The Dingo Dilemma

摘要

Among the endangered are an array of small marsupial carnivores: the polka-dotted quolls; the phascogale, which looks like a miniature opossum with an ostrich plume for a tail; and the numbat, which specializes in eating termites using rapid-fire motions of its tongue. The two researchers set up transects in habitats that shelter rare remnant populations of yellow-tailed rock-wallaby and carefully searched for tracks and scats at sites on both sides of the dog fence. Eighteen endemic species, most of them common and widespread at the time of European contact, have now disappeared forever; another nine survive as small remnant populations in islands of protected habitat.