Help improve the lives of Tassie devils and continuing professional development for vets

Phil met (but did not endorse) a miniature version of himself last week.

Have you ever crowdfunded anything? Here at SAT HQ we’re big supporters of citizen science. The more people feel like they have a stake in science, the more they'll get it, and the more high quality, animal- and human-helping science we can do. We’re also fans of crowdfunding campaigns. For the price of a cup of coffee (or two) you can be part of something huge, and have a little ownership and insight into science that makes a difference.

Our Sydney University colleagues are raising money to travel to the remote south-west of Tasmania to study devils in the area. PhD student Bec Gooley has been able to successfully extract DNA from devil scats (the technical term for Tassie Devil crap) that were collected by a bushwalker. This showed that not only are devils present in the area, but that they have new alleles that are not found across the rest of the devil range. One of the problems with the Tassie Devil population at the moment is they aren’t particularly genetically diverse, making them terribly susceptible to diseases like devil facial tumour disease. These new genes will enable the researchers to do some genetic rescue to boost the genetic diversity of the species in captivity (for release back into the wild). If you think that’s a good cause, head on over here to be part of it.

Are you interested in continuing veterinary education? Friend and colleague Lis Churchward from the Centre for Veterinary Education is undertaking a really important survey about what the CVE offers, how they can improve and so on. Please support her by completing the survey – it will help Lis with her masters, it will help the CVE devise continuing education resources you want, and you can win some excellent prizes (call me a nerd, but the chance to win enrolment in their TimeOnline courses or a $2K CPD voucher is better than winning some sort of household appliance!!!). Check it out here.

If you happen to be in Sydney this weekend, make sure your non-human companions are warm and dry. There is yet another stormageddon predicted.

Counting cats: esimates of feral animal numbers

Feral cat in a tree in the Northern Territory.

Fact-checking is important, but easily overlooked. Some “facts” are born as estimates, published then cited and regurgitated without being question. This can be very problematic when the topic is emotive, for example the number of feral cats in Australia.

Some parties have a vested interest in talking the number up, others have a vested interest in talking the number down.

But it seems that there are plenty of sources willing to publish unverifiable figures without considering how indeed such figures were determined or indeed stating that this could be a gross under or over-estimate. We're probably all guilty of this at some stage or another, but its worth teasing out some of the implications.

For example, I’ve heard that there are more feral cats in Australia than there are people. That seems like an awful lot.

According to our Federal Environment Minister, Greg Hunt,

There are up to 20 million feral cats taking up to four native Australian animals a night. That is over 20 billion Australian native species being destroyed a year. 

You can read the interview here: http://www.abc.net.au/landline/content/2014/s4119674.htm

Those are staggering figures.

Such figures are cited to justify significant funding for eradication programs:

GREG HUNT: We're looking at an increase from a little above $40 million over four years to $90 million and what I have done is already spoken to the national head of Landcare. He has said that his groups want to be part of this. But what if the numbers are flawed? When we use big figures to justify spending big figures, shouldn’t we be taking steps to ensure that those figures are as accurate as possible?

The ABC’s Fact Check has provided a very insightful discussion here (great reading for anyone who has ever made a grand sweeping statement in an assignment and why your marker has circled it in red and written "source???") suggesting that the evidence base of Mr Hunt's claims in that instance was probelmatic.

Of course, it’s unlikely that anyone will be able to determine the absolute number of feral cats in Australia – they can’t really be counted one by one. The discussion highlights some of the challenges of estimate numbers of wild animals in general.