Oral Presentation Australian Society for Limnology Conference 2017

The use of central Australian waterbodies by native and feral mammals (#42)

Jayne Brim Box 1
  1. Department of Land Resource Management, Alice Springs, NT, Australia

For the past ten years we have documented the use of remote water places in central Australia by native and feral mammals.   Many sites were severely degraded by large feral animals, mainly camels and horses.   Not surprisingly, large feral herbivores can have profound negative impacts on aquatic biodiversity.  Less understood was the extent that feral herbivores impact on native terrestrial wildlife using these same sites.   Since 2008 we have used camera traps at multiple sites across central Australia to document native wildlife visitation, and to examine if feral animals “interfered” with this usage.  We used circular statistics to evaluate activity budgets for feral camels, dingoes and native birds, as well as species co-occurrence and niche overlap.  In dry times camels dominate individual water sites and readily exclude all other species, including birds and dingoes.   When camels were present at night, dingoes used waterholes during the day and displaced birds.  Thus, camels impacted on native species in three ways:  directly through exploitation and interference, and indirectly through an “interference cascade”, whereby camels displaced dingoes which displaced seed-eating birds.   Interestingly, we found no evidence that dingoes interfered with waterhole usage by cats and foxes, and all three species regularly used the same waterholes.  These data suggest that although many animals have adapted to the dry conditions of arid Australia, those species that do rely on a regular source of water are easily denied access by camels.