New truffle island could save rarest marsupial
AUSTRALIA: The world’s rarest marsupial - a small, kangaroo-like ball of soft fur that craves solitude could be just a bushfire away from extinction. Scientists are desperately searching for a new home for Gilbert’s potoroo, which is the size of a rabbit and lives almost exclusively on Australia’s native truffles.
The species, sometimes called the rat-kangaroo or garlgyte, was thought to be long extinct until a colony was discovered near a remote bay in Western Australia in 1994.
Their numbers in the wild have since dwindled to about 60. It is under siege not only from bushfires but also snakes.
Scientists are trying to find an island big enough to support a viable breeding colony with an abundance of native truffles and free from foxes, cats, rats, mice, pythons, and fire.
Ron Dorn, the conservationist leading the search for a new island, said it was not an easy task. ‘‘They really make it very tough for us to help them survive,’’ he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Dorn, who runs an organisation dedicated to saving the species, hopes that a bolthole for the potoroos might be found within the Recherche Archipelago, a cluster of 105 small islands off the south coast of Western Australia. It will take time to assess whether an island can sustain a colony, however.
Meanwhile, the remaining Gilbert’s potoroos, most of whom live in a small cluster on the Australian mainland, are barely clinging on.
According to Western Australia’s Department of Parks and Wildlife, it will take about a year to assess islands for their potential to support the potoroos.
Since the rediscovery of Gilbert’s potoroos in 1994, east of Albany, efforts to foster that population of about 40 animals have suffered several setbacks.
Only about six remain after recent bushfires started by lightning destroyed 90 per cent of the habitat in their only natural home.
Most attempts to create new colonies on islands off Western Australia have foundered because of attacks by snakes or because the potoroos could not find enough to eat. One transplanted island colony has reached close to 60 potoroos, but the island is too small to sustain any more.
Other methods to try to boost the population, including captive breeding programmes, and crossfostering - using surrogate parents from another related species to raise baby potoroos - have proved expensive, with little success.
The species was so rare by the early 1900s that it was written off as extinct, and had largely been forgotten until the surviving colony was found at Two Peoples Bay in 1994, where the creatures coexist with quokkas, another endangered marsupial.