Kath Handasyde
After decades of working on wild populations of different native mammal species, it is interesting to think about what has contributed to my most significant insights into their biology.
One of the most fascinating and insightful things I have learnt on my 40 year journey has been afforded from working on some species for a very long time, often monitoring individuals for nearly their whole lifetime. For these, where it was possible to monitor multiple individuals in a population over time (largely because it was possible to recapture them on a regular basis) this provided critical basic data on how rapidly animals grew to full body size, when they reached reproductive maturity, whether or not they exhibited juvenile dispersal, how often they bred, whether all of their young survived to reproduce, age at reproductive senescence, whether or not they exhibited lifelong site fidelity, whether their diet changed seasonally, disease status and so on. Such data are key to our understanding of population dynamics and for population management. In addition, I have always found that the variation between individuals, for many of these aspects of their biology was considerable and this reminds us of how important it is to collect data on as many individuals as we can – often more easily said than done! The other significant factor was, wherever possible, working at multiple field sites and if possible, across the species geographic range – every new field site provided new insights and reminded me that to even approach a comprehensive understanding of the biology of wild species we must try to understand variation in that biology across space and time. I so often tested ideas and formed opinions that had to be revised, sometimes substantially, when I commenced working on a different population of my study species. This takes an enormous amount of field time and effort, but for me, has provided a much more thorough understanding of what drives wild populations. All of this said, for some species, data collection such as this is just not possible, partly because these animals cannot be easily or safely recaptured or monitored.
Another key insight for me, when working on wild populations, was understanding how critically important it was to try and think very broadly across different aspects of a species biology. I rapidly learned about the huge advantages of a multidisciplinary thinking framework and saw how easy it was to become so focussed on a single aspect of biology that important interplays between different components of an animals biology could be missed, resulting in possible misinterpretation of data. While working on diet and habitat use, I came to understand that I also needed to have an understanding of how things like social systems, physiology, energetic constraints, disease, weather patterns and predator impacts influenced dietary patterns and requirements. Achieving this often involved engaging with researchers whose expertise was very different to my own – microbiologists, wildlife veterinarians, botanists etc. but also the different ideas and thinking of my amazing colleagues and graduate students – everyone brings different skills and insights to a team, and the value of this should never be underestimated. Different training, perspectives and insights on a question were so often different to mine, and this led to much discussion, refinement of questions and approaches, collection of additional data and thus a more thorough and wholistic understanding of the species’ biology. For example, when you are investigating the habitat requirements of wild populations you need to think of things like diet, shelter requirements and social systems together, as these can all have profound impacts on habitat requirements and habitat use. In the face of ongoing habitat loss and degradation, plus the increasing impacts of climate change, more and more often we will need to actively manage wild populations for conservation and the maintenance of biodiversity. Without a thorough understanding of a range of critical aspects of the biology of wild populations, we will not manage wildlife as well as we might.
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