Everyone loves the cute quokkas though few realise that they were hunted and bulldozed into extinction in Western Australia and avoided annihilation only because a few remained on Rottnest Island and now generate vast wealth as tourist selfie subjects.
We have our own NSW North Coast quokka equivalent, the gorgeous truffle-eating northern coastal potoroo, smallest of the kangaroos.
Tragically there are no islands for them to hang out on and they are now on the very edge of complete extinction.
For many millions of years, potoroos have tended their delightful garden, the scribbly gum, banksia, cypress pine, wildflower heathland coastal sand plains where they act as eco- system engineers.
They dig the truffles out of the sandy soil, aerating and turning it over, spreading the fungal spores that the plants need to grow in association with their roots. The truffles feed the plants and the plants feed the entire ecosystem.
This ecosystem has been around for over a hundred million years and once spread along the Gondwa- naland coast all the way around ice-free Antarctica to South America and Africa.
It is the habitat where flowers, butterflies, bees, songbirds and marsupials evolved. It possesses some of the most ancient of flowering plants like the prehistoric banksias, scribbly gums, and hundreds of others.
It is full of honeyeaters, whipbirds, fairy wrens, grass- birds, whistlers, warblers, robins, finches, treecreepers, rainbow bee-eaters and critically endangered birds like glossy black cockatoos, ground parrots, bush stone- curlews, bush-hens, and grass owls.
Sacred Wallum
This endangered bushland is full of unique mammals like the tiny, nectar-feeding blossom bats that hover above the flowers at night, and marsupials like the endangered pygmy pos- sums, koalas, squirrel gliders and spot-tailed quolls.
Tiny carnivorous marsupials like the dunnart, planigales and antechinus live alongside long-nosed and brindled bandicoots, and ancient egg-lying echidnas. It is full of unique reptiles, frogs, and invertebrates, some like the Wallum froglet and sedge tree frog are critically endangered.
Sacred to the Bundjalung and known as Wallum this now endangered bushland covered much of South-East Queensland and the New South Wales coast. Like the once vast subtropical rainfor- est it has been decimated, not by agriculture but by urban development.
Until recently the potoroo was still acting as a keystone species maintaining the last small Wallum wildflower heathlands at Cudgen until preparation for a housing estate exterminated them.
They have also gone extinct at Tyagarah. Some are hang- ing on at Wardell, though the highway upgrade bulldozed right through them.
Some of the last surviving northern coastal potoroos now exist at Brunswick Heads adjacent the western shore of Simpsons Creek. This was determined by ecologists Jill Smith and Mick Andren of the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, Ecosystems and Threatened Species division, along with ecologists David Milledge and David Scotts.
Their distribution was mapped in the September 2018 edition of the Australian Zoologist, published by the Royal Zoological Society of NSW. One would have expected that action would have been taken by govern- ment to protect the potoroos and several other critically endangered species from complete extinction.
They are only just surviv- ing in four undisturbed, threatened, and critically endangered ecological communities at this location. Undisturbed old growth forest full of 400-year-old trees, 230 of them, the oldest trees in Byron Shire full of rare nesting hollows care- fully studied by government ecologists.
Approved for annihilation during lockdown
Science, our life-supporting natural environment, our community, our mental health, and our survival means nothing to money and power.
The NSW government and their Northern Regional Planning Panel (NRPP) ignored the fact that a massive real estate development proposed adjacent the Simpson Creek Sanctuary Zone of the Cape Byron Marine Park and the Bayside Estate at Brunswick Heads risks exterminating these protected endangered communities and species.
They approved the last Wallum potoroo habitat for annihilation during the pandemic lockdown so you may have missed the three-hour-long community consultation.
Byron Shire will be remembered as the location of the last mass extinction event.
This is truly awful news. Politicians paying lip-service to biodiversity protection, while developers and their ugly housing estates seem to just keep on destroying nature. Why must we continue to build houses in new subdivisions which destroy the last remaining remnants of relatively intact ecosystems? Town planners in this area , and in Australia in general, should give up their addiction to continual expansion, and instead should be looking at urban infill. But of course, its more complicated than that. Our economy is structured around continual population growth, which creates a shortage of houses thanks to inappropriate levels of immigration, thanks to an unregulated business lobby (hello political donations!), in an era when housing is treated as a pretty reliable investment, a vehicle for wealth generation for owners and landlords.
We do not value biodiversity in this country. We say we do, but it keeps getting destroyed. Housing estates which destroy bushland keep getting approved.
We say we’re concerned about climate change, as a country…we sign up to agreements, march in the streets, yet coal mines keep getting approved. The fossil fuel industry keeps getting subsidized.
Nobody likes to think of Australia as a racist country but the events of the last week have held up a mirror to our national soul.
What are our values as a Nation?
Those beautiful Potaroos don’t stand a chance.
Keep up the great work Gary ..and Carmel
Thanks 🤗
Gary & Carmel’s great work in demonstrating a local example of the extinction crisis you frequently deride? So you starting to understand now Craig?
Sadly I think it’s accepted they’re already gone from Tyagarah Nature Reserve before the added threat of yet another subdivision adds more pressure to their fragile existence.
No confirmed sightings for nearly two decades now despite their survey efforts & weeks of camera traps.
Predation by foxes & cats, lack of fire over 30+ years to produce dead wood that feeds their fungi-dominated diet all are contributing causes.
Then add in habitat shrinkage & fragmentation so the coastal population became isolated & unable to migrate & interact with the metapopulation in the hinterland hills & they were doomed. Same situation as the Endangered Population of long-nosed potoroos at Cobaki Lakes. All 30 years too late.
The current hot Bayshore Drive wildlfire could well be the final straw if they’re still around…. either killed by this extreme event, or if they miraculously manage to survive, being killed by the cat & fox predation on the fireground before groundcover returns, or subsequent starvation.
How many final nails can you put in one coffin?
You can’t say that this ecosystem existed for over a hundred million years, then point out that pretty much everything that makes up the ecosystem has evolved in far more recent times. If you were here only a million years ago, some plants and animals would look kind of familiar, but it would pretty much an alien landscape to you. One hundred thousand years ago, you would be eaten by the giant predators that were walking around exactly where you are now. But luckily for you, all these plants and animals are long extinct. Though remember, everything around you is, and always was, going to go extinct too.
*slow clap*
Another round of beers for the property developers! Shall we replace that silver monstrosity (which we thankfully got rid of at the roundabout) with a silver statue of a Potoroo and make a moving speech?
Let’s just ignore all this already razed grassland all around us and focus on the rainforests and mangroves and anything that resembles an ecosystem for development. It is the way. The only way! Caesar and Augustus, with his glorious payment for having as many children as possible would be so proud. Infinite growth.
The one true way. The only way!
Three cheers and another round of beers for our politicians and developers and the glorious dazzling dollar.
Oh, right, yeah the Potoroos. The statue is coming. Relax.
Mmm now how can we blame Forest Corp for this ,there MUST be a way!!!!
It is Time for us to petition the Government to protect these areas and Potteroos from extinction, if we all stand up and together only need 20% to change direction of the government !!!!!!!!
How’s that housing crisis going? No effecting you, I presume?