Echidnas and Bushfires
You would be aware of the devastating fires that occurred late 2019 - early 2020 across Australia. In particular, the Kangaroo Island fires are close to us both geographically and emotionally. The photos above are from Dr Peggy Rismiller (pictured bottom left), who has already found echidnas foraging in the bushfire affected areas on Kangaroo Island.
Echidnas on Kangaroo Island are already listed as endangered, and have now been placed on an emergency list for bushfire recovery. EchidnaCSI will be moving into bushfire recovery projects to see how echidnas have survived the intense bushfires and to track their recovery. As always we’re going to need your help!
✨ Firstly, the EchidnaCSI team are excited to announce we have won a grant from the Foundation for National Parks & Wildlife to kickstart this process and focus on Kangaroo Island. We will be working closely with Dr Peggy Rismiller to collect samples from the echidnas and determine microbiome changes in the echidnas foraging in the fire affected and non-fire affected regions of Kangaroo Island, to determine any health and biological changes.
✨ If you live on Kangaroo Island we would really appreciate your help!
1️⃣ Continue to submit sightings of echidnas through the EchidnaCSI app so that we can see how many echidnas are being spotted in both fire affected and non affected areas.
2️⃣ Collect echidna scats (the more the better) from both regions too.
✨ If you're not on Kangaroo Island your data is still extremely valuable! Kangaroo Island will be used as a "pilot" study and we hope to get more funding to look at other fire-affected areas across Australia. So if you live around these areas your sightings and scats are valuable!
Echidnas, unlike most mammals, have the ability to survive bushfires by burrowing underground until the fire is over, sometimes this causes their spines to burn like we saw in this post that went viral August last year. We are unsure how many have survived the intense fires we have just experienced, but Dr Rismiller did find echidnas foraging in the burnt areas shortly after the fires (see images above). This raises many questions on how echidnas play a role in fire recovery, how their food sources change and how their digestive biology copes with these changes and whether there are implications for their health. All important and fascinating research questions we aim to cover, where we will continue working closely with Dr Rismiller and the affected communities to do so.
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