Rebuilding Australia: How reintroductions and introduced species could help save a continent's wildlife

I am not from Australia, so I have no doubts that whatever I say will be dismissed by at least some people as just the ramblings of an uninformed foreigner. They may be right, but I would like to think that at least some subjects can be mostly, though not entirely, learned from reading and thinking. I have written about Australia before, and in fact I have something of a fascination with the continent for a variety of reasons. One is the most obvious; from a wildlife perspective, Australia is unlike any other continent on present day Earth. The marsupial faunas that (used to) dominate there are the last remaining on the planet, after South America's collision with North America essentially ended the age of marsupials there, and the general cooling of the global climate wiped them out on most continents. In this respect, it offers us something of a look back at earlier times, and gives us a window into the past diversity that marsupials once enjoyed across so much of the world. There is another reason for my fascination with Australia however. It is the only tropical first world country, and certainly the least densely populated one. The great majority of Australia is still wilderness in one form or another. A rich country with magnitudes of uncultivated wilderness and an iconic endemic fauna, that sounds like a great thing, doesn't it? Most of the problems facing wildlife in other tropical countries are at least partly a result of the widespread poverty and corruption in said countries, and while Australia cannot necessarily be completely cleared of the later, it is certainly nowhere near as extreme as in most countries with similar climatic conditions and quantities of wilderness. You would think that the Land Down Under would be an ideal place for nature, a country with a great fauna wealthy enough to protect it. So why is everything going so horribly?

With 11% of its mammalian fauna extinct within just the last few centuries, it has the highest rate of mammal extinctions in the world. On top of that, 15% of the remaining species are also endangered, with more yet more on the verge of being so. All in all, things are not going well for Australia's mammals. The typical explanation for this is that, as an isolated island continent, Australia's endemics are especially vulnerable to introduced species. It was the foxes, goats, and horses that did it, or so the story goes. In this post I will be arguing against that prevailing idea, and continuing on my previous post on Australia in arguing that invasive species are merely a symptom of a wider problem, and that a few of the introductions may in fact be part of the solution.

Australia: Land of marsupials, especially extinct ones.

Remembering the past, Letting go of the present, Embracing the future

We don't like change. That is understandable, from an evolutionary perspective whatever situation we are currently in is obviously one that is keeping us alive, and as a result, any potential deviation could be dangerous. If our environment at present is adequately supplying us with food, water, and all our other basic needs, any changes, even those that could be positive, are still bringing risk where there previously was none. An old saying is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", and that particular mentality may be more deeply ingrained in us than we tend to realize. However, as with so many other parts of our biology, our way of life has changed so radically in such a short span of time that evolution has not yet had time to catch up, and this "now good, change bad" mentality seems to be a leftover from our hunter-gatherer past, and a dangerous one at that. We no longer live in the relatively stable environment we evolved in - change is constant in the modern world, and so attempting to ensure that present conditions prevail is inevitably futile. On top of this, mirroring the changes we have dealt to our own lifestyles, the influences and alterations we have induced upon the natural world within just a few thousand years are vast, so vast in fact that we almost certainly have yet to even fully grasp the consequences of what we have done. The main reason for this is that nature is slow to react - or rather, we are incredibly quick to act. Typically in nature, even if changes in the environment send a species spiraling towards extinction, it can still take thousands if not millions of years before the last individuals die. Likewise, changes in climate almost always cause drastic shifts in faunal and floral communities, but these shifts are not instantaneous. Plants are long-lived and slow to disperse, and so it is not unusual to find communities of plants growing in places where others could grow as well if not better.

What I am trying to get at by saying all this is that even though many of our impacts on the environment are already obvious, their repercussions may take hundreds if not thousands of years to fully manifest. In some cases we can already predict future changes even though they have not yet occurred. An example of this would be several of the species of birds living in our farmlands throughout Europe. Today we associate them with this intensively managed landscape, but comparing present populations to past ones, a downward trend quickly becomes obvious. The populations living in farmlands today are not so much adapted to that habitat as they are relics of a time when different conditions prevailed, mainly the ages before intensive agriculture and pesticides. In time, they will die out, unless another change occurs. The significance of this should be obvious, as it means that we need to be very careful when determining what is in fact any given species' ideal habitat. In Denmark the Goldcrest may almost exclusively live in plantations of non-native conifers, yes, but this is probably a result of the destruction of all native pine forests, not an actual preference for conifer plantations, an environment that does not occur naturally, and thus could never be the ancestral habitat of the Goldcrest anyway. In summary, the present is not nearly as stable as many of us seem to think it is, and any attempts to preserve current conditions on a large scale are inevitably doomed to fail. As we will soon see however, this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Exploring the natural land cover of Europe

How would Europe have looked if we had never come along? This subject has been covered before, specifically as goes the fauna, but today I will be tackling a different side of this, namely how the landscape itself would have looked. Traditionally imagined as a dense, continent-wide closed canopy forest, this view now seems unlikely, but precisely how it looked is difficult to assess, simply due to our lack of clear evidence. Despite this, enough data is available to give us a general picture of roughly how it may have looked, even if a large amount of educated guesses and inferences are required. The importance of discussing this subject must not be understated, as it is absolutely vital to conservation and habitat restoration. As has been covered here, trying to protect and restore the wrong habitats can have a devastating effect on wildlife, as demonstrated by the stark decline in many species caused by the intensive management of heaths throughout much of the continent. To understand how best to protect species we must first know what their natural habitats were, and in what conditions they once thrived. In this post, I will be covering the continent in general, but again with a stronger focus on western Europe, as this is where most attempted habitat restoration is currently taking place and where data is most plentiful.

Old-growth beech forest in Slovakia, often but mistakenly used as a model for all pristine European habitats

For All To See: Overgrazing apologists and regressive conservation

I have talked about the British highlands before, discussing its depleted state, and how it came to be this way. In that article I also devoted a substantial quantity of words to how conservationists have, for a long time, been helping preserve this depleted landscape. None of this has radically changed in the few months since I wrote that post, nor is the subject of today any more relevant now than it was then. It is also not any less relevant however. What I will be talking about here is the issue of those conservationists who have not moved on, who still cling to the old and outdated notions of what is and is not good for nature. They are unfortunately still large in number, and often fill some of the most powerful positions in conservation, controlling the majority of nature reserves. Change is coming, but as with all upheavals, there will be resistance, and much of it at that. Still, there is something uncannily disturbing about a conservationist, supposedly bolstered and driven by science, trumpeting blatantly and demonstrably false statements, so heavily contradicted by evidence, much of which they must be aware of, to border on outright lying. This post is both a rebuttal to the arguments made by these people, and also a reflection on just why they are acting the way they are, and how we may perhaps be able to change it in time.

A picture of the desolate Scottish highlands, one of many in this post, with sheep in the foreground

Lands Pristine: Europe during the Eemian

Previously I have spoken about prehistoric Australia in great length, namely here and here, and recently wrote an in-depth post about ancient California. Pre-Human Europe however has been something of a neglected subject, despite also being the one I have the greatest interest in. I have mentioned details about it in passing, but now is its time in the limelight.

When people think of prehistoric Europe, they typically picture the early Holocene, covered here, but as that post discusses, the pristine European wilderness was already gone by then. No, to see Europe as it would still have looked today if not for our presence, one must go back to the Eemian, also known as the last interglacial. Spanning from 130,000 to 115,000 years ago, it was the last point in time when the climate resembled todays, but the megafauna had not yet died out. All of the modern species we know today already existed, and at a cursory glance it would have looked quite similar, but the Eemian was to modern Europe what present day southern Africa is to its northern counterpart, an unspoilt, pristine version of the latter, in which the now vanished giants were not just present, but dominated the landscape. In this post I will be covering primarily western Europe, as that is the place with which I am most familiar, and we will explore a Europe quite different from what we know today.

Trafalgar Square, 130,000 years ago, by Roman Uchytel

A World In The Tar Pits: California before Humans

California is known for many things; Hollywood, Silicon valley, and more recently unprecedented droughts. What it is less known for however, at least to the general public, is the vast diversity of life that once lived there. Located in California lie the La Brea tar pits, which are, as the name suggests, a group of tar pits, that have been trapping animals for the last 40,000 years, giving us an incredibly detailed view into the paleofauna of the region. Perhaps the best site for late Pleistocene animals in the world, it certainly contains some of the most spectacular creatures. From giant ground sloths and saber toothed cats to mammoths and mastodons, prehistoric California had one of the most diverse megafaunal assemblages in the world, far outmatching that of even Africa, both today and in the Pleistocene. In this post we will be travelling back 11,000 years, shortly after the end of the ice age, and right before the arrival of the first humans.

Paleoenvironment of La Brea, by Charles Knight. The animals in the foreground are the sabertooth Smilodon, Harlan's ground sloth, and the giant vulture Teratornis. In the background can be seen a herd of Columbian mammoths. 

The early Holocene of Europe - from 11,000 to 6000 BP

The Quaternary extinction is a much talked about subject today, as it is both fascinating in the context of prehistory, and simultaneously important in modern conservation. Typically defined as the rapid decline in global biodiversity during the late Pleistocene up until present, it is sometimes referred to as the sixth mass extinction in earth's history, the previous one wiping out the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Personally, I dislike the term Quaternary extinction. The event mostly occurred within the last 50,000 years, making the term "Quaternary" odd, since the Pliocene and majority of the Pleistocene was not involved. Some have also referred to it as the Pleistocene extinction, which is equally incorrect, as it has continued up until the present. I prefer the term "Anthropogenic extinction", and have used it previously, as I believe it is more apt. It ignores the timeframe in which it has occurred, instead describing the primary causal factor, humans.

While it is true that the most dramatic of the Anthropogenic extinctions occurred either during the late Pleistocene or around the industrial revolution, in this post I will be focusing on a very different, but in some ways even more significant period, the early Holocene. The early Holocene is special in that it represents a relatively brief span of time, approximately 5000 years, in which environmental conditions were similar to today, yet direct human influence on the landscape was not. Instead, the most major human influences during the early Holocene were the same as those during the Pleistocene - hunting. While many of the most important megafauna were already gone by the time the Holocene began, several were not, and for just a few thousand years, we got a glimpse of something similar to what the world may have looked like had humans not existed.

Alien species and the future ecology of Australia

First off, the next post will be about prehistory, I promise, this is the last conservation related post for a while. With that said, buckle in, as this is going to be a long one.

Species disperse, this is an universally accepted part of ecology and evolution. Eventually animals will spread from one area to another, and if the conditions in this new habitat are different enough that they favor unique adaptations, evolution will occur, possibly resulting in the creation of a new subspecies. When animals naturally disperse, we tend not to have a problem with it, at least in most cases. Take for instance the Cattle egret. This small Heron has rapidly spread to colonize most of the world, while even just a century ago it was mostly restricted to Africa. This seems to have been completely by its own doing, and thus we have allowed it. Another example of this is the Turtle dove, which rapidly spread from western Asia to most of Europe within a few decades, though it is now declining again.

The Cattle egret, conqueror of the world

The world that we forgot

Humans are an inherently short sighted species. We do not think too far into the future, and rarely gaze much further back than our youth. At most, the average person thinks a few decades forward, and a century back, anything beyond that is largely forgotten, or ignored. For conservationists protecting nature, this cone of vision is slightly less narrow, often looking an entire century forward, and sometimes upwards of 500 years back. This allows them to view the general trends these last few centuries have experienced. But it is still a narrow view, and still does not offer one crucial thing; Perspective. Most conservation efforts focus either on preserving areas as they are today, or turning them back at most a few hundred years. Often the time just before the industrial revolution is used as a target, an ideal. In this post I will discuss why to properly conserve nature, one must look much further back, and how this lack of perspective and vision is choking nature today.

The Cairngorms of eastern Scotland

Lizard Kings: The giant Monitors of prehistoric Australasia

Today, the Komodo dragon is quite a well known animal. As the largest lizard in the world, it carries a prestigious title, and it is indeed an impressive creature. The Komodo dragon is however only one part of a greater puzzle, that being the giant Monitor lizards that once dominated much of Australasia. Not much is known of these enigmatic animals, but the bits and pieces we do have seem to reveal what was previously a widespread and successful group, now mostly extinct.

The most famous of the giant Monitors is obviously Megalania, a huge lizard that inhabited southern Australia up until the arrival of humans, when it was wiped out in the Anthropogenic-extinction. Known only from fairly incomplete remains, despite being a very recent animal, Megalania has been the subject of much debate, chiefly over its size. Original estimates from when it was first discovered placed it at 7 meters in length, what that would have made it a truly enormous animal, but in 2002, Zoologist Stephen Wroe found it to be a great deal smaller, at only 4.5 meters in length. This was again changed in 2009, when Wroe himself along with other researchers upsized it to 5.5 meters. In truth, we have no idea how large Megalania really was, since we do not know of its proportions. Ralph Molnar said in 2004 that if it's proportions were like those of a Komodo dragon, it would have been 7 meters long, while if they were similar to a Lace monitor, it would be upwards of 8.

Varanus priscus, by Vlad Konstantinov