Scientists look to history in bid to save critically endangered marsupial from climate change

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Scientists look to history in bid to save critically endangered marsupial from climate change

By Laura Chung

A handful of critically endangered mountain pygmy-possums have swapped their usual freezing alpine habitat in NSW and Victoria for the much warmer Lithgow region as scientists race to bolster the marsupials’ dwindling numbers.

Scientists have combed through fossil records from millions of years ago to justify the move of 14 mountain pygmy-possums to their new home in Secret Creek Sanctuary in Lithgow, an area where the marsupials once thrived.

A handful of mountain pygmy-possums have been translocated to Lithgow in the hopes of saving the population.

A handful of mountain pygmy-possums have been translocated to Lithgow in the hopes of saving the population. Credit:Lachlan Gilbert

The project, led by the University of NSW in partnerships with wildlife foundations and government conservation programs, is an attempt to bolster the possums’ declining population. Only 3000 remain in the wild as numbers of the marsupial’s main food source – the bogong moth – plummet.

While the temperate rainforest environment around Lithgow may seem vastly different from the harsh alpine regions of NSW and Victoria, UNSW palaeontologist Professor Mike Archer said the mountain pygmy-possum has been living at the edge of survival for thousands of years.

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“For 25 million years, almost identical ancestors to the species living in the alpine area today, were thriving in cool, temperate lowland rainforests. Among other places, we have found their fossils in the Riversleigh World Heritage Area of northwestern Queensland in rocks that span 25 to 10 million years ago, a time when this lowland area was covered by wet, species-rich rainforests,” he said.

“We think the mountain pygmy-possums moved into the alpine area during a warm, wet period during the Pleistocene, but when the climate changed, they became stranded there. They only just managed to survive by using the rock piles and snow cover to insulate themselves against the cold of winter. The rock piles also protect them from the lethal heat of summer.”

He added that climate change was threatening their alpine homes, with winter snowfalls decreasing and exposing the rock piles in which they seek refuge while they hibernate. “We decided to use these clues from their past to reintroduce them to the cool, lowland rainforest environments where their direct ancestors thrived,” he said.

Archer added that combing through fossil records was a unique approach to conservation and could be used to expand the current habitats of many species.

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“It’s like playing golf: if you have one club in your bag you are not likely to play a great game of golf. But if you have different clubs in your bag you’ll have a much better game. We need many conservation clubs in our bag. Paleontology and using that to help us translocate species so that they might survive climate change is just one of the clubs to have in the bag,” he said.

“The way we see animals today is inevitably a tiny part of the total story. It’s widely being realised that the business as usual approach is no longer an option and more things are going down the plughole. The world is changing so fast that nature cannot adapt at the same pace.”

The mountain pygmy-possums’ new home includes a research room, nesting boxes and a cool room for food in the hopes of providing a unique environment where the animals can thrive.

Secret Creek Sanctuary chief executive officer and secretary of the Australian Ecosystems Foundation Trevor Evans said while the possum had been discovered in the 1960s, there was still a lot of work going on to understand the animal. While they face many threats, including a declining food source, their biggest threat remains invasive predators, such as foxes, cats and horses.

“All the Australian species are competing with introduced species. Australia needs to choose between wild horses, foxes or cats, and native species. We can’t have both living together,” he says. “A lot of national parks don’t know what animals are disappearing unless you are researching every day. We need to get serious about it and we can’t keep researching things to death, we have the best extinction rate on planet, we need to do proactive intervention.”

Since colonisation, about 100 of Australia’s unique flora and fauna species have been wiped off the planet, including 34 mammals. The rate of loss, which is as comprehensive as anywhere else on Earth, has not slowed over the past 200 years. Last year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature released its Red List, the most comprehensive global inventory of biodiversity, logging 40,084 species at risk of extinction.

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Among the species was the iconic Australian bogong moth, which made its first appearance, as its population has plummeted in the past three years after record-breaking droughts. Australian zoology professor at Sweden’s Lund University Eric Warrant has observed the moth for decades and said they used to coat the walls of alpine caves, but this year there are only a handful of caves where the moths have been found.

He added while conservation efforts usually focused on the cute and cuddly animals, this was slowly changing. But threats like climate change and invasive predators were driving down the moths’ population.

“It is not very clear how we can protect this species. Conservation is usually concentrated on the habitat that an animal needs to reproduce but that’s not an easy task because you’d basically have to protect the entire south-east of Australia. The only thing that will save the moth is to stop burning fossil fuels.”

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