Calling citizen scientists: more data needed to protect echidnas

Extract from The Guardian

Environment

Our wide brown land

These masters of disguise are some of the world’s oldest surviving mammals, but they are threatened by habitat loss, traffic and feral cats – and they need our help

Alexandra Spring

Thu 22 Feb 2018 04.00 AEDT Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 04.02 AEDT

Researchers believe the remaining Australian echidna population may be threatened and they need citizen scientists’ help to save them. Photograph: KristianBell/Getty Images/iStockphoto

They may be one of the world’s oldest surviving mammals – around for at least 25m years – but scientists don’t know much about echidnas. Now researchers believe the remaining Australian population may be threatened and they need citizen scientists’ help to save them.

The short-beaked echidna is found only in Australia and Papua New Guinea. In 2015 the Kangaroo Island echidna, a once significant subspecies, was listed as endangered. While the remaining population is listed as “least concern”, researchers question the listing. As Tahlia Perry, a PhD researcher at the University of Adelaide’s Grutzner Lab, which is studying the molecular biology of echidnas, says: “When you don’t have exact numbers, it’s really hard to give something a listing.”
In September 2017, the lab, in association with the CSIRO’s Atlas of Living Australia, launched the free echidna CSI app to encourage Australians to photograph wild echidnas and collect their scat, or droppings. “What we are hoping to find out is [whether there are] other pockets of populations around the rest of the country that are in the same sort of threat level [as the Kangaroo Island species] because they face the exact same threats,” says Perry.

"They are masters of disguise and hiding and are insanely fast when they want to be."

Tahlia Perry, University of Adelaide

The main threats to echidnas are land clearing and habitat loss. This was demonstrated on Kangaroo Island when the population shrank as development increased. Echidnas can travel great distances – often several kilometres in a day – they have very large home ranges and so land clearing and rapid developments can cause problems in their ability to travel by removing viable habitat, says Perry. Other major threats include traffic, feral cats and potentially the rapidly changing climate.
What is known about the echidna is fascinating. Like their mammalian cousins the platypus, echidnas lay eggs but keep their young – puggles – in the mother’s pouch. Once they are the size of a cricket ball and their spines begin to develop, they are kicked out of the pouch and left in burrows. And while some echidna populations nurture their young, mostly the puggles are left to figure things out for themselves.

A short-beaked echidna puggle at Sydney’s Taronga Zoo in November 2016 – the zoo’s first successful echidna births in nearly 30 years. Photograph: Taronga Zoo/EPA

Echidnas are quite smart, though, having the biggest frontal cortex in relation to their body size of all mammals, including humans. They can climb, burrow and run rapidly. They are mostly solitary animals, but the rare times they are seen collectively is when they form “an echidna train”. This is when the female is in season and up to 20 males follow her across great distances, all competing for her attention.
They are robust and are found in wildly different environments, from the desert to the snow, likely to having much lower body temperature than all other mammals - around 30C - which can fluctuate by up to 10C in a single day.
Perry has long been fascinated by the spiky creatures. Asked for a little-known fact, she points out the back feet of the echidnas point backwards to help them dig their burrows. This bewildered the British taxidermists of old who, thinking there must be a mistake, rotated the feet forward. Now hundreds of years later, those feet are being switched back.
With the help of the research project, Perry hopes to discover more about the echidna’s DNA, eating habits and hormones to study breeding patterns.
“You can also measure things like stress hormones to figure out what populations are particularly stressed,” she says. “For instance, [the] ones that are around more suburban areas, it would be interesting to find out if that is affecting them in a negative way or if they don’t care at all.” Anecdotally some echidnas seem terrified of humans – burrowing quickly – while others are more inquisitive.

Their ability to escape stressful situations so quickly is why little is known about echidnas, says Perry. “They can literally dig themselves into the ground within a matter of seconds – they completely disappear in front of your eyes … They are masters of disguise and hiding and are insanely fast when they want to be as well. So they are just not great for a research animal.”
As part of Guardian Australia’s series on endangered species, we’re encouraging readers to take part in the echidna CSI project. Download the free app, then photograph your local echidna or collect a sample of their scat and help to save the echidna.