the swamp antechinus and the New Holland mouse, both listed as threatened species. The New Holland mouse could easily be mistaken for the common house mouse, to which it is actually no relation. It is fluffier, has large eyes and a longer tail. Best of all it doesn’t smell mousy. The slightly larger swamp antechinus is a carnivorous marsupial – it has a pointy snout, short ears and a long tail. Barb’s studies showed that both species, which existed in good numbers prior to the 1983 fires, had been decimated. Two years later, the researchers happened by chance upon a small population of the New Holland mouse, which had survived in a tiny 8
The native bush rat (Rattus fuscipes). Photo by Fern Millen
unburnt patch. However it took about 12 years for the swamp antechinus to reappear, albeit in small numbers. It was a project Barb took on for the Western Australia government, driven by the state’s need to conserve its threatened water supplies, that led to her understanding of the impact of climate change on biodiversity. On returning to Victoria, Barb was interested to see how the local mammals were faring and quickly realised they were in trouble. Surveys conducted between 2013 and 2018 revealed 67 per cent of sites exhibited large to severe decreases in numbers, with only eight individual swamp antechinus at sites where previously they’d been in abundance. Further there has been no record of the New Holland mouse since 2003. The research found strong evidence that, for both species, reproduction is related to rainfall, and the millennial drought had a huge impact on their decline. A recent project for Parks Victoria has
found Barb looking specifically at the impact of climate change on the flora and fauna of the Eastern Otways, where many species are reducing in numbers. Barb’s work involves studying the effect of the loss of vegetation through impacts such as the devastating plant pathogen Phytophthora cinnamomi and variations in rainfall and temperature on the populations. It was during this project that Barb and her team discovered, to their surprise and delight, thriving populations of a variety of mammals in our local sand dunes, adjacent to the Great Ocean Road. Barb describes it as ‘one of the richest remnants and refuges for mammals in the Eastern Otways that we’ve found – very small and very important’. Animals found there include the swamp antechinus, brown bandicoot, longfooted bandicoot and white dunnart. Barb had known that some animals had recovered there after the 1983 fires but only recently discovered that they’d survived in such numbers.
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