Species on the Move

1 SPECIES ON THE MOVE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OPENING ADDRESS BY HER EXCELLENCY PROFESSOR THE HONOURABLE KATE WARNER AM GOVERNOR OF TASMANIA HOTEL GRAND CHANCELLOR, HOBART, 10 FEBRUARY 2016 Good morning everyone. Thank you for the invitation to open your conference this morning. A superficial skim of your conference program and I quickly realised I was right out of my depth in an attempt to say anything strictly relevant to the themes of your conference for my opening speech. However, having ascertained that “range shifts” are all about changes in the distribution of species boundaries, I had a thought: What about a look at the fauna that white settlers found when they first arrived on this island in the first years of the Nineteenth Century? Perhaps examining early accounts of the discovery of these species, naming and classification and eventual fate might be interesting. The first description of an Australian marsupial by Europeans is believed to be a description of the tammar wallaby of south-western Australia by the Dutch Commander of the wrecked Batavia, Francisco Pelsaert in 1629: .. we found in these islands a large number of a species of cats, which are very strange creatures. It has two hind-legs and it walks on these only. Its tail is very long; if it eats, it sits on its hind legs and clutches its food with its forepaws. Joseph Banks gave the kangaroo its European name, writing in 1770:1 Quadrupeds we saw but few and were able to catch few of them that we did see. The largest was called by the natives 'kangooroo'. In Van Diemen’s Land there was one species of kangaroo, the forester (eastern grey) kangaroo and two species of wallaby, the Tasmanian pademelon and the Bennett’s wallaby. They provided a good source of food for the new settlers. Historian James Boyce gives an excellent account of this in his book Van Diemen’s Land. Boyce quotes convict Edward White’s recollection that ‘there were hundreds and hundreds of 1 Quoted in D Cowley and B Hubber, ‘Distinct Creation: Early European Images of Australian Animals’, (2000) 66 The Latrobe Journal, p 4. 2 kangaroo …’2 They were successfully caught with hunting dogs, being too difficult to shoot. A Van Diemen’s Land settler guide published in 1820 noted that ‘this whole length of country could be traversed on horseback (or foot) “with almost as much facility as if the island had been in a state of civilisation and cultivation for centuries”.’3 Of course this is because the Aborigines had developed and managed the grasslands as their hunting grounds by regular seasonal burning. These grasslands were homeland to a bountiful supply of game, especially the forester kangaroo, the Bennett’s wallaby and the distinctive Tasmanian emu. What is the situation today in relation to these three animals? The forester kangaroo is common on the mainland but in Tasmania the population has been severely depleted by hunting by the white settlers and habitat loss. It is still at risk here and is now wholly protected. The pademelon and Bennett’s wallaby are abundant and their numbers and distribution have expanded over the past 30 years.4 The Bennett’s wallaby is a subspecies of the red-necked Wallaby which is common on mainland Australia. The red-bellied or Tasmanian pademelon (Thylogale billardieri) is a species of pademelon which is now extinct on mainland Australia because of predation by foxes and large-scale land clearance. And what of the Tasmanian emu, a distinct subspecies of the mainland emu? This too is extinct through hunting and habitat destruction. It seems to have disappeared around 1850, though this is vague and it could also have been hybridised out of existence after the introduction of mainland emus by the white settlers. What of other animals that were so curious to European eyes, the wombat, the thylacine and the platypus? The first record of a wombat in Australia by white settlers was as a source of food for a group of sailors who were shipwrecked on Preservation Island, an apparently uninhabited island in the Furneaux Group in Bass Strait in 1797. There are no longer any wombats on the Bass Strait Islands, with the exception of Flinders Island. In 1805 George Bass sent a live wombat, which he had caught on King Island, back to London where it lived with Everard Home, who authored the first detailed study of anatomical structure of the wombat in a Royal Society paper published in 1808.5 2 James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, Black Inc, 2008, 24. 3 Boyce n 2, 23. 4 http://dpipwe.tas.gov.au/wildlife-management/living-with-wildlife/living-with- kangaroos-and-wallabies accessed 2 February 2016. 5 Cowley and Hubber, above n 1, 15. 3 There are three subspecies of the common or bare-nosed wombat, two of which are only found in Tasmania. The Tasmanian wombat – Vombatus ursinus tasmaniensis – is still common, particularly in the north-east. The Preservation Island wombats eaten by the shipwreck survivors would probably have been this subspecies. The Platypus was the most curious of all Australian animals. It was first discovered by Europeans in 1787. Collins described it as an ‘amphibious animal of the mole species’. A specimen sent to England was treated with scepticism by naturalists such as George Shaw, who in his 1799 description and illustration, named it Platypus anatinus (flatfooted duck), and said it was ‘most extraordinary in its conformation, exhibiting perfect resemblance to the beak of a Duck engrafted on the head of a quadruped’. Was it a bird, a reptile or a mammal? It was not until two more specimens were sent that suspicions that the platypus was a fraud were dissipated. 6 However, its classification remained a challenge. In 1824 a dissection revealed evidence of mammary glands and in 1833 George Bennett observed that milk was secreted from the mammary glands of the platypus. But if it laid eggs as the Aborigines and some of the earlier settlers suggested, it could not be a mammal, as Shaw claimed. Rivalry to uncover the paradox of the platypus raged for another 85 years. Finally a young zoologist William Caldwell, who had a Cambridge fellowship to study the Queensland lungfish and peculiar Australian Mammalia, solved the platypus problem. In 1884 he shot a platypus whose first egg had been laid and the second egg was in an advanced stage in the uterus. Killing a female platypus at the point between laying her twin eggs gave him the crucial information about the stage of development at which the eggs were laid, a stage which he described as equal to a 36-hour chick.7 He sent a telegram ‘Monotremes oviparous, ovum meroblastic’ which was relayed to Sydney and then to Montreal where it was read out at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science’.8 6 Cowley and Hubber, above n 1, 19. 7 Libby Robin, ‘Paradox on the Queensland Frontier: Platypus, lungfish and other vagaries of nineteenth century science’, (2000) 19 Australian Humanities Review 6, 7. 8 Brian K Hall, ‘The Paradoxical Platypus’ (1999) 49(3) BioScience 211-218. Oviparous (laying yolky eggs) and ovum meroblastic-ovum splits but not completely. As an oversimplification it means the laid eggs are of the same sort as reptiles – they contain partly developed young. So platypus eggs are incubated before and after they are laid. Note the platypus has no nipples; the milk comes out of the glands and pools on the mother’s abdomen and they lap it up. 4 So poor old George Bennett, who had worked on the problem of the platypus for 50 years, was beaten to the solution by a 25 year-old Scottish zoologist! Perhaps it was some consolation that the Bennett’s wallaby had been named after him. Scientists still had a lot to learn about monotreme and marsupial reproduction. It was not until the 1920s that Professor Theodore Flynn (the foundation professor of biology here in Hobart and father of actor Errol Flynn) dispelled the myth that marsupials were born out of the nipple. They give birth to tiny young which crawl into the pouch where they find a nipple and develop for a number of months. The greatest loss in Tasmania is the loss of the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. The first definitive encounter of Europeans with the thylacine was by the French explorers of the D’Entrecasteaux expedition in 1792. Lieutenant-Governor Paterson, who founded the settlement at Port Dalyrmple in the north of the island in 1804, sent a description of it to the Sydney Gazette the following year.9 The tiger’s demise was at least partly due to the fact that the Van Diemen’s Land Company had introduced bounties from as early as 1830, and the Tasmanian Parliament in 1887 imposed a bounty payment for animals, dead or alive. The Government paid out 2,184 bounties but it is thought that many more thylacines were killed than were claimed for, and bounty records indicate a sudden decline in thylacine numbers early in the Twentieth Century. As well as hunting, habitat destruction has been implicated as a cause and a distemper-like disease further weakened the remnant population.10 A conservation movement pressed for the thylacine’s protection, in part driven by the increased difficulty in obtaining specimens for overseas collections, But the Government bounty continued until 1909 and the thylacine was not officially protected until July 1936. This was just 59 days before the last known animal died in captivity in Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart.

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