NON INVASIVE POUCH MONITORING OF THE SPOTTED-TAILED QUOLL DASYURUS MACULATUS GRACILIS

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NON INVASIVE POUCH MONITORING OF THE SPOTTED-TAILED QUOLL DASYURUS MACULATUS GRACILIS USING CAMERA TRAPS ALBERTO N. VALE Introduction Traditional data collection of gender and pouch young of mammal species, like the Quolls, has been achieved by using the stressful and invasive method of cage trapping and handling animals, often including sedation. Recent studies (de Bondi, White, Stevens and Cooke, 2010) showed that camera trapping is now often more cost effective and more useful than trapping for wildlife detection. Camera traps (motion sensor cameras) are now widely used to monitor, survey and sample a variety of arboreal and ground-dwelling species of wildlife. (Meek, Ballard and Fleming, 2012) Restricted initially by image resolution, unsuitable minimum focal lengths, slow trigger mechanisms, new improvements in motion sensor technology, has seen cameras achieving remarkable improvement in sensor trigger response, with fixed or manual focal range, no glow illumination [“no-glow” flash feature are cameras equipped with black LED's which are totally invisible to not only game animals but humans as well], interchangeable lenses and higher resolution imagery. Integrating these technological advances, a new non-invasive method of wildlife monitoring, WildCAM Australia® has developed “Quoll C”, and the more advanced Quoll C MKII, camera systems that now allow close-up recordings of the underside of wild mammals, using a scented attractant to lure the target species. The system has been successful in identifying spotted-tailed Quolls, including their gender and stage of development of their pouch young [Fig 1], changing what was previously an intrusive and stressful cage trapping method, to now provide an easily deployed remote and relatively non invasive method for studying Quolls. Design and Procedure The Australian Quoll Conservancy (AQC) has previously successfully used camera traps, to identify individual northern spotted-tailed Quolls by recording their unique pattern of body spots. However the methods reported here have extended this work to provide gender identification monitoring of female pouch and teat development and growth of pouch young during the Quoll breeding season.

Fig 1 Quoll C Flat tray capturing the distended and relaxed genitalia of a breeding female quoll.

The initial prototype was created in June 2015, by WildCAM Australia® using small High Definition GoPro cameras, with 128Gb Micro SD cards [One megabyte (MB) is made up of 1,024 kilobytes (KB). The next measurement up is a gigabyte (GB), which is made up of 1024MB], recording subjects at 1080p [known as Full HD 1080 horizontal lines of vertical resolution; the p stands for progressive scan] and 2.7K [resolution of 2704x1524] high definition video rates. The small size cameras allowed for compact field deployment including the March 2018

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