Arid Recovery Internship Introduction

Hello from Roxby Downs. Where’s Roxby Downs I hear you say?! And what are you doing there?! Roxby downs is a small mining town in South Australia roughly 550 km north of Adelaide with a population of around 4,000 people, however the majority of the time I’d be surprised if it even reaches 1,000! During the day Roxby Downs appears to be more like a ghost town, with most people at work in the nearby mine (Olympic Dam) or asleep, after spending a night shift at the mine. Even the gym and swimming pool are closed in the afternoon! 

Olympic Dam (the mine) is located just out of town and mainly mines copper and uranium. According to google, globally it’s the fourth largest copper deposit and the largest known uranium deposit in the world! I guess you can now see why the majority of people are attracted to the town (and why it’s so quiet in the day).  

 For me, my attraction to Roxby Downs was Arid Recovery (AR), a conservation initiative that aims to help restore Australia’s arid lands. (One of AR’s supporters is BHP Billiton, the mining company).  AR’s main goal is to facilitate the re-introduction of some of Australia’s native mammal species to arid Australia. Unfortunately for native species they are losing the battle between natives vs exotics (e.g. introduced feral cats, rabbits and foxes). However re-introducing natives straight into the wild just wouldn’t work as there are just too many predators and unfortunately natives don’t know how to cope and avoid predation…yet…here’s where AR comes in! AR has created a 123km² fenced reserve on the outskirts of Roxby Downs, which was firstly removed of all feral cats, foxes and rabbits and has successfully reintroduced four native species. A map of the AR reserve can be seen below. As part of a new project, there is now one paddock of the reserve (the Red Lake expansion) which contains a small number of feral cats and in another paddock, the northern expansion, two native cats, western quoll (Dasyurus geoffroii) have been introduced. By introducing a small number of predators AR hopes that some of the introduced native individuals will learn how to avoid predation. Currently the natives in the reserve are doing well and has a very successful population of stick nest rats (Leporillus conditor), burrowing bettongs (Bettongia lesueur), greater bilbies (Macrotis lagotis) and western barred bandicoots (Perameles bougainville). 

Whilst on my 8 week placement at AR I will be working alongside Dr Bec West (Research Officer), whose job is to monitoring the interaction between natives and the predators in the reserve. I’ll mainly be assisting in carrying out research for the project “Tackling Prey Naivety”. Native species extinctions have most likely occurred because natives just don’t know how to respond when faced with predators or do not mount the correct response. This project therefore aims to look at whether certain individuals have qualities (e.g. are more bold or shy) which makes them better at surviving when faced with predators. 

For more information about Arid Recovery here is a link to their website...http://www.aridrecovery.org.au

 A map of the Arid Recovery reserve showing the various expansions. The main, second and expansion currently do not have any predators in them, the Northern has quolls; Red Lake has feral cats and the Dingo Pen used to have Dingo's (Canis lupid dingo) however now does not and  is not used for the project at the moment.