New Scientist - UK (2022-05-14)

14 May 2022 | New Scientist | 27

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The columnist

Chanda Prescod-

Weinstein on science

misconceptions p28

Aperture

An exhibition to help

us reconnect with the

natural world p30

Letters

How ghosting may

eventually come

to haunt us less p32

Culture

Women’s crucial

contribution to UK

war intelligence p34

Culture columnist

Simon Ings on a fight

for environmental

justice in Chile p36

H

OW would you describe
Australian mammals?
My work involves
regularly talking to people
about them. When I say that
platypuses’ duck-like bills can
detect the electrical impulses
controlling the heartbeats of
their prey, or that males have
venomous ankle spurs, or that
their hands are like Swiss Army
Knives, with different foldaway
tools for swimming, digging and
walking, the typical response is
a wide-eyed, “That’s so strange!”.
Not all mammals are considered
equals. Why is it that the ingrained
response to the incredible
adaptations of Australian
mammals is to call them “weird”?
“Primitive” is often thrown into
the mix too, even though all living
complex species are equally
evolved. The fauna of no other
large land mass is treated this way.
We have been conditioned to
repeat such views because they are
the typical messages featured by
museums and documentaries.
The BBC’s 2019 series Seven
Worlds, One Planet included
this line in its description of the
episode on Australia: “Isolated for
millions of years, the weird and
wonderful animals marooned
here are like nowhere else on
Earth.” However conservation-
focused the production was, the
framing of Australian wildlife as
weird is unhelpful.
Thankfully, platypuses, koalas,
kangaroos, wombats and their
relatives are popular. People are
enthusiastic about these creatures

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Comment

because they are interesting, but

we need to avoid making subtle

value judgements.

These pejorative trends can be

traced back to early colonial

accounts of Australia, which are

peppered with unscientific slurs.

When Europeans first saw

Australian marsupials and egg-

laying mammals, they were so

unlike anything they had seen

before that it required them to

rethink their understanding of

the tree of life. Crucially, in

perceiving Australian animals to

be different to those they were

familiar with in the “Old World”,

European colonists assumed that

they were inherently inferior.

This notion of inferiority was

tied up with how the colonial

machine sought to paint the

whole country as subordinate

to the northern hemisphere.

The animals continue to carry

this baggage today, which has

major ecological implications

as it risks devaluing and othering

Australian wildlife.

This is important because,

despite great public affection

for its platypuses, echidnas and

marsupials, Australia has the

world’s worst extinction record

for mammals today. Over a third

of all the world’s recent mammal

extinctions have occurred there,

from famous thylacines to less

well-known broad-faced potoroos

and desert bandicoots.

Surviving species are also in

crisis. Fossil evidence shows that

northern hairy-nosed wombats

were once widely distributed over

eastern Australia, but today they

are found only in Queensland,

numbering about 300 individuals.

Stripy, squirrel-sized numbats

were previously found across most

of southern Australia, until they

were restricted to a tiny pocket of

the country’s south-west.

There are many human-induced

drivers for extinction in Australia,

including introduced species

and altered fire regimes, but a

key issue is that conservation

isn’t a government priority. There

is no legal requirement for the

government to protect its long list

of threatened species, and support

is therefore weak. One report

found that the government is

failing to monitor threats, failing

to effectively develop species

recovery plans and – when it

does – failing to check if they work.

We protect what we value, and if

these incredible, highly adapted

species are incorrectly written off

as biologically inferior weirdos –

cute, but ultimately evolutionarily

doomed to fail – it makes

conserving them much harder. ❚

Not alien, just Australian

Writing off the amazing adaptations of Australian mammals as

“weird” and “primitive” hurts conservation efforts, says Jack Ashby

Jack Ashby is assistant director

at the University Museum of

Zoology in Cambridge, UK, and

author of Platypus Matters