Click here to read the full post at WildlifeSNPits

Click here to read the full post at WildlifeSNPits.

When is a native species also invasive, and how can we tell? This may seem a strange question, but it highlights the difficulty we sometimes face determining the boundaries of the area in which a species naturally occurs. Especially when detection is imperfect and those boundaries may change over time. Animals move. Plants move. Sometimes a species will naturally move into a new area, and we recognise this as a range expansion. At other times, a species may only be able to move to a new area with human help (deliberate or unintentional), and this may create a new, invasive population.

​Think about Australia. If I asked you to name an invasive mammal, you might choose a fox, cat, rabbit or pig. These are clearly not native to Australia. What if I ask you to name a native mammal? Maybe you chose a red kangaroo or a wombat? They are both native to Australia, but they are not native to ALL of Australia. If we were to move a native species to a new part of the country where it had never previously occurred, it may not find the resources it needs to survive, but if it did, we may have created a new invasive population – an invasive native...

Photo credit Dejan Stojanovic

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Bandicoots are fascinating creatures, but I suspect few people outside Australia and New Guinea have ever heard of them, well, unless you count Crash Bandicoot…

They are probably best known in suburban Australia for infuriating gardeners with the conical pits, or “snout-pokes”, they dig whilst foraging for their food, which varies a little among species but usually includes fungi, plants and invertebrates. All Australian bandicoots are diggers, and a recent study estimated that a single southern brown bandicoot could dig as many as 45 foraging pits each day, meaning it has the potential to excavate around 3.9 tonnes of soil each year! That’s not bad for an animal that weighs less than 2 kilograms.

In the not too distant past, bandicoots and their relatives could be found across almost the entire Australian continent, but theirs has been a sad story of extinction and decline since Europeans arrived. Today, thanks to habitat loss, competition from introduced rabbits, and predation by introduced cats and foxes (check out this camera trap photo, captured by Guy Ballard, of a feral cat with a bandicoot), many populations have diminished or disappeared. This may have real implications for the ecology of Australia: digging mammals seem to have important roles in soil turnover, water and nutrient cycling, and seedling recruitment, and the decline of these little diggers may have caused a deterioration in ecosystem function across the Australian continent.
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There is an awful lot more I could share about bandicoot ecology and evolution, but for now I want to concentrate on explaining what a bandicoot is, how many species there are, and where in the world they are found. I hope you’ll agree with me that as well as being amazingly cute (the official term is “bandicute”) they are also amazingly interesting...​

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​At first they were just shadows, dark impressions glimpsed through the mist. Is that really…? Could it be…? As we moved a little closer one of them turned to the east, to face the rising sun. His profile was unmistakable, the curved horns and humped shoulders proclaiming “bison”!

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So, I just made a discovery – November 7th 2015 is (or was) the first ever World Numbat Day! I had another post planned for this weekend, coincidentally about a different group of marsupials, but how could I go past this opportunity to write about numbats? I might be a little late to the festivities, but I don’t think the good folks atProject Numbat will mind too much.

In this post I’m not going to share any tales of numbats glimpsed crossing the road in front of my car, or whilst I was hiking in the Australian bush, or even any of my own numbat photographs. There’s a simple reason for this. I’ve never actually seen a numbat. Yes, I know, my credibility is ruined! But wait… before you judge this alleged mammalogist too harshly… the sad truth is that the entire global population of wild numbats alive today would likely fit in my living room. I’m not saying they’d be comfortable stacked up like that, but with fewer than 1000 individuals left it’s not a big stretch of the imagination. The species is listed by the IUCN as endangered.

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September 7th marks the anniversary of a spectacular failure in Australian wildlife conservation. On this day in 1936, the last known thylacine, the largest marsupial carnivore and the only member of the family Thylacinidae, died in captivity in a Hobart zoo. Today, this day is recognised (I cannot bring myself to write “celebrated”) as Threatened Species Day.

In July this year, the Australian Government launched a new Threatened Species Strategy at a summit in Melbourne. Many conservationists, myself included, have welcomed these plans, which include targets to improve the conservation status of 20 mammals, 20 birds and 30 priority plant species by the year 2020.

Those who know me will know of my love for bandicoots, bilbies and quolls, so it should be no surprise that I’m delighted to see some of these species included in the new strategy. But still, in the days following the announcement I found myself having conversations with an assortment of friends and colleagues that went along the lines of “this is great but what about the threatened fish… or reptiles… or amphibians… or insects… or crustaceans…"

If we are serious about wildlife conservation and the preservation of ecosystems, we can’t afford to focus only (or mostly) on the cute and the fluffy. We need to strive to conserve all wildlife and especially to prevent the loss of species that play important ecological roles. We need to save the pollinators, the predators, the detritivores, the ecosystem engineers… there are many of these and, although some may have fur or feathers, most of them don’t!

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I know a lot of biologists who have lists related to their work: lists of birds they have seen, lists of journals they want to publish in, lists of top wildlife spectacles they want to see, lists of species they have studied, lists of their favourite fieldwork sites.

I too have a few lists, and in writing this post I’m thinking of one list in particular: my list of the most disgusting batches of tissue samples I have ever had the misfortune to extract DNA from. It is a short but memorable list, which, as of this week, stands at four entries. And despite the large number of scat DNA samples I have worked with over the years, there are no faeces on that list!

I thought it was going to be a routine afternoon in the lab. I was planning to take subsamples from some roadkilled mammal ear tissues we had been sent. Roadkills can be a valuable non-invasive source of population genetic information for many species. The procedure goes something like this: take a 2mm subsample of tissue, finely chop it with a scalpel and forceps, and transfer the tissue to a tube with lysis buffer to incubate overnight. I had 48 samples to prepare, so was expecting to spend a couple of hours in the lab, then finish the DNA extractions the next morning.

That was the plan…