Animal Adventures

Leatherback turtles spend most of their lives at sea, but they're hard to track, which makes them very hard to protect. This talk explores how we use computer models to estimate where these turtles will be and how best to protect them in the deep blue sea.

The growing human population is driving the demand for fish-based protein. Fish in aquaculture benefit from “exercise”. I will show how we can select the best “exercise regime” for fish to ensure that they reach marketable sizes faster.

We have 9 species of microbat in southwest WA, some which weigh as little as 3 chocolate smarties and can eat over 1000 insects a night. These elusive mammals are vital to our ecosystems, however IUCN red list assessment indicate huge knowledge gaps and that our bats population trend is in decline or unknown. We're investigating how citizen scientists can use the non-invasive survey method of bioacoustics to address some of these knowledge gap and determine just how bats are faring in response to environmental pressure. During this talk we'll discuss some of the preliminary findings of our citizen science bat monitoring pilot.