One of Australia’s most devastating invasive predators took just 60 years to colonise the whole continent, according to new research from Curtin University and the University of Adelaide that offers vital clues to preventing future extinctions of native animals from foxes.
By reconstructing the invasion patterns of foxes in Australia using computational models and historic sightings of foxes published in newspaper articles, the new paper has uncovered critical data needed to disentangle the role of foxes in the demise of Australia’s native animals.
Lead author Dr Sean Tomlinson, from Curtin’s School of Molecular and Life Sciences, said researchers used hundreds of first sighting records and thousands of model simulations to reconstruct the arrival and spread of the fast and fierce hunters.
“European red foxes and domestic cats brought to Australia by European colonists kill about 300 million native animals in Australia every year and remain the major driver of past and current extinctions,” Dr Tomlinson said.
“Our detailed reconstructions show that foxes filled their potential distribution in Australia in just 60 years, providing new historical and temporal data needed to quantify past losses of fauna and help avert future extinctions.”
Australia’s fox population is about 1.7 million and the Invasive Species Council estimates as many as 16 mammals have become extinct mainly or partly because of foxes.
Dr Tomlinson said foxes were deliberately introduced to multiple locations in Victoria in about 1870 for the sport of fox hunting.
“Our modelling indicates that foxes quickly expanded their distribution throughout the southeastern corner of Australia between 1870 and 1895, before rapidly spreading in northerly and westerly directions. By 1900, it is likely that foxes had occupied all available habitat in the south-eastern region of Australia,” Dr Tomlinson said.
“Fox colonisation across the northwest of Australia was the final phase of colonisation, with the distribution of foxes being completely infilled in 1940.”
Senior author Associate Professor Damien Fordham, from the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute, said the new research promises to help better explain past losses of biodiversity, providing critical information needed to avert future extinctions of Australia’s unique fauna.
“Our high-resolution reconstructions of fox invasion of Australia pinpoint areas that could have provided native wildlife with sanctuaries from foxes due to later invasions or lower predator densities,” Associate Professor Fordham said.
“We hope the findings will offer a useful framework for mapping the spread of other invasive species, including cats, potentially helping curb Australia’s worrying decline in native wildlife.”
The research also involved collaborators from the University of Melbourne and University of Copenhagen’s GLOBE Institute, as part of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project.
For more on this story, see this article on The Conversation.
