Few marsupials have gone from miraculous survival to the brink of extinction as shortly because the Kangaroo Island dunnart.
In 2019 and 2020, devastating fires burned practically 10 million hectares of southeastern Australia. The flames threatened a whole bunch of species with extinction, however the Kangaroo Island dunnart (Sminthopsis aitkeni) — which already numbered lower than 500 earlier than the fires — gave the impression to be one which defied expectations within the aftermath (SN: 3/9/21).
But now these uncommon creatures could also be extra in danger than ever, researchers say June 16 in Scientific Reports. The hazard, as home because it sounds, is getting eaten by a cat.
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As of 2008, invasive feral cats had contributed to at the least 13 p.c of extinctions worldwide. That’s one purpose the federal government has been euthanizing cats on Kangaroo Island for years. The scientists who performed the dunnart examine knew all this — however once they studied the stays of cats euthanized in 2020, they have been nonetheless shocked by what they noticed: Seven out of 86 cats had lately dined on dunnart.
“We were not expecting to find so many,” says Louis Lignereux, a discipline researcher on the University of Adelaide School of Animal and Veterinary Science. It’s significantly dangerous information, he says, in case you consider what was within the cats as solely a snapshot of what they ate within the final 36 hours. Taking that under consideration, these seven cats alone might have eaten sufficient to wipe out the Kangaroo Island dunnart inside a couple of months, if they’d survived — and there are a whole bunch of different cats on the island.
A small habitat makes the dunnarts particularly susceptible. It’s like placing all of your eggs in a single basket, Lignereux says. Since the fires, the Kangaroo Island dunnart is believed to now dwell in an space about one-tenth of the dimensions of Manhattan (SN: 1/13/20).
“If something happened to this spot,” he says, “then [the dunnart] is gone forever.”