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The Mountain Pygmy Possum is one of
Australia's rarest marsupials,
and when it comes to population growth and
genetic diversity, their isolated alpine habitat does
this endangered species no favours.
With fewer than thirty Possums left in the
Mount Buller population alone,
this species is facing a very uncertain future.
But a translocation strategy led by a team
of researchers at The University of Melbourne
and the Department of Sustainability and Environment
has brought new hope to this rapidly declining species.
The problem is that it's restricted to the alpine
or sub-alpine zone, and this in itself presents
a unique problem because in Australia we have
very few alpine areas.
So these populations are threatened annually with
factors such as climate change and warming temperatures.
They hibernate under a cover of snow,
and unfortunately in the Southern area,
which is the Mount Buller population, we've seen a
drastic drop in numbers over the last ten to fifteen years,
which has seen the population go from about
three hundred down to thirty individuals.
What we've also seen is a very drastic decline in
genetic variation that's present in that population.
It's crashed at comparable levels so that there's only
about twenty percent of the genetic variation in
that population that was found back in 1996.
Now what that means is that species is a lot more
prone to other factors such as climate change,
change in environment, also disease, pathogens and
these sort of things.
So we need to fix the genetics of that population
to give it the best chance going into the future.
The best way to do that is to take some genetics
from a healthy population, and put it into the
Mount Buller population.
Now the population that we chose to move animals
from was on Mount Hotham, because that is a very healthy
population that has over a thousand individuals
within that population.
We radio tracked them and collected the hair samples,
and then after radio tracking them we knew that they'd
successfully settled in, and in November we went
back and collected hair samples and now we're just
looking at the success of whether we did manage to
get a cross-bred Hotham-Buller young out in the field.
The result was a success, with the discovery of the
first wild-born male Pygmy Possum, with genetic features
from both populations.
In January we were able to capture nine juvenile
individuals on Mount Buller.
We brought hair samples of those back to the lab,
and essentially put them into little tubes, and we
use these tubes to extract DNA from the hair samples.
And what we uncovered was that one individual
was a hybrid form Mount Buller and Mount Hotham,
and that's exceptionally great for the program,
that means that we can undertake these translocations
in the wild, and it's likely that they're going to be
successful into the future, which gives us great hope
of essentially genetically rescuing that population
and restoring it to it's former health.
The team are hoping the translocation strategy will
improve the genetic diversity enough to sustain the
population until a captive breeding program can
re-introduce more animals.
Our hope is that we can restore that population to the
genetic diversity levels that it had about twenty or thirty
years ago, before its population crashed on the mountain,
so that it has the opportunity to survive going into the future.