Dr Tiana Pirtle
Cats have been eradicated from Three Hummock Island and Little Dog Island recently. There’s also a lot of work going on to remove them from some of the other Bass Strait Islands, so that’s Mount Chapel, Badger, Babel, and Lungtalanana Clarke Island. There’s also some work happening on Bruny Island with feral cats, you know, starting to be removed from North Bruny and then preventing them from coming back up using Felixers, the AI cat killing technology, which is highlighted in some of these recent government comms.<\/p>\n
Ryk Goddard
Hang on, hang on, we’ve got to pause there. What the hell is AI doing to eliminate cats, Tiana?<\/p>\n
Dr Tiana Pirtle
Yeah, so these are Felixers. They’re a recent technology over the last few years that uses AI image recognition, and so it will record any animals walking by. It recognises the shape of a cat, and it will spray a little bit of poison bait on their fur, and because cats like to self-groom, they’ll lick it and then go off and die. But this works really well in remote areas where it’s hard for people on foot to be trapping or shooting, and so Three Hummock Island saw a lot of really successful use of the Felixers. Felixers are being used on Bruny as well to stop those cats from coming back up that isthmus into North Bruny and keeping them out of the penguin colony. It’s just one tool in the toolbox that helps us with island eradications.<\/p>\n
Ryk Goddard
I guess the concern is that the AI is learning from that and we will be next, but…<\/p>\n
Dr Tiana Pirtle
I think we probably have more AI concerns than the Felixers.<\/p>\n
Ryk Goddard
Sure, sure. Why is one of the biggest threats a plant?<\/p>\n
Dr Tiana Pirtle
Weeds are a huge issue around Australia. Just go walking along any of our creek lines and you can see blackberry completely choking out. They’re also really can be quite impactful for agriculture, like serrated tussocks can out-compete a lot of grazing plants for farmers. And a lot of times weeds are really hard to manage because a lot of our really problematic weeds have these really long-lasting seed beds. So you can remove the adult plants, but there’s six to 15 years worth of seeds that keep popping up. So it takes a lot of work, but we really can have some easy wins when it comes to weeds as well because we still sell weeds at nurseries around the country, including in Tasmania. You can go to Bunnings and buy highly invasive weeds. So we could have some much stronger regulation, better education for people. Most gardeners don’t want to plant a terrible weed in their garden, but that information isn’t always very readily available. And that’s easy policy shifts that we could enact to prevent new weeds from coming out into the bushlands.<\/p>\n
Ryk Goddard
Just to go out and shoot the rainbow lorikeets, Tiana, and why?<\/p>\n
Dr Tiana Pirtle
Yes, well, unfortunately, so rainbow lorikeets were introduced to Tasmania and they’re beautiful, they’re spectacular, but they’re also extremely aggressive towards our native lorikeets, musk lorikeets, and they can interbreed, push them out. They can push lots of birds out. And the rainbow lorikeets are interesting because they’re still relatively early in that invasion curve, so they’re not very widespread. Just in the 12 years I’ve been in Tasmania, I’ve only just started to see them around Hobart. There’s some populations down by Kingston and further down Tinderbox. So we could still prevent really widespread incursion of rainbow lorikeets. And there are land care groups that are working to manage rainbow lorikeets because it is a tough call to kill beautiful animals. Same with cats on islands. Cats are beautiful animals, but we really, unfortunately, we can’t have both our beautiful native mammals and birds and lizards and have cats roaming around on the landscape.<\/p>\n
Ryk Goddard
So the Invasive Species Action Plan is out. Dr Tiana Pirtle’s been having a look at it. Do you feel like it’s comprehensive enough? Where are the gaps in this plan?<\/p>\n
Dr Tiana Pirtle
Yes, so it’s really great to see an overarching framework that kind of brings together the management of all of our different invasive plants and animals. But a plan is only as good as the resourcing behind it. And this Invasive Species Action Plan hasn’t been announced with any sort of expanded funding to achieve the goals in here. In fact, we’ve seen a slow erosion of biosecurity funding over the last five years. And that’s a huge concern because Tasmania does have really unique and amazing wildlife. We’ve got great agriculture and primary industries as well that also suffer when our biosecurity isn’t strong. And so it’s great to have a plan. That’s a really important first step. But now we need to see the resourcing and funding to actually implement the goals and actually achieve what this plan sets out to do.<\/p>\n
Ryk Goddard
And Tiana, there’s a great question here, just to finish up with, what’s the strategy for rabbits?<\/p>\n
Dr Tiana Pirtle
Yeah, this action plan does touch on rabbits. So rabbits are a very challenging one because they are very widespread in Tasmania. They breed like rabbits. They breed very quickly. And because they breed so quickly and they’re well adapted, there’s constantly an arms race with our biocontrols like Calicivirus and Myxomatosis. So really, when it comes to rabbits, we really need to see an influx of some innovation, research, funding to support that so that we can develop better tools to deal with rabbits because we’re losing that fight right now in Tasmania. Anecdotally, we’re seeing an increase in rabbits across the state and our biocontrols aren’t as effective as they used to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dr Tiana PirtleCats have been eradicated from Three Hummock Island and Little Dog Island recently. There’s also a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":959382,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[327741,64,63,249570,2475,89708,75,526882,2466,60747,47148,128],"class_list":["post-959381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-action-plan","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-carp","tag-cats","tag-deer","tag-environment","tag-felixer","tag-invasive","tag-lorikeets","tag-pests","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=959381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959381\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/959382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=959381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=959381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=959381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}