Hi I'm Jenny Gray, I'm the Chief Executive Officer here at Zoos Victoria
Today I'm at Healesville Sanctuary and I'm standing outside of our Fighting Extinction
Headquarters. Many of you will have gone through this building and learnt about
some of the incredible work we're doing to save some of our most endangered species and
in particular the super cute Mountain Pygmy-possum. But what you don't know
is all the work we're doing behind the scenes, so come with me and I'll introduce you to some
of the staff working on it and show you where we're doing this incredible work.
Marissa thank you so much for joining me, we're here to talk about
I think your favourite animal? It is Mountain Pygmy-possums
and Antechinus I must admit joint favourite animals they are just amazing marsupials.
Marissa is one of the world's leading tiny mammal experts and probably in Australia
you have a formidable reputation working with these little creatures can we just give everyone
a sense of size I know they're going to see them on the screen but how big is a Mountain
Pygmy-possum? Mountain Pygmy-possums are tiny and it's in the name pygmy-possum. They're
really a tiny little animal that could fit into your hand but they actually change in size quite
a bit. So before they go into hibernation which is when they spend five to seven months of sleep
under the snow they can be about the size of a tennis ball. But then during hibernation
they lose half their weight and they're about half that size so they really are just a tiny
beautiful miniaturized little animal that is still super tough.
I love this fact about Mountain Pygmy-possums is that they actually double their body weight
through summer. What a great life cycle that you just you know you emerge in spring you're super
cute and then you spend the whole of summer eating you sleep it off over winter. These
guys have just got it sussed out right? They absolutely do. They're actually Australia's
only hibernating marsupial they're our only animal that you find only up in the alpine zone
and they have this amazing life history where they wake up at about say 40 grams or so
they breed they travel they spend all of their spring meeting other possums making
their youngsters and then putting on that weight over autumn so they double their body weight they
they're Australia's biggest losers but also Australia's biggest gainers.
Great little lifestyle but why are we worried about them? How did they get to be listed as one
of our fighting extinction species? The Mountain Pygmy-possums actually have a really interesting
history in that for a long time we thought they were extinct they were only known from the fossil
record and then back in 1966 someone found a living Mountain Pygmy-possum in a ski resort
in Mount Hotham and people realised that this remarkable little animal was actually still alive.
Unfortunately they are critically endangered though. Before people found that they were still
alive and out in the boulder fields there was a lot of historic habitat destruction to make
way for roads and for infrastructure. There's also a large number of introduced species like
feral cats and foxes up in the boulder fields and then you've got climate change on top of that. So
unfortunately they do need a really thick blanket of snow to survive the winter.
Another big issue that we found just in the last few years and again associated
with things like a changing climate and drought is a lack of food. So every year
we have a beautiful species called the Bogong Moth. It's a migrating species of moth
which is remarkable for a tiny little animal about an inch long. They can fly a thousand kilometres
from their breeding grounds up to the Alpine Zone and they arrive often in numbers around
four billion so it's the biggest second biggest influx of nutrients into the area after the sun
and in 2017 and 2018 those billions of moths were nearly undetectable and that's the main
food source for the Mountain Pygmy-possums coming out of their hibernation and because there wasn't
that food a large number of the females up to 95 percent in the worst affected population actually
lost their full litter of young and the big issue there is this is a critically endangered species.
There are only around 2 000 of them left in the world. We also saw last year the major issues
with bushfires. And so the pygmy-possums have a lot of threats we didn't know they existed and
now they're critically endangered which is why we all have to work together to try and protect them.
There are things that everyone can do to help them. Things like turning off their lights to
help the Bogong Moths planting native foods for the Bogong Moths as well and using Moth Tracker.
Here at Healesville Sanctuary we do a huge amount with the Mountain Pygmy-possums too.
We have the world's only captive breeding program where we do a lot of research to try and help the
possums learn as much as we can about them. We've done reintroductions out to the wild.
We work with partners out in the wild putting in things like new tunnels underneath the roads
with Mount Hotham and with DELWP so that we can ensure possums can travel properly
and safely. One of the more recent programs one that I'm really proud of
is developing a new type of food for them when the Bogong Moths their main food source in spring
largely failed to arrive we worked with the Mountain Pygmy-possum Recovery Team
to look at the different tools we might need in our toolkit in the future to help the possums.
For us it was developing and trailing this new food called Bogong Bikkies which can act
as a replacement for the Bogong Moths and so we're working out in the field I've actually just gotten
back from one of our trips to trial this food to make sure it's safe so that we can work out the
best ways to deliver it and it's actually a food that in New South Wales our partners used after
the fires to help the possums. Talking Mountain Pygmy-possums for us at Zoos Victoria success
is not animals in our care it's animals back out in the wild thriving. Are you optimistic for the
Mountain Pygmy-possum? I'm always optimistic for the Mountain Pygmy-possum. I really think there's
so much that we can do together to help them. I've been really proud to be involved with the breeding
program here at Healesville for about 14 years now we've bred and raised more than 130 little baby
possums but my favourite thing is seeing them out in the wild and being able to work with them out
there. I think together we can have this bright future for the Mountain Pygmy-possum we all just
need to focus on them to love them to protect them and to make sure they're still around the future.
It's a beautiful hot summer's day here at Healesville Sanctuary but as Marissa told you for
our Mountain Pygmy-possums it's really important that we can replicate the conditions in which they
live. So what you can see behind me are cooling containers where the Mountain Pygmy-possums live.
It's in here that we're able to adjust the temperature to get it down to two degrees
so that we can replicate the conditions they live in in the wild. It is the work that we
do here behind the scenes at Healesville Sanctuary that is helping us to know so
much more about these incredibly cute animals to learn what we need to do to help them and
to come up with strategies to make sure that this population thrives well into the future.
Thank you for your support and together we can fight extinction.