Maremmas Guarding Penguins

The end was in sight for the Middle Island colony of little penguins (Eudyptula minor).

“Massacred,” read the banner headline in the local newspaper — just the single word, as if describing an act of war. Below it was a photo of dead penguins and other birds, the latest casualties in Australia’s long history of imported species’ decimating native wildlife.

Foxes killed 180 penguins in that particular episode, in October 2004. But the toll on Middle Island, off Victoria State in southern Australia, kept rising. By 2005, the small island’s penguin population, which had once numbered 800, was below 10.

Salvation for the little penguins came in the form of a Maremma sheepdog.  The Maremma is an Italian guardian dog bred to live among the sheep it guards.  At the same time the Middle Island little penguins were hanging on by a thread, a local free range chicken farmer, Allan “Swampy” Marsh, had begun to use Maremmas to protect his wandering chickens from foxes, the same predators decimating the penguin colony.  When Swampy heard of the penguins’ plight, the solution was obvious to him.  Train Maremmas to act as penguin guardians on Middle Island.

For a class assignment, David Williams, a university student who worked on Mr. Marsh’s farm, wrote up a proposal for deploying the dogs on the island, and later submitted a more formal version to the state environmental agency. But even as the penguin population kept dwindling, the approval process dragged on as the plan was vetted by overlapping government entities. “There was a lot of talking,” Mr. Williams said.

It took until 2006 to convince local authorities, raise funds and demonstrate the concept.  But, it didn’t take long for the first two Maremmas – Ben and later Oddball – to prove that to a Maremma guarding was a species blind task.  Sheep, chickens, penguins are apparently all the same to a properly trained Maremma.

Since then, Middle Island’s penguin population has rebounded to 150, and not one has been lost to a fox, said Mr. Williams, who now works for Zoos Victoria, the operator of three zoos in the state.

The local community took the Maremmas to heart and when the first generation of penguin guardians retired successors were ready to go.  Now, as the second generator nears retirement the community has raised funds to bring on another generation.

On Middle Island, Oddball’s successors, Eudy and Tula (their names come from the word Eudyptula, the little penguin’s genus), are still keeping foxes away but, at 8 years old, are nearing retirement. Local groups managing the project recently raised more than $18,000 online to buy and train two new Maremma pups.

The first new pup is in training.

The project's coordinator, Peter Abbott, said its new arrival — a nine-week-old Maremma puppy — had proven to be "a bit of a handful".

"We picked him up about a week ago, so he's growing at about a kilo a week and he's just a bundle of joy," he said.

"Over a bit of time we've learned we need to get the dogs on the island as young as possible, and getting them to see and smell the penguins as soon as possible."

The new puppy will be joined by a female companion in the latter half of the year — the first time a dog has been placed on the island by itself since the program's inception.

There are three take aways from this story. 

First, without dogs humans would still be hunter gatherers.  (Just an opinion.)

Second, disturbing the predator/prey equation has damaging consequence.  Foxes were imported to Australia (for sport hunting) and, without any natural predators, bred like crazy and decimated unprotected native populations, little penguins being only one example. 

And, third, as in many cases where dogs have been brought in to assist humans, they have done the job and demonstrated that there are other similar opportunities for this human/canine partnership to achieve conservation goals.

Zoos Victoria is now trying to use Maremma dogs to reintroduce to the wild the eastern barred bandicoot, a small marsupial not seen outside captivity since 2002. Several previous attempts have failed, but Zoos Victoria, which has pledged to prevent the extinction of any terrestrial vertebrate in Victoria, hopes the dogs will make a difference.

A five-year trial is underway... The puppies will learn to bond with sheep, which will also be present at the three trial sites, and with bandicoots, which are shy, nocturnal creatures, said Kimberley Polkinghorne, communications manager for the Werribee zoo.

“This trial draws on the success of the Middle Island project,” Ms. Polkinghorne said. “We are very excited about its potential to not just help bandicoots but other threatened species as well.”

Bats**t Crazy

Since April 11,000 human residents of the tourist town of Batemans Bay on the southeast coast of Australia have been coping with an inundation of 140,000 bats, the grey-headed flying fox (Pteropus poliocephalus), Australia largest bat.  The bats have been returning to Batemans Bay at this time of year since 2012, roosting in large trees in a local nature preserve and adjacent golf course. 

The houses are covered in guano and those who venture outside soon feel a disgusting “sprinkle of something”.

Then there’s the early-morning screeching, so excruciating that resident Danielle Smith said it compelled her to go on anti-depressants.

Her two-year-old can no longer play in the backyard and “won’t even sleep in his own bed anymore because he’s so frightened of the bats”, she said.

“I can’t open my window at all because the smell is so bad,” Smith said. “We can actually taste it — that’s how strong it is.”

Flying foxes are not migratory, but they do travel across their Southeastern Australian coastal range. The foxes are fruit eater, preferring to forage at night in the forest.  Their travels are forage driven as they follow their food supply.

This year’s Batemans Bay colony is nearly triple the size of the colonies in previous years.  The increase in colony size isn’t due to an increase in overall flying fox numbers, which have decreased by 30% since 1990.  In fact, what it represent is a decrease in flying fox habitat.  Australia is a world leader in deforestation, aggressive cutting down native forest in the entire range of the flying fox.  As the fox bats territory is reduced colonies cluster together to take advantage of the available resources.  

“It’s an unprecedented event because we’re in uncharted territory with how to manage it,” the mayor, Lindsay Brown, said.

Government science agency, the CSIRO, estimates there are 680,000 grey-headed flying foxes in Australia, meaning Batemans Bay has been home to one in five of them. Each bat can weigh a kilogram with wing spans exceeding a metre.

They fly out at dusk to feed on flowering spotted gum and bloodwood trees in forests, then wake locals with a cacophony of screeching on their return to town before dawn.

Thousands fly en masse into power lines, knocking out power to the entire town. This happened not just once but on nine consecutive nights in April.

Batemans Bay will survive its annual flying fox visit, although plans are in place to cut down trees to create a buffer zone for the town.  Unfortunately, it was the cutting down of trees that have led to this situation in the first place.

Bat colonies in Australian urban areas have become increasingly common since the 1990s, Sydney University bat researcher Kerryn Parry-Jones said.

“We have … an ecological problem which has been generated over probably 50 years, and it’s only now people are becoming aware of it,” she said. “And now they want a complete and utter solution within 24 hours.”

 Yes, Australia, you have a problem.

DAILY QUICK READ - JUNE 11, 2016

Bleaching?  What bleaching?

Australian politicians pretend all is well with the Great Barrier Reef.  Keep the tourist dollars coming and pretend that being a major coal exporter doesn’t harm the environment. 

Key habitats showed “severe declines in abundance and condition”, populations of species such as sharks, rays and dugongs were falling and water quality was declining. Hardly a glowing endorsement of what Hunt says is the “best-managed marine ecosystem in the world”.

Terry Hughes, a professor at James Cook University and convenor of the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce, says: “Water quality is important, but only for the bottom two-thirds of the reef. The part that’s bleached to blazes was the most pristine part with no coastal development – that’s the part Australia used to argue to the UN that the whole reef should be kept off the danger list. Now it’s wrecked – from Port Douglas to New Guinea.”

Hughes says there’s a mismatch between Australia’s support for coalmining, the country’s endorsement of a UN target to keep warming “well below 2C” and apparent concern for the reef.

“Clearly if only 1C of warming is enough for three bleaching events then we are kidding ourselves if we think 2C is safe,” says Hughes.

Australian get mad when anyone suggests the Reef is in danger.

The US talkshow queen Ellen DeGeneres is bewildered her call to protect the Great Barrier Reef has sparked a backlash in Australia.

DeGeneres made headlines earlier in the week with the release of a video public service announcement as part of the Remember the Reef campaign.

The comedian was criticised by Nine Network’s Today Show co-host Karl Stefanovic and bombarded with five tweets from the environment minister, Greg Hunt.

Solar Powered Atlantic Crossing

The aptly named Solar Voyager is attempting to cross the Atlantic Ocean from Massachusetts, USA, to Portugal, powered solely by the sun, in a 3000 km autonomous journey expected to take about 4 months.

The Solar Voyager measures more than 4 meters long and about one meter wide, and employs a custom propulsion and electronics system, including a satellite-enabled tracking and data transmission component that allows the team to monitor its operation and progress.

Texas Politicians Are Stupid – People Die

In Texas they pretend climate change isn’t real, but the rivers still flood. 

Texas and France have a number of things in common. They’re roughly the same size. They were both republics. They have delectable, widely loved cuisines. And, just last week, both were battered by torrential rains and flooding turbocharged by human-made global warming.

What’s different between them? Plenty, to be sure, but given that the recent deluge is the topic du jour, what’s most interesting are the diametrically opposite views French and Lone Star state officials hold about the climate change connection. For the French, it’s “Mais oui, bien sûr!” But as far as the Texans are concerned, “It just ain’t happenin’.”

More Anti-Zoo Propaganda

This is another load of crap from the anti-zoo crowd.  This time aimed at aquariums.  Who do these clowns think does the research and manages diversity for endangered species.  What a load of crap.

Aquariums can, of course, be centres for conservation and research. But there is a special issue when we take children to visit them. We are setting an example of how we think we should live, and this might be done only by ignoring what’s in front of us, lying just beneath the surface.

By taking children to these places, we are communicating to them indirectly that it is acceptable to confine non-human animals to small tanks that dramatically restrict their movement, and derive pleasure from gawking at them.

Economic Value Drives Extinction Risk

The study shows underappreciated risk to marine species similar to that of iconic terrestrial species, but elevated by key differences in the sea. "We typically assume that if a species is reduced to low numbers, individuals will be hard to find, hunters will stop hunting, and populations will be given a chance to recover," said Loren McClenachan of Colby College in the US. "But the extreme values of these species mean that without significant conservation intervention, they will be hunted to extinction," said McClenachan.

McClenachan, along with Andrew Cooper and Nicholas Dulvy from Simon Fraser University in Canada, identified a taxonomically diverse group of more than 100 large marine and terrestrial species that are targeted for international luxury markets. They estimated the value of these species across three points of sale and explored the relationships among extinction risk, value and body size. They also quantified the effects of two mitigating factors: poaching fines and geographic range size. The analysis showed a threshold above which economic value is the key driver of extinction risk.