Should landowners be allowed to cull bats without permits?
Queensland has four species of large fruit bats (‘flying foxes’), which fly from their roosts in spectacular fashion at dusk to feed on fruits and nectar, dispersing seeds and pollens of native trees, shrubs and vines while doing so.
Unfortunately they have also developed a taste for some cultivated fruits, which can affect the livelihood of some orchardists. This year, ironically on threatened species days (since two of the species are considered vulnerable) new legislation was passed in Queensland allowing the culling of bats by shooting, but only as a last resort and with permits that must be sought from the state government.
Whether this is an efficient solution and whether conservation or animal welfare issues can be adequately monitored and controlled is still very much open to debate
There has also been much talk in the press about the Hendra virus, which is present in bats but can only be transmitted to humans by infected horses (which appear to be able to contract it from bats although the mechanism still seems uncertain). So far there have been four human deaths from this virus, but many of the public seem unaware that you cannot contract it directly from the bats, nor that you cannot contract the other potentially lethal virus carried by bats, Lyssa virus, unless scratched or bitten by a bat, which is unlikely to happen unless you are deliberately handling them. So far there have been two human deaths from this.
An amendment soon to be presented to parliament goes further than the original act, and would allow any landowner to cull bats and even destroy whole roosts if the landowner “reasonably believes” this is necessary to remove the risk to local health.
Wildlife Tourism Australia’s response to this amendment is here:
Submissions to the Queensland government have officially closed, although you could still express your opinion to the environment minister. You can also have your say via the following survey:
Turtle information centre, and a great combination of wildlife conservation, research, education and tourism
Jennie Gilbert and her husband run a large veterinary clinic in Cairns, and Jennie is also a researcher of marine turtles at James Cook University. In 2000, she and fellow marine biologist Paul Barnes started one of Australia’s largest voluntary turtle rehabilitation centres with an attached interpretation centre presently being built.
Scuba divers coming ashore on Fitzroy Island
I recently visited the turtle rehabilitation centre , on Fitzroy Island, near Cairns, Far North Queensland.
Fitzroy is a beautiful little continental island with fringing reef. Just over an hour’s ferry ride from Cairns, it includes rainforest walks, lovely beaches, mountainous terrain (it is essentially a mountain top with most of the rest of the mountain now covered by sea) and coral you can snorkel amongst just by walking out fro the beach. Not quite as diverse as the outer reef, there are still plenty of species of fish foraging amongst the corals, and I was especially thrilled when a unicorn fish passed close to me.
The turtle hospital is near the best snorkelling area, and when I visited had just two turtles in the tanks (I was told there were a few more at the Cairns Turtle Rehabilitation Centre on the mainland). One – an olive Ridley turtle – was very badly injured when first brought in and recovery is taking while.
Green turtle (usually herbivorous) eating a squid at the Turtle Hospital, Fitzroy Island
The other, a green turtle, is doing very well and will probably be released fairly soon. Since green turtles are herbivorous, I was surprised to see her eating squid, but they apparently adapt very readily to that in captivity.
You can easily visit Fitzroy Island as a day-trip from Cairns, but even better you can stay overnight, either at the campground or the very attractive and comfortable Fitzroy Resort
The turtle information centre is due to open a little later this year: keep tuned for a report here from Jennie.
Further reading (on Jennie Gilbert, turtle research and turtle rehabilitation):
Jennie Gilbert with a green turtle on Fitzroy Island. The missing piece of shell on her right hand side will never re-grow, but she has now recovered well from other injuries and is soon to be released )
Sharks are impressive animals deserving of respect: an interview with Madison Stewart
Madison Stewart has been producing some amazing films about diving with sharks. She has been diving with and handling large sharks since before her teens, and is still in her late teens now. She is enthralled with the beauty and power of these animals that so many are terrified of ever seeing, and convened for their future survival in our oceans.
Most people don’t feel comfortable being close to large sharks unless there is glass between them like those folk in the Aquarium in Darling Harbour, Sydney
Q. Madison, what was your reaction when you first saw a shark while diving?
A. Excitement, astonishment, realisation in my own understanding for these creatures… and that fear wasn’t even on my mind.
Q. How and why did you start handling sharks?
A. I don’t actually handle sharks apart form the shark feeds where not handling them is impossible because you get so close. However I do film a lot of shark handling situations, because I know this does not harm the shark, and is often a relevant factor in research, education and filming interactions to show people the true nature of sharks is far from what they learnt from jaws.
Q. What made you start getting concerned about the disappearance of shark from our waters?
A. I was only 14 years old when my world literally fell from underneath me, places i had called home had lost their sharks and in turn the entire ecosystem had suffered and what was once vibrant reefs full of fish life became algae covered rubble. So when I realised not only how quickly it could happen, but also the fact that public fear of sharks was a huge factor, I realised the severity of the situation. It was not only what I had seen, but because it happened in my lifetime.
Q. Of course many people find it difficult to see past the fear when they think about sharks, sometimes so extreme that they either stick to swimming pools rather than going into the sea, or wanting all sharks eliminated. We are understandably afraid of traffic accidents as well, but rather than ban all motorised vehicles on the road we learn how best to avoid accidents. The same with horse-riding – many people have been badly injured or killed by falling off horses or being kicked by them, but many (including myself) still ride horses, but they probably feel they have more control of the situation and can learn to understand the horses they interact with, whereas they see shark attack as something that just happens unpredictably. Maybe if people understood how to lower the risk of shark attack they wouldn’t panic quite so much. You tell us you have been close to many sharks for many years without ever being threatened. Apart from not attracting sharks with blood, such as spear-fishers might inadvertently do, what is your advice to anyone who is diving and sees a shark?
A. There is nothing abnormal about fearing sharks, even if it is unjustified. I believe a big part of this comes from the fact most people have never seen one for themselves, its that initial encounter where you see this sometimes huge creature labeled to be a man-eater run from you where people loose that fear, but when we have only attack stories and jaws to base our understanding off, its bound to create fear. It never ceases to amaze me that in school in Australia I remember being taught about the waves, rips, the dangers of the surf, but never taught about the fact we go in the hunting ground of an apex predator. What people should know is that sharks look for injured creatures, which is what humans look like. but not only this, most of the sharks that are responsible for attacks on humans are species that attack from underneath, watching and waiting for sometime first while we splash around looking like injured fish, they hunt in dusk, dawn, night-time. Their hunting will be sparked by the smell of dead fish (they can smell human blood but the belief they react to it is not true) and muddy water, for example if its been raining, is an advantage on their senses and they use this bad vis to hunt. At the same time its important to know that hundreds of sharks see humans every day, hear them, smell them, but don’t react to them, so just because there was an attack, doesn’t mean that there was a shark in the water that day, they are always there, it just means that one made a mistake. My advice for anyone diving (depending on the situation) is take a picture, and enjoy, diving is different to being on the surface, your under there with them, they see you as another predator. Its a hard question for someone who seeks dives with sharks to answer haha, all the sharks I have seen in their natural state have run from us, the only real and long encounters I have had were in the presence of food used to attract the sharks.
Q. And what about swimmers generally? And kayakers? What should they avoid doing to lower the possibility of attracting the attention of sharks?
A. You don’t walk around a dangerous street at night alone waving $1000 in your hand, but spear fishermen carry dead fish with them. Anyone who goes in the oceans must accept that its the sharks home, and we have no jurisdiction and no real control over what happens aside form the obvious… don’t spill fish blood or guts into the water, keep your speared fish in the boat, don’t go when its too murky or at the wrong times… treat sharks like the surf, potentially dangerous at times. As well as this we can be realistic about out chances, and the fact its proven we are more likely to die form being hit by lightning.
Q. What are the thoughts on the shark deterrents promoted on http://sharkshield.com/?
A. The shark shield is a bit of a controversy, but hey- it beats shark nets or culling pandaemonium, and i believe used commercially and by those intentionally going in dangerous situations. it doesn’t kill the sharks, its probably an unnecessary paranoid addition to involvement in the oceans, but there are allot worse things happening to these creatures to focus on.
Q. You say during the past decade you’ve seen ecosystems collapse because of the over-fishing of sharks. Would you like to elaborate on this?
A.The sharks in large numbers control the fish that eat other fish, in some ecosystems they even control the growth of the sea grass beds by preying on the animals that eat it, causing their movement to change giving the grass a chance to grow. The have an unreal and delicate impact on their surroundings, they are in our oceans for a reason, and although fished like any other fish, they grown and mate like mammals, so they have the potential to be wiped out very quickly. This has already been seen in many areas of the oceans. My experience comes form within the Great Barrier Reef and certain populations of sharks have declined by 97% in some areas as new scientific research shown. “sharks inhabiting Australia’s great Barrier Reef are in decline due to overfishing” (JCU research, September 2011). As well as the scientific background i found on these declines, it is visible in the areas i knew, and through the oceans by many others. 90% of the sharks and other big fish have gone from our oceans, this is not what they looked like 100 years ago, this is not what they looked like 10 years ago.
Q. I’ve been surprised to see restaurants and seafood shops in Australia still selling shark fin soup or the raw shark fins, and I never enter one that does. Do you think it would be useful for other restaurants, the ones that don’t sell it, to proudly use that as a selling point, the way many now promote ‘no MSG’)? I think some restaurants in Singapore now do this.
A. This is happening, and there are many projects beginning where promotion of being ‘fin free’ is something worn by restaurants with pride, unfortunately its still a big trade, and there are many many restaurants and people who eat in them who do not know the relevance of supporting such a trade, or that the fins are taken from a creature that is thrown back in the ocean still alive to die painfully. Australia’s contribution to the export of shark fins behind closed doors is also a concern. But to have these stickers in many more windows promoting they do not serve shark fins would be a great movement, and for people to know what this means, and choose to eat there because of this, consumers never realise their power
Q. Do you know if there are any regulations as to how the fins are obtained for restaurants in Australia? For instance, is there some accreditation that tell us sharks have been harvested for the whole body, killed humanely and the fin used along with everything else, rather than the cruel and wasteful practice of just slicing the fin from a live sharks and dumping it back in the water? If so, does our government ban the use of non-accredited product?
A. The black market for shark fins is second only to the drug trade, legal and licensed boats in australia still participate in the illegal shark finning and fin trade of endangered species, only last week a shark washed up at Evans head alive with its fins cut off.
The fishery i have been working against for a while now is the East Coast Inshore FinFish Fishery, and it consists of around 200 commercial gill net vessels operating to target sharks within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and World Heritage Area, as long as the body is kept the fins can be exported (and are worth a lot of money whereas the body is not), this means our GBR sharks are ending up in asian countries as part of shark fin soup, legally. The more than 400 species of sharks are copping hatred form the apx. 5 implicated on attacks with humans, and in turn our oceans are suffering. Shark finning is illegal in Australia, so when the body is sold (27 different species are sold under the one name at Woolworth supermarket in Australia) and as ‘flake’ then the fins are processed separately and used here and overseas.
Q.Conservationists seem a bit divided on the idea of tours that have people going underwater in cages and luring sharks such as the great white close to them with baits. On one hand it provides an economic incentive to protect sharks for the tourist trade, but some argue that it may make the sharks associate humans with food. What are your thoughts on this?
A. I don’t think it does, of course i am making an educated assumption, but no research has proved this yet. However these sharks are not dumb, many people think they bite the cage to ‘get the humans inside’ but they are just picking up the electric field off the metal and getting curious. In realist terms, we take a few hours out of their day to show them to people, and then they go back to being the wild animals they are, who were in that area hunting seals anyway. I do not think we are ‘associating them with people’ if anything, we could argue that fishermen associate boats with dead fish and attract sharks to any boat.
Q. How many others now go diving with you and stroke sharks? I assume you’re not advising everyone to try it. Do you think there could be a danger that some diving tourists might hear about this and try to do the same but because of their inexperience give the sharks the wrong signals and agitate them, or not read the sharks’ own behaviour correctly before approaching them? Even Steve Irwin, with all his experience, didn’t realise how edgy the rays were that day.
A. I am not advertising people to try it, these sharks are fed everyday and have a connection to the few people that get to perform the ‘tonic’ on them, and it is an amazing thing to witness and often helps researches take samples and remove hooks from the sharks mouths. What happens it a stimulation of the electrical sensory system on their snout when the feeders run their hands over their nose, sending them into a trance. Divers that want to try this would never get close enough to be able to do it, and here the dives are well regulated and not just anyone can do it. But yes, recently i took my mother and a good friend to come see this with me, and they got to touch a shark whilst in tonic, and love it. my mother who describes herself as ‘from the jaws era’ always loved them but had some apprehension, is now completely sold on shark diving. What happened to steve irwin was a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, factors like the stingrays behaviours are very readable for people who know what to look for, and other times, if you go in this environment and push your luck, things happen. This can happen with sharks, but it can also happen with dogs, even bees, so singling out marine life as unusually dangerous is unfair, it requires the same amount of respect and caution as others.
Q. Are there some countries that seem to be finding a better compromise than Australia between protecting swimmers and protecting sharks?
A. we have pandemonium and shark nets- we are very far behind other countries. Shark nets merely attract sharks because they catch turtles, whales, dolphins and stingrays, then they die and rot, like ringing the dinner bell, and most of the sharks caught are actually leaving inside the nets, heading back out to sea. If you look really close at the stats on the east coast, attack have increased since the implementation of the shark nets!
Interactions with sharks in Australia are unavoidable, we are a population of beach goers and coastline inhabitants, we share this with sharks, no amount of killing them or shark nets will ever change this. Other countries are still using shark nets and ordering culls, but this is changing now. As well as a growing awareness, countries are creating shark sanctuaries, where the overall killing of sharks is illegal! Even china has banned the serving of shark fin soup at government meetings- a huge thing for sharks!!! In Australia, our laws and protection of sharks will never change until our attitude towards them does.
Q. Do you have any further thoughts on how to achieve a better understanding of sharks in our community?
A. On average one person dies in Australia from a shark attack each year. Each year 100 million sharks are killed by humans… and its not just the people fishing them, its our fear of them that is allowing government to profit from killing them with no reaction from the public. This kind of thing would never happen to dolphins, and we need to develop a realistic view of sharks, the european honey bee kills 10 people a year in Australia.
For example, culling Great Whites would never work because they are migratory, there is almost no chance of finding the shark actually responsible for the attacks, and we know going in the ocean with sharks is not a harmless activity, so why do we react when someone is harmed? The reason these unusual attacks in WA are occurring is because of a dead whale carcass that is ‘chumming’ the waters with the smell and attracting sharks, but it doesn’t help the media circus date to admit these kind of facts. We are losing out sharks in Australia, and in turn or ecosystem, and its only the people who fear then who can change who will make a difference. Understand their important to our oceans, and look past jaws and the media stories to the reality of a beautiful creature that is being brought down by the oceans worst predator, humans. Sharks attack people in the oceans in unfortunate situations, but its far more dangerous driving to the beach.
Some pages Madison suggests readers can check out:
send this letter to stop legal shark fishing inside the Great Barrier Reef:
http://elements5.blogspot.com.au/
Man eating shark:
The australian anti shark finning alliance (includes a wall of shame where you can see and dob in restaurants that serve shark fin soup)
The Training package for the old course has been reviewed and MSIT has replaced the old Certificate III in Native animal rehabilitation with a new Certificate III in Animal studies which focuses on wildlife. The course details can be found here.
There is also a Certificate II in (general) animal studies which covers the broader animal care industry including domestic animal care. For information on the Cert II click here.
WTA member Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary (Gold Coast, Queensland) is holding a gala dinner on 22nd October in support of their excellent new wildlife hospital.
The wildlife hospital services not only their own animals but orphaned, sick and injured wildlife throughout the southeast corner of Queensland, often brought in by concerned members of the public, and can include anything from echidnas and kangaroos to snakes and frogs.
The 8th Australian Wildlife Rehabilitation Conference is to be held in Townsville .
It will be run by North Queensland Wildlife Care Inc, established in 1989, a not-for-profit and totally self funded organisation with a core of highly skilled and motivated rehabilitators. The conference is to be held at the Rydges Southbank Conference Centre in the heart of the city. A facility that has a maximum seating capacity for 300 attendees.
The theme for this conference is ‘Continuous Improvement’.
We wish to include presentations on the many aspects of wildlife rehabilitation; including speakers from wildlife care organisations, the veterinary community, environmental concerns, research, mining operations and their environmental impacts, legal constraints, and other matters pertaining to the care of our wildlife.
Each speaker will be given 30 minutes, this will include five minutes for questions from the floor. Additional questions will be collected and answered later in the conference. Presenters will be required to allow the publication of their papers on the conference website and in the printed proceedings. We offer speakers free registration for the day of their presentation if necessary.
Please express your interest in presenting by email to margaret@2012awrc.org.au as soon as possible. Abstracts of approximately 200 words, a biographical statement of 100 words, plus details of your audio-visual requirements should then be submitted by email to the same address.
Should you not have e-mail access, please post to:
Margaret Neihoff, PO Box 1446, Aitkenvale, Qld 4814
Abstracts are due by 1st March 2012. Complete papers due by June 1st 2012
Darren and Ronda (Araucaria Ecotours) raised this orphaned black flying fox a couple of years ago
We’ve had many inquiries about such courses, including the one that was offered by Renee Chamberlain but the online version is unfortunately not currently available
The Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital and the Australia Zoo Rescue Unit are experiencing a dramatic increase in wildlife injuries and orphans due to the devastating floods. We need your help!
Our Queensland wildlife are feeling the pain with the majority of their habitats inundated with flood waters. As the clean up continues around South East Queensland, the Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital and Australia Zoo Rescue Unit are seeing an influx of flood affected victims.
If you would like to help, please make your tax deductible donation to the Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital Flood Appeal please visit www.wildlifewarriors.org.au
The floods have been devastating and tragic for many humans. Wildlife carers are also finding many animals displaced or injured by flood waters, and caring for them can get costly.
Wildlife Tourism Australia has made a donation to RSPCA towards helping carers of wildlife affected by the Queensland floods and urges others who are in a position to do so to consider donating to either RSPCA (wildlife section), Qld Wildlife Rehabilitation Council, WildCare, Bat Conservation and Rescue or other such organizations.
Queensland has four species of large fruit bats (‘flying foxes’), which fly from their roosts in spectacular fashion at dusk to feed on fruits and nectar, dispersing seeds and pollens of native trees, shrubs and vines while doing so.
